Ben Franklin on Welfare Policy

The Cablenator left a comment on my post from Friday about a recent WSJ article on the use of food stamps in the United States. His comment, in part, reads:

Food stamps offer little in the way of incentive to break free from the welfare system if they facilitate other areas of spending that are clearly non-necessities. Plain nutrition-cakes are entirely humane and discourage dependency.

I agree. This brought to mind something that Benjamin Franklin once said, one of my favorite quotes of his:

I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.