In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State by Charles Murray

From the Publisher

Charles Murray proposed a plan to eliminate all welfare transfer programs at the federal, state, and local levels, and substitute a $10,000 annual cash grant to everyone age 21 or older. Sound too good to be true? The book describes the financial feasibility of the plan and its effects on retirement, health care, poverty, marriage and family, work effort, vocations, neighborhoods, and civil society. In Our Hands will help us to sweep out the intellectual cobwebs and come to grips with a truth that somehow has been ignored in all the hand-wringing about budget deficits and shortages of money: It is absurd that the government can spend so much money on poverty, health care, and retirement, and accomplish so little. While an obvious audience will be people on the right, libertarian and conservative, In Our Hands will also appeal to those on the left who are serious about getting more resources into the hands of the poor. It will also challenge the left to confront its own rhetoric about the disadvantaged. If it is not a good idea to give real resources and responsibility to them, why not?

Publishers Weekly

Libertarian Murray's Losing Ground laid the groundwork for controversial welfare reform proposals. His latest volume continues in the same vein, positing that government support has exacerbated dysfunctional underclass behavior, and offering a compromise to social democrats who call starve-the-beast policies cruel. In "The Plan," all the money currently used in transfer programs Murray doesn't deem universal (Social Security, agricultural subsidies, corporate welfare, as opposed to national defense, clean air, etc.) would be redirected into a new program that gives each citizen an annual $10,000 cash grant, beginning at age 21. The plan would slice one Gordian knot: everyone would be required to buy health insurance, insurers would have to treat the entire population as a single pool and changes in tort and licensing laws would enable low-cost clinics for minor problems. But Murray's purposes are larger: to enable the search for a vocation by making it easier to change jobs; to encourage marriage among low-income people; and to move social welfare support from bureaucracies back to Tocquevillian civil society-a nostalgic argument that deserves a more cyber-era analysis. His volume makes an intriguing contrast to 1999's left-meets-libertarian book The Stakeholder Society (unmentioned by Murray), which proposed $80,000 grants, financed by taxing the rich. Given Murray's track record-he coauthored The Bell Curve-and his think tank backing, expect much discussion of this book in print and on air. (Mar.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

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