There is a deadly cancer that is eating away at Western society—Welfare. It is supported by a web of lies that are so pervasive that no one dare question them. Two of the most ingrained are:
- There is no substitute for helping the unfortunate than government provided welfare on demand.
- The monetary stimulus from welfare spending adds to aggregate demand and helps to stimulate the economy.
Erosion of the Family as Welfare Provider
The primary form of welfare for the unfortunate is the family. Yet many welfare programs actually encourage the destruction of the family. The rise of the so-called “single parent family” is aided in part by the requirement that the child has been abandoned by one of the parents, almost always the father, and that the remaining parent with child is engaged in a noble endeavor. The reality is that, prior to welfare on demand, what in America is termed an “entitlement”, becoming pregnant out of wedlock was a disaster for the mother and her extended family. If the biological father shirked his duties, the financial and social burden of raising the child fell to the grandparents at a time of life when their physical vigor and income are declining. There is a further lie that a single parent, again usually the mother, can raise a child for a life of achievement, flies in the face of all research. In all surveys the single most important trait that will predict a child’s future financial success (having a real profession and landing a good job) and social success (staying out of prison, for example) is whether or not the child was raised by a mother and a father. (Here are forty-five single parent statistics you can’t ignore.) (Here are charts of single parent families.)
Marxist Ideology Attacks Work and Enterprise
The stigma of being on welfare has been ameliorated by Keynesian economics and Marxist ideology. Marxist ideology casts capitalists as a parasitic class, stealing what should belong to the workers. Therefore, the parasitic class deserves to be wiped out financially and, in some Marxist countries, literally. In his latest book Economic Perspectives, in which he compiled his periodic essays from over a decade, Emile Woolf reported on page 11 that “A friend in the Languedoc (a province in the south of France) has four daughters in local schools. The children relate how their teachers keep telling them that enterprise is bad because it engenders exploitation.” You may counter with “Sure, but this is France, not America”, but a few years ago our local high school children were tasked with reporting how their families were “energy hogs”. Apparently heating and cooling one’s home to his liking, taking long showers, etc. were societal stigmas which the children were required to report in class. Sounds innocuous, but is this really any of the school’s business and does it really add to a student’s knowledge base, or does it just turn government schools into conduits of propaganda?
The Lie that Aggregate Demand Stimulates Production
Keynesian economics elevates “aggregate demand” (spending) as the driver of prosperity. Keynes ignores Jean Baptiste Say’s “Law of Markets” in which he clearly expresses the obvious fact that production must precede consumption. One cannot consume what one has not produced, either for himself or for others in the market. By ignoring this bald fact of life, politicians have been given manna from heaven to spend recklessly, as Keynes actually recommended! He claimed that it was perfectly fine to pay people to dig holes in the ground and pay others to fill them back up! Of course, politicians were now given theoretical cover to spend to fund whatever would get them elected, and welfare recipients were brainwashed into believing that they were doing God’s work by consuming and not producing. The stigma of being dependent on public welfare has gradually been removed to the point that one is expected to praise the unwed single mother for her courage!
Destruction of the Family Is Well Under Way
In America in 1950 ten percent of households were classified as single parent families. Today it is thirty percent. Marxist and Keynesian ideologies have given profligate politicians cover for taxing the supposedly exploitative and selfish productive class in order to buy votes from easily swayed welfare recipients. A requirement to receive these handouts is that there is no intact family! The result is an ever increasing number of generations who have never known work and feel entitled to live as dependents of the state, which really means you and me. This trend can rightly be called a cancer, because it is spreading and the cure, if attempted at all, will be painful. If left unchecked, which seems likely, it is a prescription for societal decline and failure.
© Patrick Barron 2025 Website
