Failed Policies Caused by Altruism

With politicians always trying to scheme how they can help the poor by increasing more aid to this group or that group, health care for children, etc. etc. the one thing they never do is think about the consequences of their policies over the long term and how individuals will react to handouts from the public trough.

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article about how we are recovering from moral bankruptcy. The article by BY PETER WEHNER AND YUVAL LEVIN states "Since 1960, there had been a more than 500% increase in violent crime; a more than 400% increase in out-of-wedlock births; almost a tripling in the percentage of children on welfare; a tripling of the teenage suicide rate; a doubling of the divorce rate; and a decline of more than 70 points in SAT scores."

"But the past 15 years has seen a turn for the better in all of the above statistics.
The most striking element of the overall picture continues to be the extraordinary turnaround in nearly every area apart from the family. The progress we have witnessed over the last 15 years is impressive, undeniable, and beyond what most people thought possible. There was, it is fair to say, essentially no one in the early 1990s who predicted it. How, then, did it happen?

"Obviously, no single explanation will suffice. Instead, long-overdue changes in government policy appear to have combined with a more or less simultaneous shift in public attitudes, with each sustaining and feeding the other. We may begin with the change in policy, for if the past 15 years demonstrate anything, it is the enduring power of policy, properly understood, to influence culture.

"The 1996 welfare-reform bill was the most dramatic and successful social innovation in decades, reversing 60 years of federal policy that had long since grown not just useless but positively counterproductive. In effect, the new law ended the legal entitlement to federally funded welfare benefits, imposing a five-year time limit on the receipt of such benefits and requiring a large percentage of current recipients to seek and obtain work.

"When the bill was passed, there were dire predictions, mostly emanating from liberals, of an explosion of poverty and hunger. They were just as quickly refuted. State welfare rolls plummeted--and poverty, instead of rising, decreased. Welfare reform sent a message in bright neon lights: Higher expectations will yield better results. Rather than giving up on the poor, the new policy assumed that the able-bodied were capable of working, expected them to work, and was rooted in a confident belief that, materially and otherwise, they would be better off for it. In each of these particulars, the policy makers proved correct. If, as the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote in the 1990s, our old social policy had "succeeded in 'demoralizing' . . . society itself," the new policy proved to be profoundly re-moralizing.

"Crime rates, too, benefited from something of a policy revolution over the course of the '90s... " (Read the full article here).

Ultimately, of course, government policies are the result of the philosophical ideas held by a culture. And until we don't discard the tired idea of altruism in favor of a philosophy of individualism and the principle of laissez faire in economics we will always be searching in the dark for the right policies to enact. This hit and miss approach causes a lot of heartache and loss of treasure.