America's First Lady, Hillary Clinton, lately has been reminding us of an old saying, “it takes a village to raise a child.” I believe the saying, but I am not sure Mrs. Clinton understands that a welfare check is not a village. A village is a place where neighbors rely on themselves and on each other, and raise their children to do the same. Governments lull us into thinking that the only alternative to individual responsibility is government responsibility; villages teach us that we have another option.

We need another option, too. It would be a fallacy to assume that those who criticize need-based redistribution by government do not care about need. Presumably, some of them care about need but think need-based distribution by a central bureaucracy is not what people need. When we address problems of poverty by turning some portion of the productive capacity of individuals into a common-pool asset and then giving welfare agencies access to it, the recipe has all the ingredients of a tragic commons. Eventually, one would expect, the common-pool asset will be exhausted. The problems will be worse than before.

Some people think we can end poverty through redistribution, and that ending poverty would be well worth any marginal reduction in overall productivity.