Welfare and the “Road to Serfdom” Stephen Baskerville, Ph.D.

As conservatives congratulate themselves on ten years of welfare reform, they need to start looking at the larger picture and all that was left undone. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) addressed only one program in the welfare behemoth, Aid to Families with Dependent Children. The myriad other programs that constitute the welfare state remain untouched. Figures recently reported by the National Center for Health Statistics showing out-of-wedlock births at a record high confirm that, in social terms, we have barely scratched the surface.

Moreover, it is not called the welfare “state” for nothing. For unnoticed by reformers has been a startling development that is far more serious than even the devastating economic effects. This is the quiet metamorphosis of welfare from a simple system of public assistance into nothing less than a miniature penal apparatus, replete with its own system of courts, prosecutors, police, and jails: juvenile and “family” courts, “matrimonial” lawyers, child protective services, domestic violence units, child support enforcement agents, and more. This kafkaesque machinery operates by its own rules, largely outside the constitutional order, and represents the fulfillment of Friedrich von Hayek’s prophecy that socialism would eventually take us down a “road to serfdom.”

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