We have examined the nature of welfare rights, their history, and the philosophical case for them. We have examined the arguments for believing in such rights and seen how the many issues they raise can no longer be resisted: the concept of welfare rights is invalid. There is no warrant for claiming rights to food, shelter, and medical care, to income maintenance, child support, and retirement pensions, at taxpayer expense. Such rights cannot be justified by appeal to freedom, to benevolence, or to community. They do not expand but curtail freedom -- that of program clients as well as of taxpayers. They make charity compulsory, undermining any genuine benevolence donors might have toward the poor. They replace the voluntary bonds of a society of contract with the coercive power of the state, undermining genuine community. The concept does not provide a valid rationale for the welfare state; it provides a mere rationalization for the coercive transfer of wealth.

...[N]o government programs can achieve the same degree of diversity and flexibility as private ones. More important, however, the coercive "philanthropy" of public aid presupposes that the donors are owned by the recipients. Voluntary philanthropy is the only system compatible with the fact that individuals are ends in themselves.

The welfare state's crisis of legitimacy is real. It is profound. Behind the social crisis of perverse incentives and disabling pathologies, behind the financial crisis of exploding costs, it is a moral bankruptcy. The welfare state rests on a false moral foundation. And we can see the outlines of a sound alternative, one that is built on a foundation of real freedom, real benevolence and community.

Some will say, "So what?" As a vast engine for transferring wealth, the welfare state has created vested interests. Lobbies for the elderly will never agree to let Congress cut back Medicare or Social Security benefits. The poverty bureaucrats will fight to the death any major change in the industry that feeds and clothes them. It is naive idealism to think that the lack of a moral justification represents any sort of danger to the welfare state.

Maybe so. But the cynics have been proven wrong time and again, most recently in the collapse of communism. That system was backed by forces much more powerful than lobbies and bureaucratic inertia. The Soviet state had its secret police. It owned all the media; indeed it owned the entire economy. Yet it collapsed when the central sanctifying myth -- the myth of a workers' paradise to be created by collective ownership and economic planning -- had lost all credibility. The welfare state has likewise been sustained by nothing more than a myth, and it is likewise vulnerable to collapse.

So concludes David Kelley's A Life of One's Own: Individual Rights and the Welfare State. With his usual calm, gentle tone and methodical reasoning, Kelley takes on every major argument used to justify and expand welfare programs. Always fair, even when examining ideas he finds abhorrent, Kelley's book is essential ammunition in the war of ideas over the moral legitimacy and economic feasibility of socialism in every form.

Throughout, Kelley's arguments are predicated on the philosophical concept that individuals are ends unto themselves. Because no human being can live another human being's life, and because individuals are discrete biological entities, people are born with the inalienable property right to themselves and to the products of their labors. The welfare state runs counter to this concept, of course -- and this book is an excellent treatise on precisely why this is so.

Kelley first examines what rights are, contrasting classical liberty rights with the new "welfare rights" that advocates of collectivism believe humans possess.

Every right involves some claim that one person or group is entitled to make on others. It is this element -- the moral claim at the heart of any right -- that gives rights their special character.

...The dignity inherent in claiming one's rights is a primary reason welfare advocates have insisted on treating benefits as rights rather than charity.

Welfare rights differ from the classical rights to life, liberty, and property in the nature of the claim that they embody. They differ in what is being claimed as a right, in the obligations that they impose, and in the way they are implemented...

The primary difference is one of content, a difference in what it is that people are said to have a right to. The classical rights are rights to freedom of action, whereas welfare rights are rights to goods...

Liberty rights set conditions on the way in which individuals interact. Those rights say that we cannot harm, coerce, or steal from each other as we go about our business in life, but they do not guarantee that we will succeed in our business. Thus, the Declaration of Independence attributes to us the right to pursue happiness, not to happiness per se. Society is responsible for ensuring the freedom to pursue happiness, but the responsibility for success or failure in that pursuit lies with the individual. Similarly, T.H. Marshall, a leading theorist of the British welfare state, noted that liberty rights "confer the legal capacity to strive for the things one would like to possess but do not guarantee the possession of any of them. A property right is not a right to possess property, but a right to acquire it, if you can."

Welfare rights, by contrast, are intended to guarantee success, at least at a minimal level. They are conceived as entitlements to have certain goods, not merely to pursue them. They are rights to have the goods provided by others if one cannot (or will not) earn them oneself. Thus, they are quite different from the classical conception of rights as rules governing the process of producing the goods and services people want. Welfare rights require that the outcome of the efforts of productive members of society be distributed in such a way that everyone enjoys certain goods.

Kelley goes on to describe the difference between negative versus positive obligations:

One person's right always involves corresponding obligations on the part of others to respect it. The moral claim inherent in a right would be meaningless if no one were obliged to respect it. Liberty rights impose on other people on the negative obligation not to interfere, not to restrain one forcibly from acting as he chooses.

...In this framework, the positive obligation to provide another with a good or service arises only from one's own consent or voluntary act.

But welfare rights impose on others positive obligations to which they did not consent and which cannot be traced to any voluntary act. If a person has a right to food, come what may, then someone else has an obligation to grow it... A welfare right is by nature a right to a guaranteed positive outcome that is not contingent on the success of one's own efforts. It must therefore impose on those who can produce the goods the obligation to share them.

Considerable space in the book is devoted to Kelley's analysis of the emergence of the concept of welfare rights. Kelley blames an intellectual revolution of anti-individualism that popularized the collectivist ideas that drive the welfare state today. The "new liberals," as Kelley calls them, redefined concepts such as freedom and coercion.

Classical liberals viewed freedom as the absence of coercive interference with one's choices -- choices among the opportunities and alternatives available to the individual. This is the "negative conception" of freedom -- the absence of interference. The new liberalism brought us the positive conception of freedom, which takes into account the opportunities and alternatives available. No longer was the individual responsible for choosing, to his or her best ability, from among the available choices. Those who believe in positive freedom sought (and seek) to alter the field of alternatives through coercive state action.

The positive conception of freedom also saw the development of a new definition of coercion as described by Kelley.

Just as the new liberals expanded the concept of freedom to include the enjoyment of various economic goods, they employed an expanded concept of "economic coercion" to include deprivation of those goods. Coercion was no longer limited to the use of force by one individual against another or by government against citizens. It now included any action...that the new liberals felt unduly restricted the weaker party's opportunities.

Kelley links this idea to a third concept: environmental determinism.

Despite the claims of the new liberals, there is an evident difference between the power of a government to throw one in jail and the power of an employer in a free and competitive market to refuse one a job. The new liberals' refusal to accept that distinction may be traced to a third assumption. The doctrine of environmental determinism held that human beings are so shaped by their circumstances that they have no more genuine choice in the face of economic restraints and inducements than they have in the face of literal physical force.

Kelley goes on to make some very good points. The industrial revolution changed the nature of risk in the modern world. Economic risks replaced natural ones, in greatly expanding the number of human beings who could survive and even thrive in a given area. While it is normal and expected for people to seek protection from these risks, Kelley argues over and over again -- providing numerous statistics, charts, and footnotes to back up his claims -- that private insurance cooperatives, private and voluntary charity, and free market solutions invariably provide better protections than government welfare programs. Private institutions also enjoy much more freedom to alter their programs and coverage to meet changing needs among diverse consumers -- something that is very difficult for government bureaucracies to do.

The remainder of the book is divided into three sections refuting the three major arguments for welfare rights. These are the arguments from economic freedom, from benevolence, and from community.

Economic Freedom

The argument from economic freedom states that it does one no good to have rights if one cannot exercise them. We must therefore enjoy certain basic guarantees -- comprising freedom from want -- in the society envisioned by the new liberals.

Kelley demolishes this argument fairly easily. It is a fact that goods must be produced before they can be enjoyed. Those who believe in positive freedom, and thus in welfare rights, are attempting to evade this fact of reality. If we all are to be guaranteed that which must be produced to be enjoyed, it must be coercively transferred from those who produce it to those who do not.

The same goes for those who attempt to justify socialized medicine by claiming that good health is a prerequisite for the exercise of one's rights. Disease and physical infirmity are facts of reality that cannot be changed. Medical care is comprised of goods and services produced by others. To claim that medical care is a right is to demand the coercive transfer of what is produced from those who produce it to those who do not.

Benevolence

To argue from benevolence ultimately produces certain problems for the advocate of welfare rights. Compulsory benevolence isn't benevolence at all, and actually undermines any feeling of genuine compassion individuals might have held for those in need. Kelley advocates private charity in the pursuit of benevolent goals, arguing that these programs provide better service and greater flexibility for those who need them. He admits that there is no way to predict the level of aid that would be given in a private system, but states that this is not the issue:

Our point of departure, morally speaking, is not the needs of recipients but the generosity of donors. It is the donors who set the terms. Recipients do not own those who support them, and thus do not have a right that must be met, come what may. Those who would privatize poverty relief do not have the burden of showing that all poverty would be dealt with as effectively as it is today by government programs, although the considerations [that Kelley discusses before concluding this section] make that extremely likely. The burden is on those who support government programs to show why they think the poor are entitled on altruistic grounds to the aid they are receiving.

Compassion and generosity are virtues, and the charitable help they prompt us to provide the less fortunate is, for most of us, a part of what it means to live in a civilized society. But compassion, generosity, and charity are not the sum of morality, nor even its core; and they are not duties that create entitlements on the part of recipients. The poor do not own the productive, nor are the latter obliged to sacrifice the pursuit of their own happiness in service to the poor. If individuals are truly ends in themselves, then charity is not a duty but a value we choose to pursue. Each of us has the right to choose what weight charity has among the other values in our lives, instead of having the government decide what proportion of our income to take for that end. And each of us has the right to choose the particular people, projects, or causes we wish to support, instead of having government make that decision for us.

Community and Contract

Kelley views the free society as a society of contract: one in which individuals enter into voluntary agreements governing what they will do. The rule of law as administered by the state preserves the rights of individuals to act as they choose, provided they adhere to the negative conception of freedom and do not interfere with the actions of others.

Those who argue for welfare rights from a sense of community, Kelley says, believe we have moved too far from our tribal roots. In primitive societies the community was all, and individuals' desires and needs were secondary to the demands of the tribe. The society of contract produces a destructive atomism, say the communitarians, and thus welfare rights must be recognized to preserve the "family" that is the state and its citizens.

Communitarians advocate a return, at least in part, to a society of status: a pre-modern, pre-liberal conception according to which an individual's relationships to others are not chosen but predetermined or imposed. According to this conception, we look to society rather than our own efforts for our support; we are responsible to society for working and supporting the social good; we belong in part to society, not fully to ourselves. But there is no warrant for this return to pre-modern principles. Our identity as individuals is not so shaped by social influences as to make us perpetual dependents. Our debts to others are not so open-ended as to give them property in our persons. As self-movers and self-owners we have rights to life, liberty, and property, and the social expression of those rights is a society of contract, not status. Henry Maine was right: the society of contract and the society of status reflect two fundamentally opposed principles.

Man is a social animal, and a society of contract is a genuine society. It is chiefly a civil society, a world of commercial enterprise and voluntary noncommercial organizations, with the political sector playing the minimal role of maintaining order and adjudicating disputes about the boundaries of rights. Everything that is true and appealing in the communitarian vision is available in civil society. Freedom breeds a spirit of genuine solidarity among people who independently embrace the same values. It breeds a spirit of responsibility among people who know they cannot drat others, by force, to enroll in their projects.

But nothing in the communitarian vision that goes beyond civil society -- nothing that presupposes positive political rights to welfare goods, nothing that requires the state as a primary agent -- is either true or appealing, or workable. A modern society does not and cannot function as a giant family, and the effort to make it do so has destructive effects on everyone involved. It breeds political struggle among interest groups for control of the levers of power. It produces unintended consequences that cannot easily be corrected. And, as the looming crisis of Social Security illustrates so clearly, it encourages people to act irresponsibly in the expectation that others can be forced to clean up the mess.

Conclusion