The Cruelty of the Welfare State

Everyone knows that the welfare state is the most wonderful thing in human history.  Finally, after the madness of the nineteenth century when the poor went unfed and the homeless unsheltered and children uncared-for, we have a system that cares.

Then there are the folks like us here at Road to the Middle Class that believe that the welfare state is the cruelest, most uncaring system in history.  This column by Jennifer Roback Morse, author of Smart Sex and Love and Economics, on the foster-care system suggests that we here are right and “everyone” is wrong.  Well of course we are.

The story concerns the death of a child in foster care.

Malachi Jermaine McBride-Roberts life was brief and difficult. He was born to a teenage mother living in foster care. After she ran away, he was sent to live with another foster family.

So this kid was a second-generation foster kid!  How could it happen?  Well, the short answer is that the system encourages it.  First of all it encourages birth parents to hang on to their parental rights.

Some birth parents consider the best of all worlds to be keeping parental rights, seeing the child once in a while, but letting someone else do the hands-on child-care work. Unfortunately, the system enables, rather than discourages this posture.

Why be surprised?  Isn’t that always how the welfare state works.  And, of course the local bureaucracy of social workers and attorneys live off the process, the process of managing children in foster care.  And the last thing they want to do is make a mistake.

Although California law requires infants to be “fast-tracked” for permanent placement, attorneys and judges don’t want their decisions overturned on appeal.

We know, of course that swift adoption is the best option for the children of children, particularly, as in this case, the child of a teenager with no possible means of support.

Adoption removes a child from the foster-care system. Adoptive parents become accountable for a child in a way that the bureaucratic government agency never can be. Adopted children do better than the children of single mothers. And even the average child of an average single mother has far better life chances than a child in foster care.

But the system doesn’t encourage that.  Instead it rewards bureaucrats and attorneys who dot their “I”s and cross their “T”s.  And of course the reality of adoption politics is that the government bureaucrats and the attorneys get the ear of the legislators.

What would be the best way to define a cruel and unjust society?  I’d say a society that allowed children to moulder away in foster care for their entire childhood.

And that’s what we have under the current cruel and unjust welfare state.