BOTH SOCIAL SECURITY AND UNEMPLOYMENT COMPENSATION WERE proposed in large part on the argument of Franklin D. Roosevelt and others in 1935 that they would enable the government to “quit this business of relief.”

Though all the social “insurance” programs he asked for were enacted, together with a score of others, and though all of these supplementary or “substitute” programs have been constantly enlarged, direct relief, instead of showing any tendency to diminish, has increased beyond anything dreamed of in 1935.

SINCE ANCIENT TIMES IT HAS BEEN ASSUMED NOT ONLY THAT THE government has a duty to do something for the poor, but that one of the things it can and should do is to “provide jobs.” A declared objective, in fact, even of the Elizabethan Poor Law was the “setting of the poor to work.” Today many are insisting that the government has both the ability and the duty to become “the employer of last resort,” or to “guarantee everybody a job.”

These views rest on some serious misconceptions.

FROM TIME IMMEMORIAL THERE HAVE BEEN REFORMERS WHO DEmanded that wealth and income should be “divided equally”—or at least divided with less glaring inequalities than the reformers saw around them.

ANY ATTEMPT TO EQUALIZE WEALTH OR INCOME BY FORCED REDISTRIbution must only tend to destroy wealth and income. Historically the best the would-be equalizers have ever succeeded in doing is to equalize downward. This has even been caustically described as their intention. “Your levellers,” said Samuel Johnson in the mid-eighteenth century, “wish to level down as far as themselves; but they cannot bear levelling up to themselves.” And in our own day we find even an eminent liberal like the late Mr.

FOR MORE THAN A CENTURY THE ECONOMIC THINKING NOT ONLY OF the public but of the majority of economists has been dominated by a myth—the myth that labor unions have been on the whole a highly beneficent institution, and have raised the level of real wages far above what it would have been without union pressure. Many even talk as if the unions had been chiefly responsible for whatever gains labor has made.

FROM THE BEGINNING OF HISTORY SINCERE REFORMERS AS WELL AS demagogues have sought to abolish or at least to alleviate poverty through state action. In most cases their proposed remedies have only served to make the problem worse.

WE COME NOW TO THE MOST WIDESPREAD OF ALL FALSE REMEDIES FOR poverty—outright socialism.

AT THE BEGINNING OF CHAPTER III OF HIS History of England, Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote:

THROUGHOUT HISTORY, UNTIL ABOUT THE MIDDLE OF THE EIGHTEENTH century, mass poverty was nearly everywhere the normal condition of man. Then capital accumulation and a series of major inventions ushered in the Industrial Revolution. In spite of occasional setbacks, economic progress became accelerative. Today, in the United States, in Canada, in nearly all of Europe, in Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, mass poverty has been practically eliminated. It has either been conquered or is in process of being conquered by a progressive capitalism.

SHOULD THE GOVERNMENT TAKE POSITIVE MEASURES IN THE EFFORT to eliminate or alleviate poverty? If so, what should these measures be?

This is the most troublesome problem that the student of poverty is called upon to solve.