Good Intentions: Bad Results

        Government makes most things worse.

        Lyndon Johnson launched a War on Poverty; Richard Nixon a War on Drugs.

        Both had good intentions, but their “wars” do more harm than good.

        I believed the War on Poverty would lift people out of poverty.

        At the time I was a naive Princeton student who believed my professors when they said, “It’s wrong that in this rich country, people are poor, so government should fix that. Targeted programs will lift people out of poverty.”

        Have they?

        We’ve spent more than $30 trillion so far. Some people were helped.

        When welfare began, the poverty rate dropped … dropped for seven years.

        But then progress stopped. Since the 1970s, the number of Americans living in poverty rose and fell, but the initial success hasn’t repeated.

        That’s because the handouts encourage people to become dependent. Welfare even discouraged marriage because a single parent gets a bigger check.

        As a result, welfare created something never seen before in America: a permanent “underclass” — generations raised without fathers, generations who stay poor and passive.

        It’s happened because people “are basically told, ‘you can’t take care of yourself’… It doesn’t encourage them to be ambitious,” says Yaron Brook, head of the Ayn Rand Institute, in my new video.

        “Once you start paying people not to work … they don’t expect to take responsibility for their own lives.”

        The War on Drugs also had unintended consequences.

        “When you launch a war on drugs … you create huge profits for cartels because there’s so much at stake,” says Brook.

        That led to more illegal drugs, and “massive corruption among police.”

        I ask, just “let everybody take whatever poison they want?”

        “Yes,” says Brook, echoing Ayn Rand, who said it is “the responsibility of the individual not to take the kind of things … which destroy his mind.”

        Brook and I disagree about how to protect the environment. It’s one area where I think we do need government. Our air and water are cleaner now because the Environmental Protection Agency set some rules. 

        Brook says we could have accomplished that without the EPA, if individuals filed lawsuits.

        “You pollute in some way that is clearly making me sick, we have legal redress to deal with that … But once you give it into the hands of bureaucrats … they want to regulate and control every activity that we’re engaged in.”

        He cites California’s wildfires and water shortages as an example of “government gone wild.” (That’s also the title of my new book.)

        Government has grown wildly. Even with DOGE cuts, it will still grow. It always does.

        The EPA once imposed useful rules, but regulators always want more. Today, EPA should stand for Enough Protection Already!

        “Northern California has plenty of water,” says Brook. “In the old days, they used to move massive amounts of water from the north to south. … These days, there’s still a lot of water available in the north that cannot be moved south because of some tiny little fish.”

        That’s the delta smelt, protected by the Endangered Species Act.

        “In the name of some little fish, they’re willing to shut down huge improvements to human life.”

        If it’s not the smelt, it’s an endangered plant. Power companies wanted to install fire-resistant metal poles.

        “They can’t widen fire lanes because there’s some plant that they had to uproot,”

        “They were shut down by environmentalists because of this crazy plant … (also) they can’t widen fire lanes. The consequence, of course, is the burning down of thousands of homes. … When you place the value of a plant above the value of human life, that leads to destruction of human life.”

        Brook’s point is not that people shouldn’t try to help the poor, the addicted and the planet; it’s that individuals do it better than government ever will.

        “All these government programs that regulate and control, they institutionalize mediocrity at best.”

        Every Tuesday at JohnStossel.com, Stossel posts a new video about the battle between government and freedom. He is the author of “Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media.”