Over the last two generations, most of the improvements in the material standard of living of America's poor have proceeded not from the welfare system per se but by advances in technology and the affordability of goods that have come through the normal workings of free markets. As of the middle of the previous decade, for example,
• 46% of all poor households (defined by the Census Bureau) own their own homes, with on average, 3 bedrooms, 1.5 bathrooms, a garage, and a porch or patio.
• 76% of poor households have air conditioning. By contrast, 30 years ago, only 36% of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.
• Only 6% of poor households are overcrowded. More than two-thirds have more than two rooms per person.
• The average poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens, and other cities throughout Europe. (These comparisons are to the average citizens in foreign countries, not to those classified as poor.)
• Nearly 75% of poor households own a car; 30% own two or more cars.
• 97% of poor households have a color television; over half own two or more color televisions.
• 78% percent have a VCR or DVD player; 62 % have cable or satellite TV reception.
• 73% own microwave ovens, more than half have a stereo, and a third have an automatic dishwasher.
Against this background of capitalism's magic, the burgeoning welfare state has accompanied increases in dependency and a decline in social mobility. Crony corporatism, contributing hugely to American poverty, has also accompanied these trends, and I have written against it extensively, but a serious engagement with the well-being of our fellow Americans demands an honest look at the pillar of our redistributive system whose stated purpose is to reduce poverty and increase economic opportunity. That pillar is state-delivered welfare in the broadest sense.
While free markets have made being poor less painful, all of the State apparatus of re-distributions and support have made more people poor and/or kept them poorer for longer. That more than one in six Americans are on food-stamps is a national disgrace. Another ten million are living on "unemployment insurance"; another five million on welfare. And I've not included the 50 million lower-income individuals on Medicaid.
Things are particularly bad right now and many argue that it's a good thing that these figures are high, as they represent improved lives... but if governmental redistribution was succeeding over time by its stated goals, there would be a steady decline in poverty and dependency over time -- but there is not.
Most Americans who are alive today cannot imagine a society in which a social safety net can be delivered by any entity other than the state, because they have never seen it happen. But is this really the best we can do? What other mechanisms are there for people with a social conscience to support?
Certainly, simply taking an ideological stance against welfare, rather than an empirical one, when the immediate needs of many people appear to be at stake, seems to be callous. Given the undeniable presence of the poor and needy among us, there is a moral burden on those who would refuse to let the government intervene to explain why governmental help should not be provided and some other approach taken.
This moral demand can be reasonably answered, as it has been most succinctly by another British observer of these United States, speaking from experience of a British welfare system that has done more than perhaps any program in the country's modern history to destroy a productive and content society. Said Daniel Hannan, British member of the European parliament, in a speech in DC in June of this year.
What happens as welfare expands is that private morality is nationalized. The bonds that used to tie individuals together are frayed.
As background, you need to know that in the UK, one in 11 households have no working adult. Most disturbingly for anyone with a social conscience, one in six children live in a home where no parent works. These children have never been exposed to the relationship between work effort and well-being. This is beyond entitlement mentality: it is the generational hard-wiring of entitlement and poverty. America is moving in the same direction, and will get there unless active decisions are taken to prevent it, because State social programs never organically shrink -- never.
Ultimately, the failure of government programs to reduce poverty and their apparent tendency to increase dependency stem from the fact that the provider of help -- the government -- has no way of responding to the personal situation of the recipient. It cannot differentiate according to the circumstances, character or even intent of the individual whom it helps. One cause, then, of the failure of large government programs -- is not the motivation that underlies them, but their decoupling of intervention from the circumstances that precipitated the need for that intervention.
More subtly, but infinitely more destructive in the long run, is that the recipient of help is completely unconnected to the individuals taxpayers who are providing the help. Recipients cannot see the impact of the giving on those who gave. This is literally a de-humanization of a huge set of human transactions, as it eliminates the natural human responses of reciprocity and responsibility toward those who help us. Since the welfare state delivers help in a way that seems to come from no person, the perceived cost is zero. Why then, would any recipient feel grateful toward, or any moral obligation to, those who provided the help? Responsibility wouldn't need to be legislated if we had not instituted a system that demolishes it.
It's often been said that communism fell because it tried to build a socio-economic structure that failed to allow for a basic aspect of human nature (in that case, the urge to improve one's lot by one's own efforts). Why would we think that this exact same error, just concerning a different aspect of human nature (reciprocity and gratitude), would not damage our society, too?
Before the American welfare state, there were many poor, infirm and ill, as there are today, and it would have been as wrong then to ignore them as it would be today. It is hard for us not to believe that before the welfare-state, society was crueler; that too many people fell through the cracks. But in the absence of blanket government help, desperate people tended to be helped only by people in their family or immediate community, and this situation offered two important advantages over our current system: first, the recipient of charity within the community could see the sacrifice made by the others in the community that had provided time and money -- people with whom the recipient would have to coexist, perhaps even work with, eat with and socialize with. Second, those who were in a position to give that help knew something about the recipient of their help, and could thus make choices about future help based on the character and behaviors displayed by the recipient, and even the way the help was used.
This personal type of support creates a very natural incentive for people to help those who help themselves in the most positive of ways -- in ways that allow people to experience the consequences of their actions, which include the reactions of those around them, and particularly those who were kind enough to provide the support in the first place. Even as we believe in a social and economic safety net, why on earth should we prefer to have it operate in a way that dilutes our humanity and eliminates this kind of mutuality in our society -- the very same humanity and mutuality that motivates us even to provide that safety net in the first place?
Government-administered redistribution for welfare manifests the assumption that a society's response to hardship is independent of its causes, and, in particular, the choices that have led to it. Since the mechanism is so unconcerned with causes, it is little wonder that we have not been able to identify and correct them. With all the problems of our clumsy governmental mechanism of social protection, we should expect that individuals learn all of the lessons that we are teaching them in a kind of anti-Pavlov's-dogs phenomenon: that the link between actions and consequences is essentially unimportant to how society will treat individuals, who owe nothing, even gratitude, to those who fund others in their times of need. That, of course is the definition of the entitlement mentality.
This characterization is absolutely not equivalent to saying, "welfare recipients are lazy" or any other similarly crass generalization. Rather, it is to point out that removing all direct human experience of the largest single class of acts of giving and receiving that occur in our society is necessarily and hugely distorting of motivations and behaviors.
We have so many more resources and data than were available before the New Deal: in that context, another look at the social dynamics of the past, or even a brainstorming of new futures, can only help, but we must leave no cow sacred.
America is in a crisis, which may, if America is wise or lucky, prompt this nation to reconsider the basic assumptions of its modern society, and to check them against those on which the nation was founded.
At America's current cross-roads, the most important assumptions to question are the most fundamental; the most important actions to question are the most general, and the most important institutions to question are those that affect the most people.
Follow Robin Koerner on Twitter: www.twitter.com/rkoerner
Rather survival be mandated by entitlements and unemployment benefits. Millions are unemployed now, and it is not all their fault as corporations and school systems lay off people regularly. And they are showing more profit now, as they increase workloads on those who didn't get laid off. Still, I think we are far from the welfare state: we are in the Corporate States of America. " . Most of your readers do not even see the flaws in your essay. Who is your audience? Probably not the "welfare state" citizens you are writing about.
It's also immoral to steal.
Through the income tax we steal to help the poor.
And after all of that, they stay "poor" and we're still guilty of theft.
What a failed state this is.
http://www.aei.org/docLib/9780844742236.pdf
The plan is, quite simply, to replace all transfer programs with a citizen's dividend sent monthly to all adult citizens totally about $10,000 per year.
There are all manner of arguments against this but the one decisive argument in favor of it is made obliquely by Robin Koerner:
Once government largesse is placed in our hands without regard to who can muster political might, the responsibility for delivery of social goods is more localized with a more personal face.
We may ignore, for the sake of those who find the US Constitution to be a quaint document, the fact that this is far more in the spirit of the general welfare clause than is all the public sector rent seeking that sees the US Federal government as a football.
One excerpt from my other post: "Pro-welfarÂe state people have little argument against this."
Vote Ron Paul 2012
End the wars. Ron Paul has a plan to keep the money coming to the people who need the entitlements to survive while slowly allowing young people to opt out of the entitlement system so they can use that money to plan for their own retirement...
How?
Simple...
End the wars. Bring our troops home from the 130 countries they're in. Close all 700+ military bases we have around the world. Stop corporate subsidies. Stop foreign aid. (Foreign aid is taking money from poor people in rich countries and giving it to rich people in poor countries.) Stop the bailouts and the stimulus. End the Fed which is the cause of the biggest tax of all...
INFLATION.
If you wanna vote for more of the same... pick Obama.
If you want a real candidate who cares about this country.
Vote Ron Paul.
Free markets work better than government programs.
It's a simple concept, really. You only have to understand 2 things...
1. Every penny given to the welfare recipient comes from somewhere... and it comes by reducing the capital within the free market. This reduces the overall productivity of the marketplace, so someone has to be poorer... no way around it.
2. People spending someone else's money on someone else is the most inefficient way money can be spent. The most efficient way to spend money is for you to spend your money on yourself. This is when you make sure the money gets spent correctly. This doesn't mean that the poor don't need to be helped, but it should done by private individuals through volunteerism, churches and charities rather than through taxation (which has it's roots in violence and coercion.)
Most "liberals" or democrats would do well to listen to Ron Paul to see what real classical liberalism means.
1. Robin did an excellent job of explaining his points, and commented on the usual "yeah, but" response.
2. Pro-welfare state people have little argument against this.
3. There's no flashy image to accompany it.
The de-humanization mentioned ion the article has other effects. A few generations ago, family, friends, and private charites would take care of the uneemployed, sick, or elderly who could not provide for themselves. There was an incentive to be civil and maintain ties to your community, who would help each other in times of need. Once government usurped these functions, many of the bonds that held people together were ripped asunder. The welfare chickens are coming home to roost, and anyone who has lived on a farm knows to watch where you step.