Weiye Loh's Library tagged Benevolence →  View Popular, Search in Google

From Mr. Stove’s perspective, England’s Poor Laws are historically comparable to the metaphoric moment when the current of the Niagara River begins surreptitiously to speed our solitary Indian toward the Falls. Enacted in Elizabethan times, the Poor Laws originally gave succour to the poor, the sick and the elderly by means of a modest tax levied at the parish level. With the passage of time, the civic administrators noted a perplexing paradox: “It was found,” Mr. Stove writes, “that the proportion of the population receiving money under the [Poor] Laws (and consequently, of course, the burden on those who paid the tax) always increased.”

By 1800, the number of poor, sick and elderly people who qualified for the dole had increased several-fold, rising to one person in seven (which, coincidentally, matches the proportion of Americans who qualify for food stamps). The Poor Laws tax on the other six had risen disproportionately. By 1817, when one pound equalled 20 shillings, the dole necessitated a tax of 18 shillings per pound of income: an effective tax rate of 90 per cent. Thomas Malthus, the famous English demographer, derived two lessons from this experience: The Poor Laws increased the number of poor people, and they impoverished the working poor (or, as they were once known, the independent poor).