More than anything else, this book refutes the frequent argument that government has to look after the indigent because private charity won't or doesn't know how. Olasky takes us through the full history of charity in this country, showing the ideas that shaped it at each step in it's devolution. Starting with the categorization of workhouses and almshouses, the frequency of woodyards and sewing rooms let charitable providers differentiate the truly needy from the truly lazy. He also points out that this only worked because the charities could be personal because they worked at a local level. Through most of the first century, the underlying principal was only to help those who would help themselves or at least not hurt themselves. Olasky shows how each extension of the leniency subtly took us step-by-step down the path that the early charity workers predicted.

Too much leniency in charity was considered one of the causes of pauperism and Cotton Mather admonished people that "you may not abuse your charity by misapplying it". Nonetheless, the trend moved toward "easy charity" (my term) and then came the cry for centralization, which only government had the power to implement. During the New Deal, some worked hard in the only jobs they could get with the WPA, CCC, et al, while others fit the WPA joke "How is a WPA worker like King Solomon?" ("He takes his pick and goes to bed.") But the final blow came during the Great Society, where asking too many questions of welfare recipients was found to be in violation of their constitutional rights and social workers became a special interest group of their own (driving out volunteers, implicitly and explicitly), and, for a variety of reasons, Black leaders and welfare advocates worked hard to maintain and take the shame out of the system. There were two other surges along the way that contributed to our current state. The utopian ideas of Horace Greeley in the mid-1800's advocated that everyone had a right to the earth's resources. The extreme deliverance of his ideas were seen for what the were and failed. The trend re-emerged with the Universalists in the late 1800's. At that time, there was complaining that the idealistic charity advocates wanted to "save the world" but couldn't see individuals in the process. The wave of Social Darwinism also came and went. The anecdote of Grace Capetillo is sobering. A welfare recipient, she worked hard to save more than the limits allowed and was hauled to court about it -- having $3,000 when $1,000 was the limit. Previous to this book, I believed that the fundamental problem was that our system takes away the concept of pride from the supposed beneficiaries. Now I believe it is that we have removed all reason from the entire system, both for the beneficiaries and for society as a whole. ( )