The Real Issue With Welfare

Review of Phil Harvey and Lisa Conyers, The Human Cost of Welfare: How the System Hurts the People It’s Supposed to Help (Praeger, 2016), xv + 206 pgs.

The Human Cost of Welfare is a welcome book, an important book, and a needed book—even if it does miss the real issue when it comes to welfare. It is also a good book—until you get to the authors’ proposals in the last chapter.

Phil Harvey, the author of several other books, is chairman of the board of DKT International, “which provides family planning and HIV/AIDS prevention programs in 20 nations,” and the chief sponsor of the DKT Liberty Project, “an advocacy group that raises awareness about liberty and freedom in the United States.” Lisa Conyers is director of policy studies for the DKT Liberty Project.

The Human Cost of Welfare is about “how welfare impacts the lives and happiness of welfare recipients themselves.” It explores “what has gone wrong with our current welfare programs and how they actually work before outlining many ways to improve the welfare system.” After “living and working with the poor in many parts of the world,” the authors’ “found it easy enough to see that humans everywhere were happier when they were self-

They also say that states should eliminate “dysfunctional licensing requirements.”

What is not satisfactory is the authors’ proposals for the federal government to:

• expand the Earned Income Tax Credit,
• subsidize the wages of low-income workers,
• pay a wage subsidy to employers,
• give Opportunity Grants to the states representing the cost of 11 federal programs,
• raise the earnings cap for all welfare programs,
• promote birth control,
• favor accurate sex education,
• help workers find work by paying them to move, and
• provide a guaranteed basic income.

Since their proposal to “privatize welfare” only presents the elimination of all government welfare and the institution of private charity as one possibility, most of it must be rejected as well. Especially objectionable is the suggestion that “early-trimester abortions should be paid for by any program that reimburses the costs of low-income women’s basic or reproductive health care.”

Welfare is destructive, and The Human Cost of Welfare provides abundant proof. But welfare has another cost as well, a hidden cost that makes it immoral on its face—the money given by the government must first be taken from taxpayers.

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