Lindbeck’s Law: The Self‐Destructive Nature of Expanding Government Benefits
Relevant foresight from Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck, "Hazardous Welfare State Dynamics," American Economic Review, May 1995:
The basic dilemma of the welfare state . . . is that the more generous the benefits, the greater will be not only the tax distortions but also, because of moral hazard and benefit cheating, the number of beneficiaries. This is a field where Say's Law certainly holds in the long run: the supply of benefits creates its own demand. . . .
Serious benefit-dependency, or 'learned helplessness', may . . . emerge only in a long-run perspective. Possible examples of such gradual adjustments are an increased tendency to apply for social assistance, less job search and greater choosiness among unemployed workers, more absence from work for alleged health reasons, more applications for (subsidized) early retirement due to alleged inability to work, and more time and effort devoted to tax avoidance and tax evasion.
P.S. A 2007 empirical study by Friedrich Heinemann supported Linbeck's hypothesis, finding that "transfer expansion or increasing unemployment tend to be associated with a larger readiness of the country’s population to cheat on benefits."
