Few figures in conservativism are more revered than Thomas Sowell. A free-market economist, social theorist and philosopher, Sowell’s work has spanned decades and influenced generations.
Sowell wrote a nationally syndicated column, authored dozens of books and dazzled television audiences time and time again with his common sense, anti-intellectual approach to political and cultural issues.
The following story is part of The Western Journal’s exclusive series “The Sowell Digest.” Each issue breaks down and summarizes Sowell’s influential works, applying them to current-day events.
Welfare doesn’t work. It never has. It never will.
But you can’t tell that to those who will pull on your heartstrings mercilessly, accusing you of selfishness, thievery, avarice, cruelty, privilege and prejudice. You can’t tell it to them in scholarly papers, you can’t tell it to them with evidence, and you certainly can’t tell it to the people who administer the welfare system, at least to their face.
Unless, of course, you’re economics legend Thomas Sowell, in which case you pretty much do what you want — and do it with elan and brilliance.
Sowell has written countless books and taught at more academic institutions than can be accurately summarized here. However, in 1980, he was a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and he was invited onto a series of programs called “Free to Choose” hosted by another free-market economics legend, the University of Chicago’s Milton Friedman.
Several guests were invited onto this edition of the program — the fourth in the series, titled “From Cradle to Grave,” about the welfare system and its successes and failures. One of the most contentious quotes was from Friedman: “Trying to do good with other people’s money simply has not worked; the welfare system is rotting away the very fabric of society.”
Was Thomas Sowell correct about the welfare state?
In addition to Friedman and Sowell were several other academics and administrators from all stripes of political and economic bearing — including James R. Dumpson, the chief administrator of New York City’s Human Resources Administration, who definitely did not believe the welfare system was a failure. Or, if it was, the failings lay elsewhere.
The result was a viral showdown between Dumpson and Sowell still just as intellectually toothsome and instructive as it was 44 years ago.
The clip in question began as Dumpson worked himself into a towering rage over Friedman’s characterization of the failures of the welfare state.
“As I hear Dr. Friedman’s statement, I was aroused to the point, as I said, of anger — because only half the story is told,” Dumpson said.
“We are really blaming, again, a victim, this time a system — the welfare system — for the failure of the other systems to operate in the interest of the people.”
Sowell had the opposite reaction to the Friedman statement in question.
“My anger was at what had been created in the city where I grew up, under very different conditions, during the period of capitalistic failure, during the period when there wasn’t this humanitarianism, and where it was possible for people to live better and to get out of that poverty,” he said.
“Now, I think someone who lived in the very same place where I live would find it much harder to escape from that poverty because of all of these things. Buildings were not abandoned like the buildings we saw [in footage shown earlier] when I lived in Harlem. The crime rate — they’re all things that are blamed upon the failures of the previous method [that] did not exist.
“I slept out on the fire escapes in Harlem,” he added. “I would defy anybody to do that in any part of New York City today.”
Another panelist — Robert Lampman, professor of economics at the Institute for Research on Poverty — also tried to get in on this. “Traditionally, in the United States, we have tried to avoid some of the welfare trap that was referred to by denying eligibility to people who are able-bodied and not aged and so on,” he said. “And we’ve therefore tried to close the welfare door to a good number of categories within the poor population.”
“Some, but not all, of what we might call welfare programs broadly, have this very strong take-back of benefits as you earn some more money. And that, I guess, is what I would like to single out as the principle problem …. but it is not common to any and all welfare programs one might think of,” he added.
Helen O’Bannon, the secretary of welfare for the state of Pennsylvania, contended that the issue came from the failure of other institutions. “When the family fails, when the private sector fails to create jobs at a fast enough rate, you find that people are unemployed and drift into needing help in order to exist,” she said.
“I see the welfare system not corrupting but, in fact, taking the remains and attempting to help people live in dignity,” he added.
The other guests were then asked if they would indeed describe welfare as “rotting away the fabric of society.”
Sowell would, and created a viral clip for the ages:
“What the welfare system and other kinds of governmental programs are doing is paying people to fail. Insofar as they fail, they receive the money; insofar as they succeed, even to a moderate extent, the money is taken away.”
— Thomas Sowell Quotes (@ThomasSowell) December 15, 2024
“What the welfare system and other kinds of government programs are doing is paying people to fail,” Sowell said. “Insofar as they fail, they receive the money. Insofar as they succeed, even to a moderate extent, the money is taken away.
“This is even extended into the school systems, where they will give money to schools with low scores; insofar as the school improves its education, the money is taken away.”
Thus, Sowell noted, “you are subsidizing people to fail in their own private lives and become more dependent upon the handouts.”
O’Bannon disagreed with that argument. “We have expectations built in today about the quality of life, the quality of jobs, the level of income for which one expects in return. Why? Because we look at the level around us that it takes us to have a fairly decent” standard of living, she said.
“No, that’s not why,” Sowell responded. “I may have all sorts of expectations. … The question is: ‘What can I do?’
“If someone is subsidizing my expectations, my expectations would be far higher. Insofar as the Center for Advanced Study was subsidizing my expectations a few years ago, I refused to work at UCLA for the normal full professor’s salary,” Sowell said.
“Why should I when I can get the same money for being at the Center for Advanced Study with no hours, no duties, and no classes?”
Later, O’Bannon went for the heartstrings: For single mothers, if Sowell “cut off welfare tomorrow: What will they do? What will be their immediate response? At what price to their small children and to their middle-aged children?” She argued that women could get jobs, but that they would need daycare through what she sarcastically referred to as “this insidious, corrupting program” that the federal government subsidized.
“It’s an interesting notion of trying to get people in a productive mode,” she acidly remarked.
Sowell: “It’s incredible the way you start the story in the middle, as if there’s a predestined amount of poverty, a predestined amount of unemployment, and that the welfare system is not, itself, in any way responsible for that.”
Then, she said, there is a predestined amount! There’s a bottom 20 percent of the population!
“Well, that’s always been true,” Sowell said. “It’s also true that 20 percent of the bottom population doesn’t have to be living on the government and ruled by the government.”
The fuller clip is even funnier, in its own sad way, if you have the time; the exchange takes place over about a 15-minute period, however, and isn’t as social-media friendly:
What nobody on this panel could have known, of course, is that they were speaking at the tail end of LBJ’s “Great Society,” or even of FDR’s “New Deal.” In federal elections that November, Ronald Reagan would defeat Jimmy Carter for president and the kind of government apparatchik like Dumpson and O’Bannon who wanted to defend the welfare state would have to become progressively less upfront about the language they used and more canny about constructing their arguments, since America stopped buying them.
Yet, even when the next Democrat was elected president and declared that “the era of big government is over” in one of his State of the Union addresses (albeit somewhat deep into his first term, after heavy midterm losses), it never really was. It was always about clawing back a little more of the language — and continuing the same designed-to-fail welfare programs they tried to imply were “over.” They’re even more out of control, in fact.
We’ve continued to cheerfully subsidize failure in the same way Sowell warned we were. That hasn’t changed. The language has. The shuffling of programs, the rebranding of initiatives, the new exigencies that the leftists claim need to be dealt with: those will morph, but the underlying philosophy remains.
Sowell’s words, meanwhile, don’t have to change. His message needs no rebrand. That speaks volumes about how truth needs no varnishing or embellishment. One can only hope that, with a new president-elect, this message is heeded and the permanent government welfare state finally starts being pruned.
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