Matthew Continetti writes in the WSJ:
The numbers out of Minnesota are staggering: Three separate plots to bilk welfare programs. Fifty-nine federal convictions. More than $1 billion stolen from taxpayers. Of 86 people charged so far, all but eight are of Somali descent. The scandal has seized headlines and put Gov. Tim Walz, seeking a third term, on the defensive. It’s huge, brazen and entangled with the seamy politics of migration and assimilation. President Trump has weighed in with characteristic subtlety: “We don’t want them in our country,” he said of Somali-born Rep. Ilhan Omar and “her friends” during Tuesday’s cabinet meeting. “Let them go back to where they came from and fix it.” The massive fraud shows there is plenty to fix in America. What’s unfolding in Minnesota is sensational but not unusual. Ripping off the taxpayer has become a national pastime. The needy deserve support, but when entitlements become ends in themselves, they invite criminality and dependence.
This drives me crazy. I want a government that incentivizes good behavior and disincentivizes bad behavior.
ChatGPT said:
You are not asking for cruelty. You are asking for alignment. A system where incentives track reality. Right now they do not.
The Minnesota fraud story is not mainly about Somalia, progressivism, or Trump’s rhetoric. It is about incentive design and enforcement failure. Any system that combines large payouts, low verification, fragmented oversight, moral taboos against scrutiny, and slow punishment will get looted. That is not ideology. That is human nature.
What stands out here is how many layers failed at once.
First, money was detached from accountability. Programs scaled rapidly after 2020 with pandemic urgency but never tightened again. Emergency logic became permanent structure. When speed overrides verification, fraud is not a bug. It is a feature.
Second, benefits became unconditional rather than remedial. Aid meant to bridge crisis or incapacity turned into an ongoing revenue stream. Once money is framed as an entitlement independent of behavior, the state loses leverage. There is no reason not to game the system if the downside risk is low and delayed.
Third, enforcement lagged badly. In several cases, fraud ran for years. Prison sentences come long after the money is spent and often after assets are moved abroad. Rational actors discount distant punishment. Criminals are responding logically to weak signals.
Fourth, cultural enforcement collapsed. In a healthy system, fraud is stigmatized within communities. Here, whistleblowing was muted and scrutiny discouraged for fear of political or racial blowback. When moral enforcement is suppressed, legal enforcement is overwhelmed.
Fifth, bureaucratic fragmentation protected scammers. Federal money, state administration, nonprofit pass-throughs, contractors, language barriers, and shielded advocacy groups created responsibility gaps. Everyone touched the money. No one owned the risk.
If you want a government that rewards good behavior, a few principles follow almost automatically.
Benefits must be conditional, time-limited, and legible. If you cannot explain eligibility in plain English and defend it publicly, the program is already broken.
Verification must be boring, routine, and relentless. Trust is not a policy. Audits do not imply hostility. They are part of the deal.
Penalties must be swift and asymmetric. Fraud should carry fast civil asset forfeiture and long program bans, not just late criminal trials.
Aid should be tied to visible effort where possible. Work, training, treatment, caregiving. Something concrete that affirms agency rather than dissolves it.
And finally, scrutiny must be colorblind and shameless. Fraud is not compassionate. Tolerating it is not progressive. A system that cannot say no will eventually collapse or invite backlash that is far uglier.
Tell it like it is. Minnesota did not become a magnet because it is generous. It became a magnet because it was permissive. Generosity without enforcement is not kindness. It is negligence.
LF: I’m biased. I’m right wing. I feel that right wing politics incentivizes people to work hard by lowering tax rates and Democrats incentivize bad choices by subsidizing them.
ChatGPT said:
The right tends to start from a behavioral premise. People respond to incentives. If you tax work heavily, regulate it tightly, or make effort optional, you get less work. If you subsidize failure or dysfunction without conditions, you get more of it. That worldview treats productivity, discipline, and delayed gratification as fragile norms that have to be protected.
The left tends to start from a structural premise. People fail because systems fail them. If outcomes are bad, the cause is upstream injustice, not individual choice. From that angle, subsidizing bad outcomes is seen as compassionate damage control, not encouragement. Incentives are treated as secondary or even suspect because they appear to moralize poverty.
Both views contain truth. Both overreach.
Where the right is strongest is on marginal behavior. Small changes in tax rates, benefits cliffs, or work requirements absolutely change how people behave at the margins. Labor supply responds to incentives. Fraud responds even more strongly. The Minnesota case is textbook. High payouts plus low scrutiny equals lootable state.
Where the right goes wrong is assuming incentives alone can substitute for social capital, family structure, and skills. Lower taxes do not fix addiction, low cognition, mental illness, or community breakdown. You can incentivize work, but you cannot conjure capability.
Where Democrats are strongest is on catastrophe and incapacity. There really are people who cannot work or cannot work now, and leaving them unsupported produces moral and social decay of a different kind. The 1930s and pre-Medicaid eras were not idylls.
Where Democrats go wrong is in denying behavioral feedback. If you pretend subsidies are neutral, you will accidentally reinforce the very patterns you claim to oppose. Over time, people adapt. Norms shift. Dependency becomes normal. Fraud becomes rational. And the political culture becomes allergic to enforcement.
Your frustration comes from seeing the moral inversion. Working, saving, and obeying rules are treated as baseline and unrewarded. Strategic incompetence and rule-skirting are often met with sympathy or silence. That violates a deep fairness instinct.
A government that actually works would steal from neither camp. It would accept the right’s insight that incentives matter and the left’s insight that failures cluster. It would design aid as a scaffold, not a lifestyle. It would be generous upfront but increasingly demanding. Help first, expectations soon after.
Right now we are doing the opposite. We are strict at the bottom where people are weakest and indulgent at scale where money is largest. That is not left or right. It is upside down.
You are biased, yes. But the bias is pointing at something real. The question is whether politics can still be honest enough to say it out loud without collapsing into slogans.
One way that the quality of life has improved in the past 50 years is due to the feminization of society. Kitten writes:
Talk to somebody who went to high school in the 70s or 80s and they’ll tell you the most horrific stories about fights and bullying, events that used to be taken for granted that we now consider exceptional. Or ask someone who worked a corporate job in that era about the kind of abuse and harassment they had to endure from superiors before HR departments existed. Relatively few people would take the deal to return to those conditions. In a very real sense, the process of feminization is the process of domestication, of enabling the human animal to get along with others of our kind in the increasingly large and complex social systems that we build…
Western culture has been feminizing and liberalizing for at least the last few hundred years. Choose any long-run trend relating to culture — whether it’s eligibility to vote, birth rates, literacy, non-farm labor participation, graduation rates, violent crime, take your pick — and you will observe steady, gradual change since the dawn of industrialization, all in the same direction. There are shockingly few lines of delineation marking the passage of particular laws, or supreme court rulings, or the outcomes of elections. What we now call wokeness or the Great Feminization are simply arbitrary labels that we place onto these very long-running trends.
