I grew up in a very poor neighborhood, surrounded by welfare families. My mother was a single parent, raising two boys on her own. Most of her friends were welfare mothers.
This experience taught me a couple of things. First, my mother’s friends were very angry. The cheques they got from the government were never enough, they were entitled, it wasn’t fair, etc. I also heard lots of claims of how a single mother with two children simply can’t make it without help.
Well, my mother was proof that this wasn’t the case. She didn’t have much of an education, but she worked in a grocery store as a clerk, and worked hard. She made less than the welfare moms were getting. But you know what? Our conversations around the dinner table weren’t about the unfairness of life and the cheapness of government. Instead, they were about opportunities, working hard, the chance of promotion, etc.
This set an example in my life, and I was never in danger of becoming a second-generation welfare recipient. But what about those kids whose only role models had given up and expected everything to be given to them because life wasn’t fair?
Anyway, over time my mom did indeed get promoted, and eventually wound up managing that little grocery store. And she saved her money and we eventually bought a little house and moved out of the area. Eventually, she sold that house and used the equity to buy a little store of her own, which she runs by herself and is very happy. And she never took a dime of government assistance.
A few years ago I went back to that old neighborhood. And you know what? Most of the people I knew there as a child are still there. Their children probably live there as well (I personally knew a couple who did). I came to the conclusion that government handouts may sometimes be necessary, but they carry a tremendous baggage - a soul-deadening belief that you are helpless, that there are forces beyond your control running your life. It creates a permanent underclass of sad, angry people. It is something to be avoided at all cost.
That experience made me skeptical of government, and I started paying much closer attention. And I found that for every ‘good’ government program, there were ten that were poorly planned, or pork-barrel projects to get someone elected, or flat-out counter-productive. These formative years were spent watching governments flirt with wage and price controls (which ALWAYS backfired, and many of us knew they would and couldn’t understand how the politicians couldn’t figure that out).
We watched governments impose sky-high tariffs coupled with freight subsidies for ‘good’ industries, in an attempt to control the direction and production of the economy. With disastrous consequences.
We watched marginal tax rates reach 70%, while the gap between the rich and poor continued to increase. We watched the government loosen the money supply in an attempt to buy prosperity, which resulted in high inflation as classical economists had been saying it would for a long time. We watched as society started to fracture and ‘malaise’ set in, as the current governments told people that the rich were at fault, it wasn’t their fault that they were poor, tough times were ahead, and that the only answer was to tax the rich even more and give to the rest of the people because they weren’t capable of making it on their own without the benevolent government helping them. We were told we were too stupid to figure out which products to buy, which drugs were safe, which jobs were unsafe, which cars to buy (foreign cars had high tariffs on them to ‘encourage’ us to buy the ‘right’ kind of cars), etc. Government became our mommy and daddy, and the people suffered as a result.
Finally, as I was becoming an adult the ‘conservative revolution’ happened. Reagan was elected in the States, Mulroney in Canada, and Thatcher in Britain. And I never saw such an outpouring of hatred and anger from the left. But all three countries made a miraculous turn-around in fortunes. Reagan more than the others brought back a sense of optimism and self-reliance that filtered back through the populace. He told us that government was the problem, not the answer. He told us to look at ourselves first if we wanted our lives to be better, rather than trying to hitch a ride on the back of government. He gave us back our self-esteem and a sense of purpose.
Now that I’m almost 40, my beliefs have tempered a bit. I no longer see government as a necessary evil, but as a positive presence in our lives as long as it is kept somewhat in check. I’ve made lots of liberal friends, and I discovered early on that not all liberals are motivated by fear and anger at life, as were the people of my youth.
But I still deeply believe that the best organizing force in our lives is the free market, and that government generally screws things up when it involves itself in the affairs of the market. And while I believe that we are wealthy enough that people shouldn’t starve in our streets or go without basic medical care, I still believe that government charity comes with a very high spiritual pricetag and should be avoided if at all possible.
But while some of my beliefs have tempered, others have grown stronger. I’ve watched the ‘war on drugs’ turn into a frontal assault on our civil liberties, with unreasonable searches, racial profiling, civil forfeiture of assets even without charges being laid, etc. Millions of non-violent drug offenders locked up in overflowing jails. I consider these people to be political prisoners. Here in Canada, I watched our welfare programs expand to the point where they almost bankrupted the country, and yet things got worse. There were just as many poor as before, many of them were now on permanent assistance, and far from making them happier it seemed to make them angrier to the extent that people the Maritimes were resorting to riots and violence to get more from the government trough.