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How Not to Cut Welfare Spending

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The U.S. federal budget is now in the neighborhood of $4 trillion. Just ten years ago it wasn’t even $3 trillion. It was “only” $2 trillion in 2002, and didn’t reach the trillion dollar mark until 1987. The greatest component of the federal budget is spending on the welfare state. Welfare programs There are in the United States about 80 means-tested welfare programs. These are programs that limit benefits or payments on the basis of the beneficiary’s income or assets. The best-known of these programs are Medicaid; the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP); the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP ); Women, Infants, and Children (WIC); Section 8 housing vouchers, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF); Pell grants; farm subsidies; subsidized student loans; Head Start; Healthy Start; Supplemental Security Income (SSI); school breakfast and lunch programs; and the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP). The most egregious of these programs is the TANF program — formerly known ...

The Irrationality of American Socialists

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It is absolutely amazing to me how any American can still be wedded to socialism. Everywhere you look, socialism has produced misery, suffering, poverty, chaos, crisis, conflict, tyranny, and violence. Yet, there they are: Americans socialists going gaga over self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders, wishing that he had been elected president, and exclaiming that he would have saved America with his socialist programs. This is all quite bizarre. After all, look at Venezuela. You couldn’t find a better example of a socialist system. Yet, look at the results: misery, suffering, poverty, chaos, crisis, conflict, tyranny, and violence. What do socialists say about Venezuela? They say that the problem in Venezuela is not socialism but rather not enough socialism. If the government is able to stomp out the last vestiges of private economic activity in Venezuela, they say, happy days will finally arrive in that country. With all due respect, that is so utterly ridiculous. The more the Venezuelan government has moved down the road toward ...

Karl Marx and the Presumption of a ‘Right Side’ to History, Part II

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Those who speak about being on the “right side of history” have, knowingly or not, adopted a central element in Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalism and the idea that the capitalist system follows a particular course of historical development that is open to scientific explanation and prediction, and which presumes to be placing humanity on a road that leads to a higher and better form of society – socialism. (See my article, “Karl Marx and the Presumption of a ‘Right Side’ to History.”) Karl Marx and Frederick Engel’s Communist Manifesto was published in 1848. The first volume of Marx’s three-volume, Das Kapital (Capital), was published in 1867 (the other two volumes were edited and published after Marx’s death in 1883 by Frederick Engels). Marx was convinced that those middle decades of the nineteenth century were the twilight years of the capitalistic epoch of industrialization. His writings make it clear that he believed that the socialist revolution was right around ...