#305 | Simone Collins; Raising Geniuses, Modern Dating, and Finding Cultural Identity

About this episode

Economist Samuel Hammond of the Niskanen Center joins Vance for a dense, wonky, and surprisingly warm debate about the origins and function of the modern welfare state. Hammond reframes social insurance not as redistribution but as the natural, historically continuous descendant of pre-industrial mutual aid societies — fraternal orders, church-based safety nets, and the LDS church security program he studied closely. He traces how commercial insurance's actuarial pricing "crowded out" community-based mutual aid, and how the welfare state's growth is entangled with secularization, unionization, and social capital across countries (Scandinavia vs. Venezuela as contrasting "socialisms"). The conversation covers child tax credits and cash transfers vs. vouchers, the 1970s "Long Great Society" and its unintended racial-stratification consequences (baby formula monopolies, WIC), farm subsidies and "zombie firms," and closes on tenant protections vs. income-shock insurance as a case study in solving root causes over surface symptoms. Vance pushes back throughout as a more traditional/skeptical libertarian, and the two find real common ground by the end.

“The rise of the welfare state was really the rise of the mutual aid nation, that the concept of mutual aid went from being something that was very local and communitarian to something that gets scaled up along with the scale of the economy.”

“There's this enormous bias in American public policy to only look... it's very parochial only to look at the Americas as if we can't learn from Europe and other countries.”

“It cut the sort of headline child poverty rate by 40%... because poverty is in some part a function of income.”

Key moments

• Origins of mutual aid societies as "fictive kin" networks before commercial insurance emerged.
• The LDS Church's welfare/"church security" program modeled explicitly on Freemason-style mutual aid structure.
• Comparing Scandinavia's "bottom-up" welfare states (grown from unions/mutual aid) to top-down US technocratic programs.
• The "Long Great Society" (Kennedy through Ford) and the decline of mass-membership politics.
• WIC's baby-formula monopoly system as a case study in "institutional rot" — cited as a root cause of the 2022 formula shortage.
• 2021 expanded Child Tax Credit cut child poverty by 40% — Hammond's own policy involvement (American Family Act).
• Sweden vs. Venezuela as two different models labeled "socialism" — one hyper-capitalist with large social insurance, one authoritarian/price-controlled.
• Tenant "right to counsel" laws increase homelessness; income-shock insurance solves the actual root cause instead.

Notable quotes

“There's a legal monopoly... this is insane industrial policy for baby formula.”

“It cut the headline child poverty rate by 40%... because poverty is in some part a function of income.”

“Tenant right-to-counsel laws actually increase homelessness... the real issue is income shocks, not landlords.”