How should we have done welfare, etc.?

I have a friend who always asks the best questions.  I say this because his questions cause me to think about things in different ways.  The below is his most recent:

What is the appropriate attitude to have towards welfare?  I don't know.

The liberal view is that it is not the fault of the children that the parents are flakes.  Children, in the richest country in the world, should receive food and clothes and shelter and schools and vaccines regardless of how useless the parents are.

The conservative view is that we're bribing people to behave antisocially.  Any time you do something bad, you are immediately rewarded with a permanent cash raise.  The way to get more money is not to go to school or work overtime, but instead to run away from home, or quit your job, or have another baby you can't support.  If entire generations and entire neighborhoods never have one worker, this curiously does not lead to utopia.

It is obvious to me that the liberals are entirely right.  It is equally obvious to me that the conservatives are entirely right.  What to do?

This led me to think about welfare in an entirely different way.  I am generally opposed to welfare, mostly because I believe it to be unconstitutional and because I believe it promotes a legal form of slavery...slavery to the state.  Of course, liberals and conservatives have entirely different reasons for believing what they do and generally, both arguments have merit, as my friend has pointed out.  However, he also showed that both arguments have flaws, at least I felt that he did.  So, if liberals are right and wrong and conservatives are right and wrong and welfare is unconstitutional as I believe, how do I reconcile all this?

It turns out, that after a lot of thought, this isn't as hard as I believed it to be.  It took a while for me to think about this, but now that I've reached a conclusion, it seems obvious to me.  For your information, here is my initial response to my friend:

Of course, there is no "good" answer.  However, I submit that our founders set us up as a federal system, leaving most of the power in the states specifically so the individual states could be an incubator of ideas.  The fact that our federal government left that idea in the dust long ago is too bad and quite frankly, irrelevant to your point.  If we used the states in the proper role rather than just assuming the federal government would take care of us all, then we probably would have seen 50 or so different models for welfare to date and thus we could see which things work and which things don't, scrap those that don't and expand those that do.  Instead, we have a one size fits all monstrosity at the federal level that can't be changed because that means you hate children.

This is a bit simplistic, but he understood the point I was trying to make (we've known each other a long time). However, I'll be a bit more specific.  The fallacy of the last 60 years or more in the U.S. government is that we have defaulted to the idea that the federal government is the best way to solve our problems.  While a logical conclusion, especially for statists, this isn't the system set up by our founders.  They believed the various states had most of the power and the federal government was limited only to the powers defined for it in the Constitution.  This is quite limited compared to what our federal government does today and most people don't even realize that the majority of its actions are powers not defined for it in our Constitution.  Nonetheless, the individual states were supposed to be incubators of ideas.  They were supposed to come up with various ways of doing things.  This would result in some collosal failures but also some huge successes.  When one state failed and then observed the success of another state, then those ideas that are good and successful can be emulated while those that prove to be failures can be scrapped.  This is the system our founders designed.


Relying on the federal government to do these things skips this step.  It may achieve a system much more quickly since getting the states to agree on things takes time, effort, and patience.  However, it achieves something else as well.  When the federal government passes something like welfare or social security or our modern example of health care reform, it expands its own powers at the cost of the states.  In fact, these kinds of programs are designed specifically to strengthen the fed while weakening the states.  They are also designed in such a way as to be used as a political tool.  What I mean by this is that for a person who wants to reform Social Security, they are branded as hating the elderly or a person who wants to reform welfare must hate children, or women, or be racist.  This is how these programs are used in the political realm...to score political points.  It also means that they can't be changed or repealed, at least not easily.  Therefore, the incubator no longer exists.  While we could have had the 50 states come up  with various methods of implementing welfare and social security or some states do nothing at all which would have resulted in an interesting variety of options that could be emulated or rejected or modified, etc., instead, we have a one size fits all federal model that can't be changed.  Instead of having patience and following the methods proscribed us by our founders, we had to "fix it now" or "take of the people" or whatever political speak sentence you want to use to fill in that blank.  This has resulted in a nearly bankrupts social security system that we can't change even though there are much better models around the world that have performed better than ours and are more stable.  It has resulted in a welfare system where 1/3 of the recipients aren't getting a leg up but are instead permanently receiving "benefits".  It will also result in a monstrous health care system with a monstrous bill to go with it.  Our own obsession with power and lack of patience seems to be what will be our undoing.