When Good Intentions Are Not Enough

Alex Trebek:  "Being a one-party state, believing in unicorns, thinking that the productive members of society will stay in California even if they're taxed to death, being progressive to the point where too many people are so open-minded that their brains fall out."

Jeopardy contestant:  "Why does California have the highest rate of poverty in the US?"

So how is it that California, which has spent nearly $1 trillion on antipoverty programs, has the highest poverty rate in the nation?

Jackson, a fellow at the Pacific Research Institute, suggests that the state’s war on poverty is one of the causes of California’s impoverished state, and why it is home to about one-third of the nation’s welfare population despite having just 12 percent of the population.

It turns out that state and local bureaucrats who administer California’s antipoverty programs have proven stubbornly resistant to pro-work reforms that have been effective at spurring individuals to pull themselves out of poverty. It’s a phenomenon familiar to those who have read the scholarship of economist Robert Niskanen, whose model of bureaucratic behavior suggested that bureaucrats tend to “maximize their own utility” rather than the interests of their constituents.

There's much more at the link.