So what business do I have saying such a thing? My mom told me that one birthday we had enough welfare money to make asada at the park. Asada. Am I saying I shouldn’t have had asada? No, I should have. But who wants the government to be the one to decide whether your son gets asada at his birthday party?
Welfare is supposed to be about families like mine. My dad was an alcoholic and not safe. My 25-year-old mom didn’t have papers. She had four boys five and younger. She was scared and vulnerable. She didn’t know what to do; she just knew she couldn’t stay with my dad.
I think people looking at a situation like mine wonder, Who will look out for people like my family? It’s a noble question, one that needs to be asked because it is both inescapable and right to ask it. As Adam Smith noted in his Theory of Moral Sentiments: “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others.”
I don’t remember any of the early marital turmoil, which occurred mainly when I was six months old. And to be honest, I liked my upbringing. I didn’t know I was supposed to have a dad or that the government paid for our food or that it wasn’t normal to have Tio Rogelio, Tia Celia, Papa, Maria, Juanito, or whoever else happened to live with us living with us. I’m sure my mom gets some relief knowing I liked my upbringing, but it doesn’t change the fact that she didn’t like it. And I mean, isn’t it obvious why? Do you want school lunches or back-to-school shopping or sending your kid to college to depend on Uncle Sam? And even if he does pay for all of it, you don’t get to escape that feeling, that feeling of powerlessness, lack of control, of sitting face-to-face with your inability to provide—it’s undignified. No, it’s humiliating.
So what do I mean when I say I shouldn’t’ve been on welfare? Especially since my story basically screams, “SOMEONE PLEASE HELP US!” Well, I don’t mean we didn’t qualify. Trust me, we did. I mean Big Government shouldn’t have decided it was the entity in society most responsible for, or capable of, helping the poor. For so many, this idea is genuinely puzzling. The thinking goes a little something like this. One: Poor people need help. Two: Only the government is capable of helping everyone who needs help. Three: Therefore, it is the government’s responsibility to help poor people. Checks out right? I guess the only problem is the government is horrible at helping poor people and it doesn’t actually help everyone who needs help, which I thought was kind of the whole point.
Let’s think about welfare for a moment. If you’re going to receive welfare, you need to qualify. So how does Uncle Sam know you need help? Well, he asks some questions. How much money do you make? Who’s in your household? How many dependents do you have? Is Dad out of the picture? And so on and so on. They aren’t bad questions. But Big Government can’t ever know your situation like your neighbor can. Let me put it this way: If you find out a single mother’s four children all sleep in the same bed or that they have felt despair watching the cockroaches scurry around them, would you think they need help? Uncle Sam doesn’t know about that. He has no way of knowing about that. There is no box to check about cockroaches and cluttered beds. And if there was, would Tio Sam slice your benefits in half because nine cockroaches squatted near the toilet last week instead of 10, or your four boys moved from a queen-size bed to a king-size bed? And if you put every manifestation of our impoverishment on your survey, how often would you need my mom walking to and then taking the bus to your office to tell you? And what if she can’t make it to the office to renew her aid? Look at that, even with Big Government my mom slipped through the cracks.
Listen: Stuff happens. People who need help not getting help happens. When someone slips through the safety net, do you want it to end up being the government’s or the community’s responsibility? The government office is open 8–5, Monday through Friday, excluding holidays, of course. What happens if you’re hungry on the weekend or at night or, God forbid, on Labor Day? What happens if someone hacks your grandma’s food stamps and she doesn’t speak English, and after waiting in line at a government office for a couple hours with her and translating for her, you need to wait up to 10 business days for her benefits to return? I think she’s going to be pretty hungry after 10 business days.
So what do people do? Well, it’s already the case that people really slipping through the cracks don’t go to the government but to their community. Think about it, when you ask your neighbor for help, do they get back to you in 10 business days? When you go to your local church, do they offer you half as much help as they otherwise would have because you make $15.15 an hour instead of $14.95? Does your community celebrate you or penalize you for getting married?
So what am I actually arguing? Two things. First, this idea that Big Government welfare is the only compassionate and effective system for helping poor people is nonsense. Second, civil society is a more compassionate and effective path forward. I know because, again, I experienced it firsthand.
When I was growing up, my family wasn’t just on CalFresh, CalWorks, and MediCal; we received immense civic help. My family took our first road trip because our neighbor’s brother Paul spent some of the money from his son’s untimely passing to bless us. My first time in nature was at a Salvation Army camp, nearly fully paid for by others. My church did a school drive every year during which I would get a backpack, pens, papers, binders, etc. My middle school band director, Deborah Carnahan, encouraged me in music to the extent that I received tens of thousands of dollars in music scholarship funds for college and grad school. Most of my professional attire? Gifts. The first car I purchased? Deeply discounted from a friend. Tuition for undergrad? Mom’s company gave a scholarship. Honors college gave a scholarship. Countless donors gave scholarships. I could go on. But the bottom line is this: The government doesn’t and can’t know what you need when you’re poor, but your neighbor does.
Now I know so many have a million objections. But Arthur, how do you go to your neighbor when they are poor, too? But Arthur, not every community has strong civic institutions. But Arthur, none of this means we have to get rid of welfare, just that there is more welfare in other places. But Arthur, you’re smart, what about everyone else? BUT ARTHUR, how can you say all this after having received aid?
First, whose fault are these problems? Aren’t they to a large extent the government’s? Didn’t central government crowd out civil society welfare, disincentivize wealth creation, and incentivize dependency? Also, even though my family barely had what we needed at times, we still helped others. If we could help others through the fluctuating ups and downs of poverty, many others can, too. Do you think the government’s inherent one-size-fits-all approach notices who’s smart and who’s not as smart? No. Teachers do. Parents do. Church leaders do. YOU DO. So if you care so much about this hypothetical struggling student, why don’t YOU do something about it? Or perhaps you don’t really care as much as you think you do.
If the government really wants to help impoverished communities, it would get out of their way. It would not make the business of business so hard. It would not give hand-outs in a way that discourages wealth creation. It would not think it knows what every unique community needs and how to help it. It would know its role. But it doesn’t. Because the government and politicians have a savior complex. How about you save us by not making it so hard for us to save ourselves?
And by the way, we didn’t escape poverty because of welfare, but in spite of it. My family’s setup was the most prone to perpetual dependency because when you qualify for welfare from a domestic-violence background, many of the stipulations are removed and even fewer questions are asked. There was never a good time to get off welfare, especially not for us. But when I asked my mom why she took a leap of faith off the benefits cliff, she said, “Grandpa’s mom got sick and he wanted to send money so I had to come up with more money to compensate for that. I also felt I needed to start working to get some type of experience on my thin resume. I had never worked before except as a volunteer for five years at the church.” In other words, she had to make more money and could feel long-term dependence breathing down her neck.
So many of the people who want to help have a savior complex and really just patronize the poor. They view them as helpless, without the power of self-determination. The poor cannot be protagonists in their own story. They are not subjects in a narrative they are crafting. They become objects of pity where good intentions matter more than good results; where the poor are more about the “compassionate” soothing their consciences than about actually helping a family up and out.
I sit here today and write because my family was helped up and out by neighbors who truly cared. We left poverty behind. All the brothers graduated from college. Two engineers, one mathematician, and a very, very green theologian. And my mom? She’s an investor, an entrepreneur, an educator, and a hero. Even when we didn’t have anything to give, she opened our home to those in need. She never told us we couldn’t do something. She never said we had to be a certain thing. She always just believed in us.
My mom works at a Fortune 500 company now. She bought a home in Southern California in 2017 without a co-signer. She does not have to pay for my grad school—thank you, generous donor—but I know that if she did, a piece of her soul would be re-dignified knowing she took back from Uncle Sam what she had unwillingly relinquished to him all those years ago.
This article doesn’t have a new takeaway. I don’t think I just reinvented the wheel. But you didn’t know my story. And I bet you didn’t expect someone whose birthday party asada, school lunch, AP tests, and college tuition were subsidized by Big Ole Uncle Sam to tell you that the truly compassionate future is the one where Tio Sam steps aside to let families and communities make their own path to meet their own needs. But here we are.
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