This is the Cato Daily podcast for Monday, March 31st, 2025.

I'm Caleb Brown.

It should come as no surprise that when the government is in charge of delivering assistance to the poor, the poor become dependent on the government.

When providers of assistance can't meet lower income people where they are, it's a recipe for wasting resources and actively not helping those in need.

James Whitford is author of The Crisis of Dependency, How Our Efforts to Sol Poverty Are Trapping People.

We spoke earlier this month.

Across multiple books, Bill Easterly, who writes about development economics, talks about, you know, the ways in which governments have tried to help the poor around the world.

And in many ways, a lot of this help is not helpful.

It is often at best wasted.

Building roads, sometimes the people honestly could have better uses of resources than roads, believe it or not.

And so I wonder about the failures of charity in that area, not meeting people where they are

and properly appreciating what people's needs are because sometimes people have needs that are not stated.

Sometimes their stated needs are not what they actually need. And I think for a lot of, a lot of

charities trying to help lower income people, people who have had problems with addiction,

people who are just having difficulty, more than the normal amount of difficulty in life,

don't get it quite right. And maybe that's inevitable, but you tell me.

No, you're exactly right. I mean, and the question that came to mind as you were opening the

segment is, who knows best? I mean, who knows best? And you're talking about some needs that

are almost hidden that you don't know about, some that may be expressed, but it's not really the

source issue. So who knows best? And really,

the truth is the person, the individual in need, really knows best. And I think that's one of the

things that we miss in the world of charity, but especially government or public charity. We miss being able to

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