SOURCE: Henderson, David R. “Value Judgments.” Reason 27, no. 2 (June 1995): 52.

In the following review of The De-Moralization of Society, Henderson agrees with Himmelfarb's distinction between virtues and values, and advocates abolishing government welfare programs.

In the early 1970s, I was a graduate teaching assistant at UCLA in an undergraduate course taught by Charles Baird, a free-market economist. After explaining to the class the problems with the current welfare system—its disincentive to work, the amount of life-arranging (his word) that social workers do, etc.—Baird proposed as an alternative Milton Friedman's idea of a negative income tax.

Under Friedman's plan, the panoply of different government aid programs would be replaced by a simple cash giveaway, administered through the tax system, with no money specifically earmarked for certain items, as with food stamps, and no pesky social workers trying to manage your life. Poor people would be able to spend...