Welfare: How Government Never Creates Problems, but Can Always Solve Them

Governments are notorious for creating problems and blaming them on the free market. The Great Depression is perhaps the most successful of such scams in the history of the United States, only exceeded on a worldwide scale by the machinations of people like Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, and Adolf Hitler. Caused by government, the Great Depression not only gave the federal government cover for the “benevolent” accumulation of power, but also has successfully (but wrongly) convinced the predominance of Americans that government bureaucrats can take care of our neighbor from afar better than we can from across the street.

A greater crock has not been perpetuated on freedom-loving people since Lucifer enticed a third part of the hosts of heaven to rebel against our Heavenly Father’s plan in our pre-mortal existence.


The Constitution of the United States instructs that one of the purposes of the federal government is to promote (or provide) for the General Welfare. However, almost every case of welfare promoted or provided by the federal government today does not fit this category, because most federal government welfare is targeted to specific individuals or groups of people. Sadly, it seems, most people don’t care when the federal government oversteps its constitutional bounds, as long as it puts bread on their table and allows inane programs on their television sets. The Great Depression, followed by Franklin D. Roosevelt as America's supposed savior, have conditioned most Americans to think this way.

When it comes to welfare, humans are generally much more comfortable with the big, easy-to-see solution that government can perform. What is harder to see is how the money extorted from the citizens in the first place could have been used for the same specific welfare that government used it for, but that privately it could have been used a lot more efficiently, a lot more legally (Constitutionally), and much more cheaply--in most cases, for free.

The people who make up government are just people. A government official person is no more capable of noticing hardship as he or she is when he or she is simply a neighbor person, a family member person, or a friend person. In fact, the government official person is less likely to see hardship, because there are far fewer bureaucrat persons than there are neighbor persons, family member persons, and friend persons. Government is far more successful in providing welfare when it uses its bully pulpit to promote it—by stirring private individuals up in remembrance of their moral duty to their fellow man.

When government becomes the provider of first resort for our economic welfare, private individuals become conditioned to be less charitable. Government usurpation of the responsibility to provide welfare has the same effect as the parent who continually takes out the trash for the child rather than reminding the child that taking out the garbage is their duty.

The best question to ask of The New Deal and The Great Society is not whether they worked but, how much better or worse off we would have been had they never been tried. I think the answer to both questions is obvious enough.

Families have been destroyed by the irresponsibility of government welfare programs. Ingenuity has been decimated by the “benevolence” of government.  I think it not coincidental that these failures have actually contributed to the "success" of government goals in the areas of population and climate control.

Americans today are much like those who suffered under decades of Soviet Communism; in our case, no one is alive who can remember that people actually did a very good job of taking care of each other before government came along and—erroneously—thought it could do it better. Like Russian history, however, conventional American history has been rewritten by the socialist victors. This faux history has trained us to believe that (a) government never creates problems, and (b) government can always solve the problems that everyone else creates.

The most notorious example of such revisionist history is the wild supposition that Franklin D. Roosevelt solved the Great Depression, which was supposedly caused by greedy bankers and investors. This is a lie in several ways. First, the problem that FDR claimed to have solved was created by government mismanagement, including criminal mismanagement of the economy by the Federal Reserve. Second, prior to the Great Depression, contrary to current popular belief, private individuals and entities were mostly doing a great job of providing for the welfare of their neighbors (it was government’s fault for failing to punish the exceptions, and it still fails in this responsibility today)—the one big difference being that if someone was an able-bodied welfare thief, private entities didn’t provide for them. Third, although masked by the employment afforded by our entry into World War II, the Great Depression did not really come to an end until after FDR’s death and the death of his anti-business policies.