Juan Williams: Government is One Big Charity?

Juan Williams was on Sean Hannity today discussing President Obama's economic and domestic policies, and when push came to shove and facts and figures and data and evidence was cited, he fell back on the same argument that liberals and progressives always fall back on when the results of their policies prove to be harmful to poor people, minorities, and the groups in society that need the most help- he fell back on the argument that for all of the government's faults, at least it was taking wealth from rich people and redistributing it as charity to poor people.

Liberals and progressives, who have seized the old Democratic Party and are now running it as a communist organization, believe that one of the primary roles of the new United States of America is to use the power of the state to distribute charity to those who need it. But their actions and beliefs are in fact resulting in less money and wealth going to the people who need it in society because the government is THE SINGLE WORST charitable organization in the world, having considerable overhead, being motivated by politics and not need, and full of corruption and graft.

CATO, in a report that, although dated, still gets to the heart of the matter, said:

Private charities have been more successful than government welfare for several reasons. First, private charities are able to individualize their approach to the circumstances of poor people in ways that governments can never do. Government regulations must be designed to treat all similarly situated recipients alike. Glenn C. Loury of Boston University explains the difference between welfare and private charities on that point. "Because citizens have due process rights which cannot be fully abrogated . . . public judgments must be made in a manner that can be defended after the fact, sometimes even in court." The result is that most government programs rely on the simple provision of cash or other goods and services without any attempt to differentiate between the needs of recipients.

Take, for example, the case of a poor person who has a job offer. But she can't get to the job because her car battery is dead. A government welfare program can do nothing but tell her to wait two weeks until her welfare check arrives. Of course, by that time the job will be gone. A private charity can simply go out and buy a car battery (or even jump-start the dead battery).

The sheer size of government programs works against individualization. As one welfare case worker lamented, "With 125 cases it's hard to remember that they're all human beings. Sometimes they're just a number." Bureaucracy is a major factor in government welfare programs. For example, a report on welfare in Illinois found procedures requiring "nine forms to process an address change, at least six forms to add or delete a member of a household, and a minimum of six forms to report a change in earnings or employment." All that for just one program.

In her excellent book Tyranny of Kindness, Theresa Funiciello, a former welfare mother, describes the dehumanizing world of the government welfare system--a system in which regulations and bureaucracy rule all else. It is a system in which illiterate homeless people with mental illnesses are handed 17-page forms to fill out, women nine months pregnant are told to verify their pregnancies, a woman who was raped is told she is ineligible for benefits because she can't list the baby's father on the required form. It is a world totally unable to adjust to the slightest deviation from the bureaucratic norm.

In addition to being better able to target individual needs, private charities are much better able to target assistance to those who really need help. Because eligibility requirements for government welfare programs are arbitrary and cannot be changed to fit individual circumstances, many people in genuine need do not receive assistance, while benefits often go to people who do not really need them. More than 40 percent of all families living below the poverty level receive no government assistance. Yet more than half of the families receiving means-tested benefits are not poor. Thus, a student may receive food stamps, while a homeless man with no mailing address goes without. Private charities are not bound by such bureaucratic restrictions.

Private charity also has a better record of actually delivering aid to recipients. Surprisingly little of the money being spent on federal and state social welfare programs actually reaches recipients. In 1965, 70 cents of every dollar spent by the government to fight poverty went directly to poor people. Today, 70 cents of every dollar goes, not to poor people, but to government bureaucrats and others who serve the poor. Few private charities have the bureaucratic overhead and inefficiency of government programs.

Democratic policies are increasingly being defended on 'charitable' grounds, from healthcare policies to economic policies to environmental policies, but the truth of the matter is that government is a poor method of distributing charity. Instead of relying on government and its horrible charitable giving, all of these programs should be ended and the money spent on them should be returned to citizens. Even if a small percentage of this money was given in charity, then it would be more successful than government programs, and as long as there are a lot of conservative Republicans around, we can be sure that a good percentage of money will be donated and not a small percentage (according to studies, liberals don't donate to charity- they feel superior by taking money from you and giving that to charity).