Leadership Quote by Barney Frank

Frank is diagnosing a paternalism that once passed for compassion: a politics where the poor are not participants in policy but props in it. The key phrase, "objects of efforts", is doing the real work. It’s coolly clinical, almost bureaucratic, and that’s the point. By stripping welfare rhetoric of its usual moral fog, he exposes the underlying posture: helping, yes, but on terms set entirely by those with power.

The specific intent is less to denounce welfare itself than to critique an older liberal consensus that treated poverty as a technical problem to be managed rather than a democratic constituency to be heard. "Perfectly reasonable" lands with a politician’s scalpel. Frank isn’t saying these supporters were villains; he’s saying the structure of their reasonableness assumed hierarchy. You can hear an argument against what later got labeled "welfare reform" language: requirements, surveillance, moral testing. When people are "objects", oversight feels natural; dignity becomes optional.

Context matters: Frank came up in an era when New Deal-style programs were being attacked from the right as dependency machines, and defended from the center with technocratic confidence. His sentence sidesteps the familiar left-right fight and targets a deeper blind spot: even well-meaning coalitions can reproduce inequality by monopolizing agency. The subtext is a warning to his own side. Redistribution without representation is unstable. If beneficiaries never get to be authors, welfare becomes something done to them, and that makes it politically easy to cut, stigmatize, or "reform" into punishment.