The other side of welfare: Idleness

Were all our citizens to say, “We will club together to assist those who cannot work, or who cannot find employment,” we should fear to see developed to a dangerous extent man’s natural tendency to idleness; we should fear that the laborious would soon become the dupes of the slothful. Mutual assistance, then, implies mutual surveillance, without which the common fund would soon be exhausted. This reciprocal surveillance is for such association a necessary guarantee of existence—a security for each contributor that he shall not be made to play the part of dupe; and it constitutes besides the true morality of the institution. By this means, we see drunkenness and debauchery gradually disappear; for what right could that man have to assistance from the common fund who has brought disease and want of employment upon himself by his own vicious habits? It is this surveillance that re-establishes that responsibility the association might otherwise tend to enfeeble.

..says Basitat in his Economic Harmonies, Book II (pp. 842-843 in The Bastiat Collection), first published at around 1850. The remainder of this part of the book is a sign of remarkable foresight from a man who understood the nature of the State better than most.