Bill Clinton promised to "end welfare as we know it." Alas, he
has not. Despite the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, the modern welfare
state is still fundamentally intact. In this book, The End of
Welfare: Fighting Poverty in the Civil Society, Michael Tanner
argues that that must change. He contends that government welfare
programs have failed to accomplish their ostensible goal of
alleviating poverty and, moreover, they have undermined the
traditional American principle of voluntarism. The interventionist
welfare state has replaced civil society with political society and
the results have been disastrous.
