David Kelley - A Life of Ones Own: Individual Rights and the Welfare State

A Life
of One's
Own

A Life
of One's
Own

Individual Rights
and the Welfare State

David Kelley

INSTITUTE

Washington, D.C.

Copyright 1998 by the Cato Institute.
All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kelley, David, 1949

A life of one's own: individual rights and the welfare state /

David Kelley.

p. cm .

Includes bibliographical references (p. 153-167) and index.
ISBN 1-882577-70-1 (cloth). ISBN 1-882577-71-X (pbk.)

1. Welfare stateMoral and ethical aspects 2. Public welfareMoral and ethical aspects. 3. United StatesSocial policy. 4. Objectivism (Philosophy) I. Title.

JC479.K45 1998

Printed in the United States of America.

C ATO I NSTITUTE
1000 Massachusetts Ave., N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20001

This book, like most, has been the labor of many hands. Merrill Matthews, R. Shep Melnick, Jos Piera, and Michael Tanner were generous with their time in talking to me about their published works. David Schmidtz shared with me research for his own book on welfare and commented on early versions of the manuscript. For their inventiveness in finding the sources I needed, I am grateful to my research assistants, Joanne Phillips and Michael Young, and especially to Roger Donway, who also vastly improved the manuscript with his detailed comments. I'm indebted to Jamie Dorrian for the patient hours she spent preparing the manuscript for submission, and to Elizabeth Kaplan, my copyeditor at the Cato Institute, for her meticulous work in preparing it for publication.

Above all, I want to share whatever credit this work may deserve with Ed Crane, Cato's president, who had the vision to commission it; with my editor Tom Palmer, who saw the project through with unfailing wisdom, encouragement, and wit; and to all the members of the Institute for Objectivist Studies, who made this work possible with their generous support.

In our personal lives, most of us realize that the world doesn't owe us a living. Whatever our individual circumstances, we know that we are responsible for doing what it takes to get the things we want in life. We're responsible for earning a living that provides for both current and future needs. We're responsible, not just for doing our jobs day by day, but for finding a job in the first place and for acquiring the knowledge and skills it takes to find a job. We're responsible, not just for paying current expenses like rent and groceries, but for saving some portion of our income for long-term needs like retirement and for unexpected ones like an incapacitating illness. We're responsible, not just for getting the kids on the school bus in the morning, but for making sure they are learning what they will need to know in life. And we're responsible for choosing to bear children in the first place, knowing the long-term commitment it involves and the investment of time and money we might have devoted to other pursuits.

Yet in our public lives we have accepted an obligation to provide food, shelter, jobs, education, pensions, medical care, child support, and other goods to every member of society. The premise of the welfare statethe sprawling network of programs for transferring wealth from taxpayers to recipientsis that the world does owe us a living. If someone is unable or unwilling to support himself, the government will provide food stamps, housing subsidies, and possibly cash assistance as well. If someone is laid off, the government will provide unemployment compensation. If an unmarried teenager has a baby she can't support, she is eligible for cash benefits, Medicaid, and other poverty programs. If someone fails to save for retirement, the Social Security system provides a pension and Medicare covers the doctors' bills. In those and other ways, the welfare state confers entitlements to goods independent of the process of earning them. It elevates needs and downplays responsibility. The result is a public morality at odds with our personal standards.

In our personal lives we know that people sometimes suffer through no fault of their own. We recognize a place in life for generosity and mutual aid. If a stranger is hurt in the street, we call the ambulance and see to his needs. If a neighbor's house burns down, we do what we can to help. But we choose to do so voluntarily, weighing such needs against the other demands on our resources, and we expect some measure of gratitude in recognition of our help. If a stranger appeared at our door demanding a place to live, or help with his medical bills, or a contribution to his retirement fund or to his kids' educationif he demanded it as a matter of right, regardless of whether we were willing and able to help, and without any obligation to thank us for helpingwe would take offense. We would recognize it as a monumental act of presumption.

Yet in our public life we accept such demands as a matter of course. The beneficiaries of social welfare programs, and those who speak on their behalf, put forward their needs as claims on the public purse, and thus on the productive members of society who pay taxes. Those claims are not always successful. They may be opposed for economic reasons; they may fail to win political support. But they are rarely challenged as illegitimate. The operating assumption in debates about social welfare programs is that the needs of recipients take precedence over the rights of producers: those with the ability to produce are obliged to serve, while those with needs are entitled to make demands. The result, once again, is a public morality at odds with our private standards.

Federal budget deficits, and comparable fiscal problems at the state level, have come to seem intractable because food stamps, Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, public housing, unemployment compensation, and other benefits have been provided as entitlements. Casting those benefits as rights has bred intransigence among recipients and thus made the prospect of benefit cuts all the more difficult for legislators to contemplate publicly. When the Massachusetts legislature voted in early 1995 to cut welfare benefits and require that recipients work, for example, welfare recipients marched through the statehouse protesting the new restrictions.

The spirit of entitlement is not peculiar to poverty programs. In New York City, students dressed in black held a mock funeral march from Battery Park to City Hall to protest cuts in federal spending on student loans and grants. Speaking of Social Security, Norman Ornstein, a political scientist at the American Enterprise Institute, observed,

Talk to almost any audience of elderly people, and it becomes clear that the widespread public view is that recipients are "entitled" to these programsand any cutbacks or changes are thus illegitimate.... A capped entitlement, of course, is like a partial pregnancy; the cap or limitation becomes increasingly difficult to maintain because one either has a right or one doesn't.

The concept of a right to the goods and services provided by the welfare state is the chief source of disparity between our private and our public morality. A right is something an individual can demand as his due without apology for asking and without gratitude for receiving. When that concept is extended to the provision of social welfare, the necessary result is to empower those who make claims on public provision and silence those who do the providing. Since the New Deal, and especially during the three decades since the creation of the Great Society programs, the legal framework of entitlements has given rise to a public spirit of entitlement, a sense that the world does owe us a living.