KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

THE DEPENDENCY AGENDA

LBJ AND THE GREAT CONUNDRUM

I’ll have them niggers voting Democratic for 200 years.

LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON, 1964

as reported in Ronald Kessler’s
Inside the White House

 

IN THE MID-1960s, the administration of President Lyndon Baines Johnson was in crisis. The Democrats enjoyed a crushing victory in 1964, but December of that year also saw the first march against the war in Vietnam, an unpopular military misadventure that was regarded as being mainly a Kennedy-Johnson project – which, of course, it was, though the sainted JFK has largely been exempted from blame for it. While Johnson’s Democratic Party was still largely dominated by fiercely anti-Communist hawks such as Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson – who had been a trenchant critic of what he considered the recklessly soft national-defense posture of the Eisenhower administration – it was increasingly the political home of the more radical elements of the left and those who sympathized with them. That the Democrats became the partisan home of the far left in the ’60s is illuminating in that it speaks to the political calculations that were made regarding the two thorniest issues of that decade: the confrontation with the Soviet Union abroad and the wrenching debate over African Americans’ rights at home.

The left could not make common cause with the Republican Party, even though the party had been – in both its legislative and executive branches – a champion of the political and economic rights of African Americans. Republicans had a tradition of consistent and energetic anti-Communism, which extended back to the pre – New Deal era, and a refreshed postwar commitment to free enterprise over state central planning. But the left found that it could make common cause with the Democratic Party under Johnson, which was curious. On top of prosecuting an unpopular war as president, Johnson – as Senate majority leader only a few years earlier – had rallied such Democratic worthies as Sen. Robert Byrd, a veteran of the Ku Klux Klan, and Sen. William Fulbright, a remorseless segregationist and signer of the Southern Manifesto, in undermining President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Civil Rights Act of 1957. That Johnson did so while successfully posing as a champion of civil rights is testament to his unique political genius, unmatched on the national scene until the presidency of Bill Clinton. Contrary to the popular myth, Democratic opposition to Eisenhower’s landmark civil-rights bill was hardly confined to the so-called Dixiecrats: Sen. John F. Kennedy voted against it, while his eventual Republican nemesis, Richard Nixon, had helped shepherd the bill through Congress. Johnson, for his part, not only opposed civil-rights legislation but also Republican-backed antilynching legislation – and had done so consistently.

While President Eisenhower was finally successful in getting the 1957 act through Congress – in spite of an unprecedented marathon 24-hour filibuster by Democratic Sen. Strom Thurmond (who regaled the Senate with, among other things, his grandmother’s biscuit recipe) – Sen. Johnson succeeded in watering down the key provisions of what he called in private the “nigger bill,” excising its enforcement clauses and thereby rendering the legislation almost entirely toothless.

Some years later, President Johnson, one of the canniest political operators in American history, could draw upon his own deep experience in legislative politics to calculate where this would all end. While racial animus was indeed a ghastly fact of life in American politics, particularly in Southern politics, he knew that there were stronger forces at play. As The New York Times put it, “He won his seat in Congress because, in 1937, central Texas was still deep in the Depression and he was able to demonstrate a connection to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was a god there.” Johnson’s constituents during his time in the House may have broadly shared his troglodytic racial outlook, but it was the New Deal, not the Lost Cause, that had brought Johnson to Washington. When he became a U.S. senator, the Times says, Johnson found himself representing a constituency that “made up for being less intensely segregationist than the rest of the South by being more intensely anti-Communist.”

Johnson found himself and his party in a position that would in the long term prove untenable. The elements of the Democratic Party that were strongly anti-Communist and in favor of civil rights – the faction represented by Sen. Jackson and others of that stripe – were sure to be repelled by the influx of leftist radicals that the antiwar movement was bringing into the fold. At the same time, those who were mainly motivated by the paramount domestic issue of fully integrating African Americans into national political and economic life had the recent experience of watching the Democrats, led by Johnson, do red-in-tooth-and-claw battle against the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and again against the Civil Rights Act of 1960. The latter act sought to remedy some of the defects of the earlier legislation and again found Sen. Johnson in the shadows leading Senate Democrats in a record-breaking continuous filibuster, this one lasting some 43 hours. In 1960, as in 1957, the disproportionately Republican congressional civil-rights caucus overcame Democratic parliamentary obstacles and sent landmark legislation to the desk of a Republican president.

All of this puts paid to the utterly dishonest account of the ’50s and ’60s cultivated by the Democratic Party today: that conservative Southern Democrats exited the party en masse to join up with a Republican Party that shared their primitive racist views. Conservative Southerners did in fact abandon the Democrats during and after the ’60s, but they did so to join a Republican Party whose legislators and president had achieved significant civil-rights progress over bitter Democratic opposition. Whatever their motive was, it was not for the sake of racism that they were abandoning the party of the Ku Klux Klan and Byrd (who held the ridiculous title of Exalted Cyclops in that ridiculous organization) for the party of Abraham Lincoln, Eisenhower, and the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 – or because of later landmark civil-rights legislation either. Even Johnson’s own keystone civil-right legislation, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, was much more strongly supported by congressional Republicans (75 percent voted for it) than by Democrats (just over half voted for it).

The question of what really happened with the political realignment of the ’60s and the subsequent decades, which saw great numbers of conservative Democrats leaving their party and joining the Republicans, is complex. The short version is that the left valued the toleration of revolutionary socialism abroad and the piecemeal implementation of the welfare state at home over the civil rights of African Americans, and it therefore made common cause with the segregationist Johnson Democrats over the antisegregationist Eisenhower Republicans, while many conservative Democrats – dedicated to opposing the welfare state at home and Communism abroad – followed the opposite course. The antiwar movement and the radicalization of the Democratic left certainly played a leading role in that drama, particularly among national security conservatives. But the most critical factor was President Johnson’s decision to try to maneuver his way out of the mess he found himself in by revisiting the political agenda that first brought him to Congress: the New Deal. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Democrats were on the verge of losing both the blacks and the rednecks, and Johnson had a plan to buy their loyalties with a program he called the Great Society.

THE NEW DEAL AND THE POLITICS OF CONTROL

The New Deal differed from the Great Society and most subsequent additions to the welfare state in important ways. It was adopted during a time of national (indeed, global) emergency. The Great Depression had led to an unprecedented decline in U.S. economic output and the sudden impoverishment of millions of Americans. (Many New Deal programs, notably the intentional reduction of U.S. agricultural production, would in fact make this problem worse, contrary to the economic theory under which Roosevelt and his advisers were operating.) In the background, the increasing possibility of another war in Europe informed a great deal of economic thinking at the time. This was true well before Adolf Hitler’s formal ascent to power, though it is notable that this happened during the same dark year – 1933 – that saw the first New Deal programs instituted. The European situation was a critical factor for two reasons. First, Roosevelt was far from alone in his belief that a United States in economic disarray was poorly positioned to be a credible military actor in an unstable world. The second and less well-understood fact is that a great many American intellectuals and politicians considered the totalitarian systems of the early 20th century to be successful to varying degrees: Roosevelt famously spoke well of Benito Mussolini (“that admirable Italian gentleman”), while leaders ranging from Henry Ford to David Lloyd George found things to admire about the Third Reich and its charismatic leader. Further, the rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union under Communism had made an impression in the West, much as the rapid industrialization of China under Communism at the turn of the century would make on similarly naive American intellectuals. For a great many U.S. leaders in the 1930s, it seemed apparent that fascism, Nazism, and Communism had all taken steps toward solving what they believed to be the pre-eminent problem of the day: the failure of capitalism and its necessary replacement with rational central-planning regimes. As the influential liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith noted, “Hitler also anticipated modern economic policy ... by recognizing that a rapid approach to full employment was only possible if it was combined with wage and price controls. That a nation oppressed by economic fear would respond to Hitler as Americans did to F.D.R. is not surprising.... In economics, it is a great thing not to understand what causes you to insist on the right course.” Galbraith, who became a senior official in Roosevelt’s Office of Price Administration during the war, was typical in his view of the necessity of centralizing government power to ameliorate the vagaries of capitalism.

The New Dealers may be partly exonerated for the subsequent sins of statism inasmuch as the ideas behind their program were largely untested; in the context of the 1930s, a centrally planned economy under the management of teams of highly specialized experts and selfless elites must have seemed a plausible alternative to the economic dislocations of the time. No similar exculpation can be offered to the architects of the Great Society, who were not operating during an international emergency and who had plentiful experience in which to root sensible expectations about the likely effects of their agenda. The social-welfare and wealth-transfer aspects of the Great Society were to play the role for middle-class whites that Johnson’s loveless embrace of civil rights played for blacks (and, inevitably, for other groups in subsequent years): a tool for building a permanent Democratic majority under which the interests of the state would be made identical to the interests of the Democratic Party – and state dependents made in effect dependents of the Democratic Party.

The New Deal, for all its failures, was not in the main a project dedicated to the cultivation of economic dependency for the purposes of political gain. Indeed, Roosevelt himself worried about creating long-term dependency. In his 1935 State of the Union speech – in which he proposed the creation of Social Security, federal unemployment benefits, and what would become Aid to Families with Dependent Children, he declared:

A large proportion of these unemployed and their dependents have been forced on the relief rolls. . . . The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole our relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical to the dictates of a sound policy. It is in violation of the traditions of America. Work must be found for able-bodied but destitute workers.

The federal government must and shall quit this business of relief.

Roosevelt’s solution was to have the government become an employer rather than a caregiver:

I am not willing that the vitality of our people be further sapped by the giving of cash, of market baskets, of a few hours of weekly work cutting grass, raking leaves, or picking up papers in the public parks. We must preserve not only the bodies of the unemployed from destitution but also their self-respect, their self-reliance, and courage and determination. . . . This group was the victim of a nationwide depression caused by conditions which were not local but national. The federal government is the only governmental agency with sufficient power and credit to meet this situation. We have assumed this task, and we shall not shrink from it in the future. It is a duty dictated by every intelligent consideration of national policy to ask you to make it possible for the United States to give employment to all of these 3½ million people now on relief, pending their absorption in a rising tide of private employment.

It is my thought that, with the exception of certain of the normal public building operations of the government, all emergency public works shall be united in a single new and greatly enlarged plan.

With the establishment of this new system, we can supersede the Federal Emergency Relief Administration with a coordinated authority which will be charged with the orderly liquidation of our present relief activities and the substitution of a national chart for the giving of work.

If it occurred to President Roosevelt that an American employed by the government on noneconomic terms is as much of a dependent as one receiving welfare payments, he does not ever seem to have spoken of the fact. But it is clear that – with some important exceptions such as the creation of Social Security – much of the New Deal was intended as a set of temporary emergency measures. The various initiatives of the Works Progress Administration, the Civil Works Administration, and the Rural Electrification Administration were intended to be closed-end projects. (Many inevitably achieved immortality, the Tennessee Valley Authority prominent among them.)

What was intended to be permanent about the New Deal was not the creation of government jobs for unemployed Americans but the extension of federal power over large swaths of the economy through the central-planning authority of the National Recovery Administration (unanimously ruled unconstitutional in 1935), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Glass-Steagall Act, the National Labor Relations Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, and the like. Fortunately, much of President Roosevelt’s statist overreach was blocked by the judiciary on solid constitutional grounds or was repealed piecemeal by Congress. Though Roosevelt went to his grave beloved, the imperial, Bismarckian style of his economic program was not destined to sit well with a nation fresh from vanquishing German authoritarianism. The Great Society attempted no such obvious domination of the economy. The New Deal was an iron first; the Great Society is a velvet glove.

Unlike the New Deal, the Great Society’s hallmark programs were not enacted in response to an emergency of any kind, much less one so deep and broad as the Great Depression. When Medicare was adopted, the elderly were the single wealthiest group of Americans, as they are today. The first Job Corps office opened when the unemployment rate was under 5 percent. The poverty rate had been declining steeply for years before the War on Poverty was announced. It was nearly halved before the Great Society began to be implemented in earnest, falling from nearly 19 percent in 1959 to less than 10 percent in 1968. After the first skirmishes in the War on Poverty, the rate began to climb: War was declared, and poverty won. Its upward march was not reversed until the Reagan administration.

This was by design. The War on Poverty was not designed to help the poor.

This was apparent from the beginning; indeed, it was the subject of hot controversy during the debate over the creation of Johnson’s marquee program, Medicare, as Charlotte Twight discusses in her meticulously documented “Medicare’s Origin: The Economics and Politics of Dependency.” Rep. Thomas B. Curtis, R-Mo., during the 1963 debate cited a University of Michigan study that found that 87 percent of households headed by people age 65 or older had a net worth at least equal to the average of people ages 45 – 65 and on average higher than those under 45. He asked the reasonable question of why the nation should offer subsidized medical benefits to 100 percent of those over 65 when only 15 percent of them had below-average levels of personal wealth. Why not “direct our attention to the problems of the 15 percent, rather than this compulsory program that would cover everybody?” Sen. Huey Long, D-La., class-conscious man that he was, demanded, “Why should we pay the medical bill of a man who has an income of $100,000 a year or a million dollars a year of income?” One wonders what Long would have made of the Great Society’s ugly grandchild, the 2009 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), which, if it stands, would offer federal health insurance subsidies to families making nearly $100,000 a year.

Long’s question was a fair one. The answer from Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Anthony J. Celebrezze will not surprise anybody who followed the 2009 debate over health care reform: We must, he said, treat health care “as a right and in a way which fully safeguards the dignity and independence of our older people.” The theme of dependence was hit upon constantly throughout the debate. Celebrezze spoke often and disparagingly of “dependence” and “dependency,” as did other Great Society architects. Others saw through that transparently false rhetoric. The proposal was “another step toward destroying the independence and self-reliance in America, which is the last best hope of individual freedom for all mankind,” declared the insightful if florid Sen. Karl Mundt, R-S.D., adding that the program would be “exceedingly difficult to discontinue without breaking faith with those who have to pay the tax.” For all the talk of protecting the “independence” of the elderly, the program, as Twight notes, had the opposite effect: “Medicare heralded enhancement of political job security by creating new and broad-based dependence on government.”

While Celebrezze argued that Medicare would enable elderly Americans to “avoid dependence,” it in fact achieved only a transfer of dependence: Old people who may have been dependent upon family members, charity, or local institutions would henceforth be dependent upon President Johnson’s health care program – and, presumably, “voting Democratic for the next 200 years.” Worse still, Americans who had previously been dependent only upon themselves and their own means would gradually be made dependent upon President Johnson’s health care program as payroll taxes diminished their ability to save for their own retirement needs and as the federal government used its political muscle to price private health care competitors out of the marketplace in favor of Medicare. It is worth noting that under the status quo ante, the poor were largely dependent upon family members, churches, and other institutions that had nothing to gain from their dependency. Under the Great Society and its later permutations, they became dependent upon a professional class whose highly paid members were themselves dependent upon the dependency of their clients. Dependency became a valuable commodity. At the apex of the dependency food chain are the highest-ranking members of a political machine ultimately dependent upon dependency and highly invested in its spread.

So intent was the Johnson administration on cultivating the dependency of all retirees – rather than the poor elderly alone – that Secretary Celebrezze and his department carried out what Sen. Mundt described as a program of “deliberate sabotage” against legislation passed in 1960 to establish a need-based program of medical assistance for the elderly. As Twight reports, Mundt complained that public meetings were closed to supporters of the 1960 legislation while the Johnson administration was deploying “public servants, paid with public funds, traveling at public expense, charged with administering a federal law, going about the country trying to destroy public confidence in a law enacted by this Congress.” For this, they must have had their inspiration in President Roosevelt’s strategy in creating Social Security: Once the middle class is paying into a program, it develops a sense of – what shall we call it? – entitlement to future benefits. “With those taxes in there,” Roosevelt said, “no damn politician can ever scrap my Social Security program.” So far, history has proved him correct.

A PROGRAM FOR THE POOR IS A POOR PROGRAM

Hooking the poor on government benefits is child’s play. Hooking the middle class is a little more difficult, though well within the powers of such masterly politicians as Roosevelt and Johnson. But the really neat trick is hooking the rich.

It is a truism among self-styled social reformers that “a program for the poor is a poor program,” and there is no paucity of examples to illustrate that fact. Ronald Reagan denounced “welfare queens” in the 1980s, and by the 1990s, Bill Clinton was reluctantly signing legislation to dethrone them. But the main middle-class entitlements – Medicare and Social Security – are untouchable, to say nothing of specialized programs such as the federal Export-Import Bank and virtually the entire Department of Agriculture, which exist for the sole purpose of transferring wealth to the wealthy. The growth of the middle-class entitlement state and the expansion of corporate welfare are well-understood and widely publicized phenomena. Less well understood is the government’s intentional co-opting of the private social-services sector of the economy, a process that began in the early 1960s and one upon which we again find the grimy fingerprints of Lyndon Johnson.

In the early 1960s the budding profession of social work was confronted with a problem. The social-work programs were turning out graduates, but there were few jobs for them and little money in those. Rather than see their members go to work as minor functionaries in the government’s welfare bureaucracies, the social workers’ professional organizations hit upon a new strategy: Social workers would not go to work for the federal government, but the federal government would nonetheless pay them to be social workers by offering them contracts to provide social services. This provided social workers with the main benefits of government employment – security, lack of accountability or meaningful oversight – with few if any of its burdens and a chance at much higher incomes than those typically enjoyed by government workers. As Roger and Nancy Lohmann put it in Social Administration, this was “part of an ongoing struggle by the social work profession to legitimize itself and find an institutional and resource base in modern industrial society.”

The U.S. government in 1962 and 1967 amended key pieces of social-welfare legislation to allow for the contracting out of welfare services, and it did so, according to Philip Popple and Leslie Leighninger in Social Services, Social Welfare, and American Society, guided by “social workers and other experts who contended that providing intensive social services would rehabilitate and bring” – can you guess what? – “financial independence to the poor.”

The outcome was precisely the opposite, as the Lohm-anns document. “Rather than leading to decreases in the welfare rolls as promised, it immediately preceded enormous increases in public welfare eligibility during the following decade.” “Moreover, in many cases the rhetoric and actions of social workers were deliberately provoking such increases.... [G]radually expanding the American welfare state became the proximate goal of the social work profession, and public purchases of services became an important means for pursuing that end.” Under the Kennedy administration, that was a simple matter of intra-governmental exchanges. The Johnson administration had bigger ideas: “The 1962 amendments made it possible for departments of public welfare to purchase specified social services for eligible clients from other public agencies. The 1967 amendments expanded this to nonprofit and proprietary agencies in cases where state agency staff were not available to provide the needed services.” Here, “proprietary” means “for-profit.” The effects were once again entirely predictable: an explosion in social-welfare spending and in welfare-dependency rolls. Meanwhile, business was booming in the medical-entitlement racket: “[By 1972] medical payments through Medicare and Medicaid – wherein service contracting had been explicitly rejected as an abridgment of the ‘autonomy’ of the medical profession – grew in excess of $50 billion, more than twenty-five times the level of social service spending.”

By the turn of the century, there were some 66,000 government-supported social-service agencies in the United States, most of them private and many of them for-profit. Private, voluntary, and even religious groups found themselves in whole or in part dependent upon government contracts; as a result, their organizations changed in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, and their missions were distorted as they chose to offer a menu of services that matched the availability of government funds. The final effect was the wholesale displacement of private philanthropy by government contracting, which has the double result of making government dependents of both welfare recipients and the workers at the agencies that provide contracted services to them. This has much deeper and even more worrisome consequences than those of having merely the poor hooked on welfare checks: A wide swath of the professional middle class has been put in the same position as the nation’s welfare recipients. It will surprise nobody that the National Association of Social Workers quickly developed a sophisticated political operation (called PACE); that it operates a political-action committee; that it created a lobbying arm; that it endorsed both Barack Obama and his signature health care program; that it lists among its top priorities ensuring high levels of funding for Social Security and Medicare; that social workers as a profession are overwhelmingly Democrats; that their organizations overwhelmingly endorse Democratic candidates and support them financially; and that they consistently push the Democratic Party into an ever more statist direction. They may be expected, as President Johnson might have put it, to be backing Democrats for the next 200 years.

Being a government dependent can pay very well. Planned Parenthood, an organization that enjoys very generous contracts from the government, pays its regional office directors salaries averaging $158,000; its national president is compensated in excess of $400,000 a year. The average salary for a nonprofit executive in the United States runs $200,000 a year, or about four times the average family income, with salaries for executives in larger organizations (budgets of more than $50 million a year) running on average from $240,000 to $300,000. Executives of health care nonprofits routinely see compensation packages well into the millions of dollars per year. If a Cadillac owner on food stamps is a welfare queen, these are welfare emperors.

President Johnson did not concoct these innovations out of thin air. In 1909 another great progressive president, Theodore Roosevelt, held the first major presidential summit on child poverty. You will not be surprised to learn that it was called the White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children, and its result was the creation of the federal Children’s Bureau. There was some slow and incremental growth in the welfare state in subsequent years but nothing to match what came after President Johnson launched his program to largely co-opt private charity in the 1960s. Once that particular floodgate was open, there was nothing that could hold the waters back.

Another key innovation of the Johnson years was to broaden the definition of who is eligible for social services that are government funded but privately administered. Previously, standards were applied to the individual – a person of X age making Y income with Z assets – but afterward, eligibility was derived from membership in a group. Relatively affluent people became eligible for social services because they lived in relatively poor neighborhoods. Relatively well-off older people became eligible for assistance because they were members of communities with high rates of poverty among the elderly. Children of middle-class parents became eligible for benefits because they attended schools that were mostly poor. Organizations such as the United Way, which had long had a specific policy against the acceptance of government money, soon changed their minds, and, inevitably, the portfolio of social-services “investments” was widened from providing relief to the poor and the sick to programs that were concentrated on more nebulous goals such as “human development” and enhancing the “general quality of life.” Thus government welfare payments became mostly separated from government welfare programs, eligibility for anti-poverty benefits severed from the condition of being poor, and the War on Poverty sundered from efforts to reduce poverty. Unsurprisingly, within a decade, only one-fifth of those being served by these organizations were poor.

By the 1980s the overwhelming majority of funding for most privately administered social services came from government sources. In some fields, such as drug-addiction treatment and services for the elderly, nearly all the money now comes from government sources – and that excludes income from “fees” that are in fact simply yet more government money in the form of Medicare and Medicaid payments. Unsurprisingly, the for-profit sector is the fastest-growing element in social services and by many estimates today is larger than the nonprofit sector. These are not tiny firms: As a Mathematica Policy Research paper, “Privatization of Welfare Services: A Review of the Literature,” points out, Lockheed Martin was a major provider of services under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program until the division that handled such contracting was sold off to American Computer Services (ACS). The depth of the firm’s involvement in the welfare state is breathtaking: “ACS now administers the entire TANF program in Palm Beach County, Florida,” Mathematica reports. “It also administers Florida’s welfare reform program, Work and Gain Economic Self-Sufficiency (WAGES) program in 13 regions and employment services in 12 workforce board regions in Texas. It currently holds 26 TANF contracts worth a possible $108 million.”

21ST-CENTURY LEVIATHAN

Before the Great Society, the share of household income derived from federal payments was vanishingly small – some modest Social Security payments to the relatively few elderly who lived long enough to receive very many of them and a very small array of welfare payments. By 1998 more than one-third of U.S. households were receiving direct entitlement payments; by 2006 it was 44.5 percent, and by 2009 it was 48.5 percent. If current trends continue, that figure will be well more than half in only a few years. Before the Great Society, less than 8 percent of household income came from federal payments; today it is nearly 18 percent. As late as 1979, the majority of federal transfer payments went to the poor; today 64 percent goes to the middle and upper classes, with the most growth at the higher end of the income spectrum. If the 2009 health care legislation stands, that would change even more rapidly. In a country of more than 300 million, there are fewer than 25,000 households that will not be eligible for subsidies under PPACA – and most of the adults in those households are either already eligible for Medicare and Social Security or on the cusp of it. We are all welfare queens now, or at least we soon will be.

Beginning as an emergency program for the poor during the Great Depression, federal welfare programs quickly grew into a tool for building political constituencies. Because the United States experienced an unprecedented economic boom from the end of World War II to the turn of the century, there simply were not enough poor to go around to meet the needs of those who would benefit from the cultivation of government dependency. It became necessary then to use various tools – changing the definition of poor, substituting group eligibility requirements for individual eligibility requirements, contracting out social services while expanding the mission of social-services agencies, expanding from poverty into health care, etc. – to deepen the pool of potential government dependents. On top of this large pool of primary dependents is the larger, wealthier, and more politically influential class of secondary dependents: those who make their living by acting as intermediaries between federal tax collectors and welfare-dependent tax consumers. It is this second class that is the real product of and constituency for the dependency agenda.

There is one fact that becomes incandescently apparent when studying the origins of the modern welfare state: It is nearly impossible to overestimate the cynicism of Lyndon Baines Johnson. The universal welfare state was only one-half of what President Johnson called his Great Society. The other half was ameliorating the gross injustice inflicted on African Americans up through the 1960s. The latter aspect of the Great Society was a moral imperative, though there is a great deal of debate about whether the particular legislative and constitutional remedies enacted throughout the 1960s and after were the best expression of that mandate, and men of impeccable intentions opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and similar legislation, largely out of concern (subsequently confirmed) that the government would abuse the vast new powers with which it was invested. Sen. Barry Goldwater was one such critic, Gov. Reagan was another; Sen. Johnson was not. There is no shortage of anecdotal evidence that the civil-rights wing of the Great Society was an exercise in Johnsonian self-aggrandizement, but perhaps the most telling was his answer to an aide who asked him why he appointed Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court instead of a less controversial African-American candidate. “Son,” Johnson declared, “when I appoint a nigger to the court, I want everyone to know he’s a nigger.” Robert Caro’s magisterial Johnson biography contains another illuminating exchange between Johnson and a colleague, with the president telling his fellow Democrat, “These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days, and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before: the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this – we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.” It is necessary to bear this in mind not in order to conclude that Lyndon Johnson was at best a hypocrite and at worst a moral monster – though he was – but to conclude that the Great Society was built for some other purpose than to help those whom Johnson et al. purported to help. There is no doubt that many of the architects of the Great Society were idealistic progressives, but each and every one of them would have had to have been blind not to have seen what they were building and for whom they were building it – a Faustian bargain at best.

It is characteristic of the progressive project that moral necessities are thoroughly blended with political opportunism and statist arrogation. No American – left, right, or center – proposes to let elderly people starve in the streets, to let the poor die of easily preventable ailments, to let poor children go uneducated, to let the disabled founder in misery. The choice before us, now as always, is not between socialism and social Darwinism, between Charles Dickens and Ayn Rand. Rather, we face difficult and sometimes painful questions about how to provide for those who cannot provide for themselves – how, how much, for whom, when, where, and on what grounds. There is abundant evidence that these decisions are best made by applying the principle of subsidiarity, meaning that families first, then neighborhood organizations, and then municipalities, counties, states, etc., attempt to address problems on their own, applying local knowledge close to home rather than relying first and reflexively on the federal Leviathan. There are many reasons to do this, a main one being that such wealth transfers automatically create their own political constituencies, both among recipients and among administrators. Those constituencies are more easily counteracted, contained, and policed at the local level. At the federal level, they become nearly insurmountable obstacles to reform and sources of financial improbity – which is precisely why today’s Democrats prefer Washington-based programs.

We have a great deal of evidence that massive federal entitlement programs do not work. Health outcomes for Medicaid patients are in fact worse than for those who have no health insurance at all. Medicare and Social Security have not reduced poverty among seniors; Head Start, TANF, AFDC, and the like have not reduced poverty among children. These programs are fiscal nightmares, to be sure: Our current unfunded liabilities under Social Security and Medicare amount to more than all the money in the world, literally – more than every bill and coin in every currency around the world, along with all bank-account deposits, CDs, and money-market funds. But the fiscal nightmare, while terrifying, is not as terrifying as the moral nightmare behind it. Millions of Americans are being exploited for the benefit of the permanent political class. In the name of a War on Poverty, we have needlessly impoverished many millions of Americans. We have needlessly ruined many millions of lives. The dependency agenda must be reversed and the federal welfare state dissolved not only because we cannot afford it but because failing to do so ensures that our politics will remain warped by perverse incentives, by unconstitutional seizures of power, and by what amounts to the looting of the fisc by the parasitic political class. That is what is at stake – not merely the national ledger sheet.

And these many decades later, what lesson have we learned? I can only imagine how Barack Obama could possibly have explained to his aides that his party intended to create a new health insurance entitlement program that would provide subsidies not only to the poor but to more than 80 percent of all U.S. households: “I’m going to have those middle-class suburbanites voting Democratic for the next 200 years.”