Welfare lines.

"What a racially segregated system once taught the young black about living with his inferiority [is] now taught by a benevolent social welfare system. The difference was that in an earlier age a black parent could fight the competing influences.

--Charles Murray, arguing for the abolition of welfare in Losing Ground, 1984

"The United States already has policies that inadvertently social-engineer who has babies, and it is encouraging the wrong women.... The technically precise description of America's fertility policy is that it subsidizes births among poor women, who are also disproportionately at the low end of the intelligence distribution."

--Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, arguing for the abolition of welfare in The Bell Curve, 1994

Ten years ago, Charles Murray published Losing Ground, a pathfinding, eloquently argued book that called for getting rid of most government assistance programs for the poor. Murray contended that the programs encouraged laziness, dependence on handouts, and endemically low self-esteem among recipients that translated into self-fulfilling prophecies of failure for many poor blacks and members of other minority groups. As the above passage from Losing Ground indicates, Murray had nothing but scorn for a well-intentioned liberal elite that professed compassion for the underclass but doomed its members to permanent dependency by expecting nothing of them. His thesis: Welfare is bad because it subsidizes bad habits and attitudes. Take away the check, and you will be treating the poor like equals, spurring them to take responsibility for their lives and possibly climb to prosperity.

On the way from 1984 to 1994, something happened to Murray's thinking. His core proposal--get rid of welfare--is unaltered, but his characterization of the welfare problem has changed drastically. First there was his much-discussed Wall Street Journal op-ed in the fall of 1993. In that article, and in a longer piece for the spring 1994 issue of The Public Interest, Murray's villains were no longer the kindly but deadly liberal social engineers of Losing Ground. Murray's new welfare villains were the welfare mothers themselves. Welfare is bad, he argued, because it subsidizes illegitimacy, which he tied to crime and other antisocial behavior prevalent in fatherless, low income families. Take away the check, he concluded, and you will shrink the size of the underclass.

And now we have The Bell Curve, with an even newer Murray thesis: Welfare is bad because it subsidizes the breeding of stupid people. As the above quotation from The Bell Curve indicates, Thesis no. 3 is actually a refinement of Thesis no. 2 because its corollary is the same: Take away the check, and you will shrink the size of the underclass, not by spurring its members to self-reliance and the repairing of frayed family and community ties, but by ensuring that they won't be born.

And as for the old libertarian Murray who derided the social engineers in Losing Ground, well, he's gone. The new Murray of The Bell Curve believes--and says so explicitly--that a little social engineering might be a good thing if it's the kind that cuts the reproduction rate of the lower orders. Not because he believes poor young men and women would be better off postponing childbearing until their lives were more economically stable, but because he believes we would be better off if those people didn't self-replicate, period. Thus, Murray wants the government to get out of the welfare business and into the birth-control business, "making available. . . mechanisms that are increasingly flexible, foolproof, inexpensive, and safe."

This foray into the big government camp may seem uncharacteristic for Murray--until you remember that he, too, now assumes, like his so-called "government bureaucrats" in Losing Ground, that the people at society's bottom are born to fail.