Libertarianism Against the Welfare State By Bryan Caplan

#caplan welfare
Libertarianism Against the Welfare State By Bryan Caplan

• to restate what I see as the standard libertarian case against the welfare state,
• 1. Universal social programs that "help everyone" are folly....taxing everyone to help everyone makes no sense.
• 2. Social programs - universal or means-tested - give people perverse incentives, discouraging work, planning, and self-insurance. The programs give recipients very bad incentives; the taxes required to fund the programs give everyone moderately bad incentives.... As a result, even programs carefully targeted to help the truly poor often fail a cost-benefit test.
• 3. "Helping people" sounds good; complaining about "perverse incentives" sounds bad. Since humans focus on how policies sound, rather than what they actually achieve, governments have a built-in tendency to adopt and preserve social programs that fail
• 4. There is a plausible moral case for social programs that help people who are absolutely poor through no fault of their own.... "No fault of their own." Why you're poor matters. Starving because you're born blind is morally problematic. Starving because you drink yourself
• 5. First World welfare states provide a popular rationale for restricting immigration from countries where absolute poverty is rampant:
• 6. Ambiguity about what constitutes "absolute poverty" and "irresponsible behavior" should be resolved in favor of taxpayers, not recipients. Coercion is not acceptable when justification is debatable.
• 7. Consider the best-case scenario for force charity. Someone is absolutely poor through no fault of his own, and there are no disincentive effects of transfers or taxes.... Think of the Good Samaritan... our "fellow citizens" are strangers - and the moral intuition that helping strangers is supererogatory is hard to escape.

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