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WHOEVER coined the image about the difficulty of dismounting from a tiger you’ve been riding, it certainly applies to getting out of a welfare state. “The welfare state,” after all, isn’t just what we think of as “welfare”; it’s everything from agriculture subsidies and the National Endowment for the Arts to HUD and the Small Business Administration, with Medicare and Social Security squatting in between. And, as Madsen Pirie of the Adam Smith Institute put it at this year’s Philadelphia Society meeting, in a situation where every identifiable group of voters gets some special benefit from the government—even if government doesn’t do things nearly as well as they could do them for themselves —no group wants to give up its benefit unless everyone else does so simultaneously.

The Philadelphia Society, meeting just after the Hundred Days had concluded, could be more hopeful than at any time since about 1981, and the program was accordingly titled “Thinking the Unthinkable: The Successful Challenge to the Welfare State.” And yet the problems of how to kill programs without inflicting serious harm on people who have come to count on them, and how to maintain a few safety-net functions without constructing perverse incentives, were on everyone’s mind—not to mention how to avoid getting eaten by the tiger in the 1996 elections.

About the Author

Linda Bridges

Ms. Bridges is the former editor-at-large of National Review.

WHOEVER coined the image about the difficulty of dismounting from a tiger you’ve been riding, it certainly applies to getting out of a welfare state. “The welfare state,” after all, isn’t just what we think of as “welfare”; it’s everything from agriculture subsidies and the National Endowment for the Arts to HUD and the Small Business Administration, with Medicare and Social Security squatting in between. And, as Madsen Pirie of the Adam Smith Institute put it at this year’s Philadelphia Society meeting, in a situation where every identifiable group of voters gets some special benefit from the government—even if government doesn’t do things nearly as well as they could do them for themselves —no group wants to give up its benefit unless everyone else does so simultaneously.

The Philadelphia Society, meeting just after the Hundred Days had concluded, could be more hopeful than at any time since about 1981, and the program was accordingly titled “Thinking the Unthinkable: The Successful Challenge to the Welfare State.” And yet the problems of how to kill programs without inflicting serious harm on people who have come to count on them, and how to maintain a few safety-net functions without constructing perverse incentives, were on everyone’s mind—not to mention how to avoid getting eaten by the tiger in the 1996 elections.