Any discussion of the demise of the welfare state must begin with some familiar words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain Unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

So wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1776. But liberty throughout history has been hard-won. The blood of millions has been shed in defense of a simple idea: man’s superiority to the state. Sometimes it doesn’t come to bloodshed or revolution. The threat posed by the state to man’s freedom is not always so clear. Sometimes it comes gradually, offered in tempting packages put forward by well-meaning people who believe with all their hearts that they know better how to improve the lot of all. All that is necessary is that we provide them with certain powers and that we sacrifice a few of our freedoms in order to provide a better and more equal world for all. A better world, of course, as viewed by them.

That world is called the welfare state.

The welfare state is much more than a set of entitlements and subsidies—and its impact reaches much further than the disadvantaged underclass it is designed to help. For, at its core, the welfare state emphasizes group responsibility over individual responsibility. After all, the purpose of bureaucracy is to make group instead of individual decisions. It also emphasizes decisions by elites, and it derides the importance of personal effort.

Collective Morality

The pre-eminence of a collective morality is evident in all of the welfare state’s manifestations, from its welfare programs’ bias against the family, to affirmative action’s group preferences, to the lax enforcement of punishment in the criminal justice system. This collective morality levies what I call “spiritual taxes” across the breadth of our society. Here are just a few examples:

  • A welfare mother who clipped food coupons and saved from her benefits accumulated $3,000 in savings toward sending her child to college. Welfare officials demanded that she return the money and face criminal prosecution.
  • New York City’s school policies require distribution of condoms to children, even if their parents have objected in writing.
  • The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that passing over higher scoring police promotion applicants in favor of lower scoring members of preferred gender or racial groups was permitted under the 1991 Civil Rights Act.
  • A Wisconsin man convicted more than thirty times for indecent exposure was turned down for a job as a park attendant. He sued on the grounds that he had never exposed himself in a park, only in libraries and laundromats. Wisconsin employment officials agreed there was “probable cause” that the flasher was the victim of illegal job discrimination.

These examples underscore the failure of the intellectual and moral foundations of the welfare state. The first intellectual leg of the four-legged stool supporting the welfare state is the idea that politicians in Washington can redistribute the wealth of the nation. The second leg is the idea that the important decisions in your life are better left to trained professionals—the “experts”—than to you and your family. The third leg is the idea that the work ethic is obsolete and old-fashioned. (If you don’t believe this is true, just look at the welfare system itself. There are only two rules for getting welfare in America: First, you may not work, and, second, you may not be married to anyone who does.) The fourth intellectual leg of the welfare state is moral relativism—the idea that there are no rights or wrongs, just different choices among alternative lifestyles.

An Alternative to the Welfare State

Conservatives must offer a vision of an alternative to the welfare state that is not just the opposite of the liberals’ vision—advocating small government where the liberals favor big government, individualism where they favor group entitlements, free markets where they favor regulation. They must engage in a profound and fundamental “revisioning” of the entire philosophy of American government.