A recent book by Duquesne University economics professor Antony Davies and longtime scholarly partner James R. Harrigan, managing director of the University of Arizona’s Freedom Center, adeptly puts in its place “beneficent” government.
“Cooperation & Coercion,” published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, indeed is, as the promotional blurb puts it, “An eye-opening guide to how society and government function … and how they should function.”
A classic example comes on pages 106 through 108 in which the authors detail a ridiculously expansive list of programs connected to the “War on Poverty.”
Davies and Harrigan list nearly two full pages of these programs that cost taxpayers an estimated $22 trillion (in inflation-adjusted dollars), which doesn’t even include Social Security and Medicare spending.
“So that’s the war on poverty in a large, painful nutshell,” they write. “And for all the money, time and effort, we have seen no significant change in the United States poverty rate for more than 45 years.”
Or, they note wryly, employing a classic Ronald Reagan quote: “My friends, some years ago, the federal government declared war on poverty, and poverty won.”
But, as the authors add, why do we persist in rehashing and expanding these same tried and failed “solutions”?
“There are few answers,” Davies and Harrigan write. “The most charitable among them is that we are really trying to end poverty but even if that goal is ultimately achievable, we are doing what we can to hold (poverty) at bay.”
But the reality is that the answer lies between the lines of that nearly two-page list of “anti-poverty” programs that keep poverty treading water.
“We have developed both a poverty industry and a poverty bureaucracy since 1964, and both of them seek to perpetuate themselves,” the authors say.
“Progressives,” of course, will call this a conservative oversimplification if not outright “hate speech.”
Which is the furthest thing from reality, as Davies and Harrigan state the obvious (at least to those with even a modicum of critical thinking skills).
“We continue down the same unsuccessful path because, now that it has been established, many people’s livelihoods depend on its continued existence,” the authors note. “And those people have a strong incentive to ensure that any meaningful ‘reforms’ involve increased funding.”
And this incentive has only been increased in the post-coronavirus pandemic environment. Never mind the rapidly recovering economy in many states and nationally, government keeps cranking out dollars to fund its dependence machine.
But as Davies and Harrigan bluntly note in their dissertation on the exponential fallacies of the “War on Poverty”:
“(I)f the government had simply divided the $22 trillion among all the poor people living in the United States since 1964, each person would have received more than $10,000 per year.
“This would have reduced the poverty rate to nearly zero,” they argue.
In the introduction to their book, Davies and Harrigan quote Revolutionary Era patriot pamphleteer Thomas Paine. In part, Paine reminded:
“Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without a government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer (emphasis added).”
The reiteration of such a fundamental truism and its accompanying sound economics tutorial is a welcome one from Davies and Harrigan. But sadly, and as per usual, it will go unheeded by those who govern us – and at every level.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
