"In any of the cases noted in the article, how would you have exposed people to those consequences without simply subjecting them to those consequences and leav

"In any of the cases noted in the article, how would you have exposed people to those consequences without simply subjecting them to those consequences and leaving them to rot?" Expose them to a fraction of the consequences, rather than all of them. My point was not that one approach is good and another not. It's a trade-off (between adequate assistance and incentives to make good choices) and the trades are implicit in every act of assistance, whether at the family or government level. The best approach is to make good trades that provide the most assistance without steering people too much towards bad decisions. It's easier to do that in a localized (or better yet, personalized) way than using central planning on a 300M-person scale. The reason is that there are many more options to get people back on track when dealing with a problem at the local level. A government of 300M people can't do much more than throw money at the problem, which is not nearly as good of a trade-off.