Decades of Great Society transfer payments have not empowered our poor, they have condemned them to lives of privation. The economic remedies aimed at helping the poor have proven ineffectual against the poverty, destitution, and despair they sought to alleviate. Until we recognize the power of free institutions, real progress towards effective compassion will continue to elude us. Wealth is not necessary and sufficient for morality any more than poverty is prerequisite for crime, violence, and illegitimacy. Lord Acton's observation that the remedy for poverty lies with the moral resources of the poor, not the financial reserves of the wealthy, speaks directly to the issue at stake.
Poverty is an economic condition with moral ramifications.
The poor have ethical responsibilities to themselves, their families, and their communities to actively work toward changing their circumstances. The decline of this ethic, and the abdication of personal responsibility by the affluent, has created a culture of apathy and complaint that immobilizes society, frustrating attempted solutions. The welfare bureaucracy contributes to such feelings by reducing the indigent to consumers of federally administered programs. Our leviathan called welfare, with its various entitlements, subsidies, and benefits, is not the panacea its originators had hoped. Instead, it has become the source and symbol of government waste and ineptitude.