Does Welfare Cause Terrorism? rc3 (congratulations, Rafe, on your nomination for weblogger of the year in the Scripting News poll) pointed to this Mickey Kaus column, calling it worth thinking about even if you don’t agree with his politics.

Well, I don’t, and it’s not. Kaus’ thesis is that alienated subcultures sustained by welfare breed terrorism. He commits several logical fallacies in his argument; I searched the column high and low in vain for evidence that I was underestimating his reasoning, but I’m not, unless I’m very very dense. First, even if you grant that terrorists tended to be on welfare (and he doesn’t even sustain this point), does that mean that those on welfare are terrorists? And second, he confuses correlation with causation — if members of the alienated underclass are both eligible for government benefits and associated with antisocial acts, that doesn’t mean that their receipt of social welfare causes their attacks.

This is a clumsy and intellectually crippled way of advancing a xenophobic and elitist anti-welfare agenda. The problem is, the Shrub administration is probably listening.