Jacob T. Levy points out what the obsession with combating welfare and food stamp fraud leads to:
[P]oor people will be subjected to another set of forms, another set of inspections, another set of surveillance and monitoring, another set of insults, another risk of false findings of guilt, for trivial financial savings. Someone gets to posture as having zero tolerance for some unacceptable outcome; that’s what the zero tolerance policies are for. And life for a sixth of the country’s population gets worse, more unfree, more subject to the burdens and intrusions of micromanaging regulation.
This kind of thing is, famously, among Milton Friedman’s reasons for advocating a negative income tax in place of the complex array of partial-coverage welfare policies in America. (It’s also among the reasons called upon today by supporters of basic income guarantees.) I think Friedman understood, not only that regulations are administratively expensive to enforce, but that they’re also sources of unfreedom for the many people who don’t violate them. And the effort to make sure that income support only ever goes to the deserving poor however conceived, to regulate their behavior to stop them from doing whatever it is the undeserving do, is regulation, and requires the same costs, sacrifices, and burdens regulation always requires.
The Dish 