83 Journal of Markets & Morality 4, no. 1 (Spring 2001), 83-93 Copyright ©2001 Center for Economic Personalism The Ideal World For the limited government, free-enterprise-oriented classical liberal, there is only one type of entitlement the citizen may properly receive from the state: security of his person and property. This entitlement entails an army to protect him from foreign despots, a police force to shield him from domestic villains, and a court system to determine who is and who is not an initiator of violence against another person or his property. Any and all other entitlements are illegitimate—at least from the perspective of this economic philosophy. 1 One defense of this limited notion of government is that entitlement programs 2 are counterproductive, which means such programs actually hurt their presump- tively intended beneficiaries. The list of such instances is long and woeful. Perhaps the most egregious is the welfare program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Origi- nally introduced as a means of helping the needy, 3 AFDC has instead promoted dependency, eviscerated personal ambition, and created whole generations of unwanted and often abused children. 4 These children, in turn, often graduate to a life of crime and continue the practice of rearing still other children of the same ilk. 5 The reason for this is not difficult to discern: Supply curves slope in an upward direction, the more one pays for an item, the more of it is called forth in the market. Welfare is the offer of money for people who are poor. The The Moral Dimensions of Poverty, Entitlements, and Theft Walter Block Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar and Chair in Economics College of Business Administration Loyola University New Orleans In the view of many commentators and pundits, all citizens have an entitlement to be relieved of their poverty, which, they believe, would best be accomplished by throwing other people’s money at the poor. This article makes the case that not only do the impoverished not have any such right, but the attempt to furnish them with wealth earned by others constitutes theft and does not help them in any case. Given, however, that such entitlements exist, what is the proper moral response? To approach an answer to this question, this article defines and then applies “libertarian class analysis” to the question and derives from this perspective some counterintuitive conclusions regarding welfare re- cipients and reparations for past invasions of person and property.