In a random sample of 1,000 Americans, the number living in or near poverty is 216, according to the latest Census estimates. Thirty years ago, the number was also 216. The near-poverty rate dips and surges during every business cycle, but the uncomfortable fact is that poverty persists, despite a slathering of government dollars on the problem.

Cataloging the thundering ineffectiveness of government expenditures in fighting poverty is trite, yet the salience of government failure is perhaps greater now than ever before. Witness the impotence of France where, in the space of a year, one Paris-burning riot protesting widespread socialist unemployment was followed by the current Paris-burning riot against any re form of that same system.

America’s struggle with government incompetence seems small by comparison. Yet America is undeniably the richest nation in human history, making poverty’s persistence here proportionally more troubling. Is there any government program that could wipe out poverty once and for all?

No, Charles Murray argues in his new book, “In Our Hands: A Plan To Replace the Welfare State” (AEI Press, 214 pages,$20). Failure of the welfare state is inevitable because it “degrades the traditions of work, thrift, and neighborliness” and then spawns new problems of its own.

The only way to resolve the paradox is for government to abandon the effort entirely (a path Mr. Murray prefers but acknowledges is dead) or a new approach that gets government out of its own way. What Mr. Murray calls the Plan “converts all transfer payments to a single cash payment for everyone age twenty-one and older.” Everyone.

If paying $10,000 to every American adult every year seems like insanity, you are not thinking like an economist. To understand real insanity, at least from the perspective of one who believes human beings act rationally, you need only consider the status quo of the last half century, in which people have been paid to be poor, paid to be single and pregnant, paid to be unemployed, and paid when they experience a handful of other negative situations. The notion of compensating the ends of dysfunctional means is the height of irrationality.

Not only is the current approach doomed to reward dysfunction, but the growing entitlement costs of Medicare and Social Security guarantee their bankruptcy in short order. According to “In Our Hands,” which uses admirably conservative assumptions, “the projected costs of the current system and of the Plan cross in 2011. By 2020, the Plan would cost $549 billion less than a continuation” of all the programs in place today.

Perhaps the leading intellectual on the right today, Mr. Murray could not write an unimportant and uncontroversial book if he tried. And he’s not trying. Armed with a Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mr. Murray roiled the welfare debate in 1984 with his watershed book, “Losing Ground.” That book cemented conservative doubts about any government plan to redistribute income, which makes the irony of “In Our Hands” almost unbearable.

The first reaction of most readers to Mr. Murray’s $10,000 universal transfer is alarm. How could such a free lunch fail to erode the work ethic, let alone a sense of family and community? How could he punt on work requirements that conservatives achieved in the welfare reforms of the late 1990s?

The work disincentive inherent in the Plan is severe, and his short chapter doesn’t address it seriously. I wonder if the Kane children would bother working if they could share a condo and play video games at Uncle Sam’s expense.

Still, I am intrigued by the idea of a transfer without income conditions and caveats. At the official book launch held at the American Enterprise Institute last week, Mr. Murray chuckled as he confessed, “The Plan lures people into working until they can’t afford to quit.”

In that sense, he is advancing the social experiment far beyond the idea of a guaranteed minimum income proposed by a mix of conservative and liberal scholars in the 1960s, and tried in some places in the 1970s. Under those “negative income tax” schemes, anyone who kept working for a salary below the guaranteed minimum was a “chump” according to Mr. Murray. The steep decline in workforce participation in places like Seattle and Denver, where it was tried, bears him out.

Paying everyone without requiring any means-testing is the brilliant stroke in Mr. Murray’s Plan. It removes all the perverse incentives that now exist in programs such as unemployment insurance, food stamps, and housing subsidies.

Most current social spending begins to phase out as recipients earn higher incomes, essentially taxing them on the margin for every dollar they earn above the poverty line. Add up all the phase-outs, and the net gain from working at that income level just doesn’t make sense. Literally. In 2001, Democratic economists on the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress emphasized that “the overall effective marginal tax rate can reach 100 percent or more” on some poor families. Imagine paying a buck twenty-five in taxes for every extra buck in income.

“In Our Hands,” by contrast, dreams of a day when paying people to be poor is replaced by a system that simply pays people to be people, and lets them decide the rest. It eliminates voluntary poverty, as Mr. Murray says. But it must be said that the Plan would not eliminate behavioral poverty.

Mr. Murray addresses this critique – let’s call it the conservative critique – at length. He is at his best defending the morality of liberty, and the benefit of reading his book comes in the final part, where he elaborates on the Plan’s “Larger Purpose” and how happiness, vocation, marriage, and community generate real and justified meaning.

Yet what haunts a sensitive reader about “In Our Hands” is its incessant use of the word Plan (with a capital P). A libertarian plan is an oxymoron. But Mr. Murray’s Plan is something more as well. It is an unabashedly nationalized project, an evisceration of the powers reserved to the states by an already hollow 10th Amendment.

Anyone who takes economic growth seriously, as Mr. Murray thankfully does, recognizes that poverty and entitlement are the real challenges of this century. And his bold plan may well be the solution to America’s gathering Parisian dilemma. We might hope that the Plan is inevitable, and we might fear that it succeeds.

Timothy Kane, Ph.D., is the Bradley Fellow in Labor Policy at the Heritage Foundation.