Rev. John Nunes, president and CEO of Lutheran World Relief, and others (me included) attempt to explain how well-intended government programs developed during the “war on poverty” initiatives help to destroy the urban black family, community, and especially low-income black men. Nunes also explains from the New York Times Magazine how there is no evidence that any government program made any improvement in any urban area anywhere. As a matter of fact, the welfare programs of the 1960s made matters worse in the black community.
Pope John Paul II explains how the intervention of the state can be a detriment of both economic and civil freedom when it assumes too much responsibility beyond the capabilities that are proper to it. The intervention of the state, as Rev. Nunes explains, should give us pause because government is ill-equipped to deal with the holistic needs of the human person which are spiritual, emotional, and material. Human beings in need require more than material assistance via wealth redistribution or patriarchal programs that undermine the dignity of the poor. State intervention provides the platform for us to personally live in solidarity with the poor because we easily abdicate our responsibility to move toward the poor holistically in love.
In recent years the range of such intervention has vastly expanded, to the point of creating a new type of State, the so-called “Welfare State”. This has happened in some countries in order to respond better to many needs and demands, by remedying forms of poverty and deprivation unworthy of the human person. However, excesses and abuses, especially in recent years, have provoked very harsh criticisms of the Welfare State, dubbed the “Social Assistance State”. Malfunctions and defects in the Social Assistance State are the result of an inadequate understanding of the tasks proper to the State. Here again the principle of subsidiarity must be respected: a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to coordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good.
By intervening directly and depriving society of its responsibility, the Social Assistance State leads to a loss of human energies and an inordinate increase of public agencies, which are dominated more by bureaucratic ways of thinking than by concern for serving their clients, and which are accompanied by an enormous increase in spending. In fact, it would appear that needs are best understood and satisfied by people who are closest to them and who act as neighbours to those in need. It should be added that certain kinds of demands often call for a response which is not simply material but which is capable of perceiving the deeper human need. One thinks of the condition of refugees, immigrants, the elderly, the sick, and all those in circumstances which call for assistance, such as drug abusers: all these people can be helped effectively only by those who offer them genuine fraternal support, in addition to the necessary care.