“…Welfare – such as it is – belongs at the local level….”

I’m going to stipulate right up front that I think that Glenn Beck is about 60% nutty. I like the guy…generally…but he can take tangents into kookoo land that make me wonder about him.

However, it was way back when Beck had his show on Fox News that he, writing to his blackboard, introduced me to Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven (Cloward passed away in 2001, Piven is currently 93. I also see from her wiki page that she is still a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, so she’s got that goin’ for her, which is nice.). Cloward and Piven were married Columbia socioligists and they wrote an article–The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty–in which they argued for doing exactly the opposite of your point above. Their article was originally published in 1966 and re-published again in 2015 after Beck had made them famous.

I encourage a full reading, and having read it again myself this morning, I can barely limit myself to just a couple of quotes. Nearly every paragraph has a red-flag jumping out at me. However, here are a couple, with my emphases throughout…..

…It is our purpose to advance a strategy which affords the basis for a convergence of civil rights organizations, militant anti-poverty groups and the poor. If this strategy were implemented, a political crisis would result that could lead to legislation for a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty. [This is from their introductory paragraph.]

…Widespread campaigns to register the eligible poor for welfare aid, and to help existing recipients obtain their full benefits, would produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments….By the internal disruption of local bureaucratic practices, by the furor over public welfare poverty, and by the collapse of current financing arrangements, powerful forces can be generated for major economic reforms at the national level….

…[T]he right to income must be guaranteed, or the oppression of the welfare poor will not be eliminated. Because benefits are conditional under the present public welfare system, submission to arbitrary governmental power is regularly made the price of sustenance. People have been coerced into attending literacy classes or participating in medical or vocational rehabilitation regimes [drug testing], on pain of having their benefits terminated. Men are forced into labor on virtually any terms lest they forfeit their welfare aid….

I could go on, and again I encourage your full reading of the article. But the point made by Beck back then, and the one that I see today, is that nearly everything the political Left (and much of the Right) has done since the early 60’s has followed this article’s advice: Load up every government social program as a way of prompting a crisis for which the answer is to concentrate power in Washington so that the Right Decisions Can Be Made. Here, Cloward and Piven were talking about aid to the urban poor. But more broadly, social benefits have expanded everywhere. You believe that your prescription drug prices are too high? Let’s start a Medicare Plan D. You can’t make a living wage (sic) by flipping burgers at McDonalds? We need an increase to the Minimum Wage. Your labor costs are too high for processing chickens or picking lettuce? We’ll look the other way and practically invite an illegal immigrant horde to come across the borders.

I really, really applauded Musk’s efforts at his DOGE cuts, but the very sad fact is that there are very few of us whose diets aren’t at least partially, enriched by government cheese. Moreover, there are damned few of us who are willing to give it up.