A New Approach To Fighting Poverty

I thought about writing about the historic 10% lead the Republicans have in Gallup’s generic poll (51% to 41%), but that’s hardly unexpected to Commentarama readers. I thought about writing about all the laughable racism allegations made against Glenn Beck’s rally, but that’s nothing new either. So instead, I thought I’d talk about an article that appeared on Drudge yesterday, an article that most people probably missed and which actually signals a significant change in world-wide thinking.

According to this article, a local charity in St. Louis is offering money to the parents of children whose kids have near-perfect attendance in school. What you probably don’t know is that this is part of a world-wide trend that is reforming the way charitable money (and welfare money) is being handed out, a trend that is showing remarkable success.

Prior to the 1960s, charity was largely handled by church and civic organizations. This system worked pretty well because these groups used the opportunity of the recipient’s need to try to instill new values that would set the person’s life right. Indeed, some groups required the recipients to give up alcohol. Others required them to attend church services or put them to work in soup kitchens or other charitable projects to learn a sense of responsibility and jumpstart a work ethic.

But in the 1960s, the government stepped into this “market” and became the dominant provider of charity. And once the government got its hands on this “market,” the left demanded that the government act in a “value-neutral” way. There were many reasons for this, but the main one frankly was that the left had been embarrassed by its embrace of eugenics, which was disgraced by Nazism, and it wanted to repudiate that. Thus, it swung to the polar opposite of what it had been advocating and it began to claim that society had no right to tell anyone how to live.

Consequently, an entire generation of people who had demonstrated a history of making poor choices was handed money with no responsibility and no requirements. Predictably poverty exploded, the inner cities imploded, and whole generations of kids ended up being “raised” by the state in conditions that were barely better than being tossed into the wild at birth.

Thirty years later, the black community was destroyed and a large chunk of the rural white community was following at full speed. But in the 1990s, things began to change. Forced by a Republican Congress, the Clinton Administration allowed the states to begin experimenting with limited changes to the system. Suddenly states were forcing those of its wards who could work to get jobs if they wanted to keep their benefits. Hundreds of thousands of people lifted themselves off the welfare roles. In fact, this was so successful that the left went from screaming that millions would die in the streets to claiming that they were responsible for this reform.

This led liberals worldwide to rethink the value-neutral approach. Soon programs began to appear all across the world where charity/welfare was handed out with conditions attached. For example, money was given to poor parents on condition that they vaccinate their kids or send them to school. Many on the left whined that this was unfair, but slowly it became clear that this was causing massive positive changes in these people’s lives. By providing an incentive to these people to make good choices, they actually began making good decisions and, in return, their lives began to improve. This has worked everywhere from Brazil to Africa to the Middle East, and now St. Louis, and has spawned many offshoots -- things like microloans to very small businesses and tying foreign aid to demonstrable numbers like the number of kids in school or the amount of clean drinking water provided to citizens.

I’m sure some of you are uncomfortable with this idea because you don’t like the government telling people how to live their lives. But I think this is heading in the right direction.

The sad truth is that 30 years of rampant liberalism has create an underclass that no longer has the tools to change their lives on their own. And they are raising new generations all the time with the same non-values, new generations that are fated to go straight to welfare. The only way to break this cycle and to undo the damage that has been done, i.e. to lift the underclass, is to give these people an incentive to start making good decisions instead of bad. These types of programs do that.

So I, for one, hope that this spreads.