A Life of One's Own Is Published ''Officially''

October 14, 1998, was the official publication date for David Kelley's A Life of One's Own: Individual Rights and the Welfare State. The Cato Institute, which published the work, marked the occasion by establishing a Web site devoted solely to Kelley's book (www.individualrights.org) and by sending out an e-mail describing Kelley's thesis as follows.

"'The welfare state rests on a false moral foundation,' Kelley says. The notion of welfare rights 'cannot be justified by appeal to freedom, to benevolence, or to community. They do not expand but curtail freedom—that of program clients as well as of taxpayers. They make charity compulsory, undermining any genuine benevolence donors might have toward the poor. They replace the voluntary bonds of a society of contract with the coercive power of the state, undermining genuine community.'"

In its bimonthly Policy Report, Cato also gave major coverage to A Life of One's Own, under the headline "Kelley Invalidates 'Welfare Rights,'" The accompanying article said that Kelley's book combines empirical evidence of the welfare state's effects on behavior, historical research on the origins of the welfare state (and on what it displaced), and philosophical clarification of such core ideas as freedom and rights. After a careful examination of the various arguments made on behalf of welfare rights, Kelley concludes that 'the concept of the welfare rights is invalid.'"

The article goes on to cite praise for Kelley's work from Judge Alex Kozinski of the U.S. Ninth Circuit, Randy Barnett of the Boston University School of Law, Douglas Rasmussen of the St. John's University, and Rep. Ed Royce (R-California). The book itself sports praise from Ellen Frankel Paul, editor of Social Philosophy and Policy. Said Paul: "Anyone interested in the moral legitimacy of the welfare state must deal with arguments in this book."

The Cato Institute, in cooperation with the Institute for Objectivist Studies, also placed nineteen ads for Kelley's book, in such publications as Commentary, Liberty, the National Review, The New Republic, the New York Review of Books, the Sunday New York Times "Book Review" section, Reason, the Washington Post, and the Weekly Standard. In the Times's "Book Review," ironically, the ad ran on the same page as a review of Sweet Charity?, a work that proclaims: "The proliferation of charity contributes to our society's failure to grapple in meaningful ways with poverty." By "meaningful ways," of course, the author, sociologist Janet Poppendieck of Hunter College, is referring to statist welfare.