How do you empower the "can'ts" so they don't become "won'ts".
This is why charity should be primarily local, personal, and involve accountability on both sides.
While we might not like the way they operate or feel that they go to far, there was a reason they came about. It is because the private charities weren't able to reach out to all the needy.
This is leftist mythology. The New Deal itself crowded out thousands of private charities in the thirties that were already helping the needy across the country on a local level, leaving only a fraction behind. There was also once something called "family" and "extended family" and "church" to which people retreated when times were tough. As both government and the consequences of the sixties eviscerated and weakened all of these institutions, the state is the last resort standing (and do you think the state is reluctant to step into this breech?).
Just like there would not be a need for unions, child labor laws, and the EPA if businesses had behaved themselves properly in the past.
1. It can be argued, taking a snapshot of the very early decades of the industrial revolution, and coming into the early 20th century, that the original union movement had its place and was fundamentally a sound idea, to a limited extent. That snapshot is now very old and faded, however, and the fundamental claims unions once made - the protection of workers from abusive working conditions and fairer wages - have long outlived their salience. Already by the thirties the core mission of unionism became what it had always essentially been, all the way back to the medieval guilds - to artificially raise the cost of wage labor by artificially restricting entry into various trades.
In the 1920s, unionism became a mafia controlled wage labor extortion racket on the east coast (among the Longshormen in New York, primarily) and retained that complexion for the rest of the 20th century. The Norris-LaGuardia and Wagner Acts gave unions vast coercive powers over business (and hence, the consumer and non-union worker) and the ability to raise wages and benefits for themselves well beyond their actual value in a free market for their services and skills, which also still remains to this day (as well as all the other corruptions and social bedlam attending unionism wherever it exists).
As capitalism matured and expanded, unionism became ever more an artifact of a bygone era of rapid and sometimes wrenching social change. Its long and severe decline since the sixties, as more and more American workers have simply abandoned the concept, is proof enough of that. Unionism also only ultimately raised wages and benefits for its own members, at the expense of the rest of the economy, and had a number of other deleterious economic and social side-effects.
2. The EPA has nothing to do with the disciplining of irresponsible American businesses, nor can it possibly be argued that existing civil and criminal laws in place at the time of its creation, or sense, were not adequate when actual corporate malfeasance was in play. It is a satrapy and tool of the environmental movement and a weapon of war by left-leaning administrations (such as the present one) against capitalism, free markets, and property rights, and industrial development. It also has no constitutional basis whatsoever, is a clearinghouse for junk science, behaves itself like something out of Brezhnev's Soviet Union, and should be abolished.
I'm a big C conservative and small l libertarian. I am not a purist libertarian in any sense, and do not believe that free markets can answer all human problems or that government does not have its place in human affairs.
I...