"Alexis de Tocqueville was very impressed..."

"Alexis de Tocqueville was very impressed, when he visited our country in the nineteenth century, to see how many voluntary associations Americans had formed in order to achieve common goals.   "The political associations which exist in the United States are only a single feature in the midst of the immense assemblage of associations in that country," he wrote.  "Wherever, at the head of some new undertaking, you see the Government in France, or man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association." De Tocqueville admired "the extreme skill with which the inhabitants of the United States succeed in proposing a common object to the exertions of a great many men, and in getting them voluntarily to pursue it."

That may be all well and good for the arts and the like, some may say, but private efforts could never substitute for gigantic government budgets for various forms of welfare.  But private assistance would not need to match these budgets dollar for dollar.  As much as 70 percent of welfare budgets has been eaten up by bureaucracy.  Moreover, government programs are far more easily abused, and the money they dispense more readily becomes a destructive habit, than with more local or private forms of assistance. 

Why would we expect a system based on legal plunder, as ours is, to be a net benefit to the poor or middle class, in whose name so many government schemes are enacted?  Every one of the special benefits, on behalf of which hundreds of millions of dollars are expended on lobbyists every year, makes goods more expensive, companies less efficient and competitive, and the economy more sluggish.  Given that the politically influential and well connected- neither of which includes the middle class or the poor- are the ones who tend to win privileges and loot from government, I do not understand why we take for granted that the net result of all this looting is good for those who are lower on the economic ladder.  And when the loot is paid for by printing more money and causing inflation, which (as I show in the chapter on money) disproportionately harms the most vulnerable, the suggestions that the least prosperous are helped by all this intervention collapses into outright farce." -Pages 75 & 76 of The Revolution, A Manifesto