Welfare Reform in His Book

Welfare Reform

In his book Losing ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980, Charles Murray identifies several "laws" that he insists apply to all social programs and other methods of government transfer. These three basic laws, as stated by Murray, are the law of imperfect selection, the law of unintended rewards, and the law of net harm (Murray 1984, pp. 211-16). The first law states that any objective definition of eligibility for a social program and/or government transfer will necessarily leave some individuals out that ought to be included in the program. The second two laws are very closely related to each other; Murray's law of unintended rewards claims that any government transfer program inherently raises the net value of the social position that warrants inclusion in the program, and the law of net harm concludes that a type of behavior that is unlikely to be changed voluntarily will most likely be exacerbated by a program that attempts to create the desired change in behavior. Thus, Murray believes that a program must provide enough incentive for change to make the participants in the program willing to pay the sacrifice of making a change, while not providing enough benefit to encourage complacency.

Christopher Jenck's main contention with Murray in his own book Rethinking Social Policy is that there are still inherent imbalances in society as a whole that afford unequal opportunities to various segments of the population (Jenkcs 1993). There are also different value systems at work in a diverse society, and the bleak view of social programs that Murray possesses fails to take into account the fact there is an uneven playing field to begin with. Jencks points out that those likely to utilize social programs often have an overall disadvantage in society due to intergenerational poverty and/or a minority status (Jencks 1993).

Jenck's criticisms do apply to Olasky's arguments concerning the need for personal and local involvement in charity and aiding the poor, though to a lesser degree. Olasky argues in the Tragedy of American Compassion that welfare and other social programs perpetuate poverty because they do not demand any self-help from the recipients, which is similar to Murray's argument that the benefits for remaining poor in a welfare state outweigh the benefits of employment (Olasky 1992; Murray 1984). While it might be true that personal and local involvement are preferable to federal social programs, Jenck's assertion of the inherent imbalance in today's society also implies an imbalance in the degree and amount of support that could and would be offered in certain communities (Jenck 1993). That is, in communities already mostly or entirely reduced to poverty, there would be little help available at the local and personal level. A federal system allows for the redistribution of resources across broader areas and populations, and though this leads to the depersonalization of aid that Olasky decries, it is arguably the only solution for lifting entire segments of the population out of poverty.