No, I haven’t misspelled the name of a radio format.
Instead I’m highlighting a great archival video clip of Thomas Sowell now posted at Ideas Matter.
As the Free to Choose Network’s Max Borders explains, the video tells us:
- First, intentions are not consequences. Indeed, the
most well-intentioned legislation can create perverse effects. When
Sowell gave this address, the U.S. welfare state underclass was bulging
at the seams, and it continued to bulge until the Welfare Reform Act of
1996. (Of course, it hasn’t gone away.) Sowell warns us to look at facts
about results.
- Second, incentives matter. If you pay people merely
to subsist, subsist they will. If you could get freebies doing nothing
or work for a chance at upward mobility — what would you do? You or I
might work harder. But there are a whole lot of people who would just
take the check for doing nothing.
- Third, bureaucrats end up just as parasitic as the people they purport to help. Indeed, the learned classes appointed to act as stewards of the poor pay themselves handsomely.
This ecosystem of waste and dependence doesn’t just go one way. In
other words, it becomes a Poverty Empire–a powerful interest group.
