I Miss Bush

[DanaC]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

But now don't you think you are adjusting the model to fix your own personal opinion? Because any idealist could put anything they want into that opinion as you define it. If I think some form of person transportation is necessary to my survival then someone else should provide it to me. And if I don't think I make enough money to get those things that I think I should have, for what ever reason, then someone else (the government) should provide it for me. And the government should be available in selected cases to do that. But for the majority of situations it should be a stop gap, not a means to an end.

What you think is necessary to survival, and what can be shown/proved to be necessary to your survival are very different matters. As Sam pointed out: it is not government's job to provide each individual with a car. It is government's job to ensure that there is a functioning public transport system, accessible to all and with routes that aren't profitable given subsidies to make sure no one community is left unserved.

It is also not government's job to ensure that I personally have a PC in my house and a broadband connection. It is however, in my opinion, government's job to ensure that there are public terminals, in libraries for example, available to all. It is also government's job to ensure that all schoolchildren are given access to such technology in order that they are not disadvantaged by a lack of computer literacy.


To me, it seems obvious that it is in my nation's interest for as many people as possible to be able to participate in society and the economy. It is of social value that even the least resourced of us has a standard of living above and beyond abject and hopeless poverty. It is of economic value that those people who are at risk of being excluded from the economy altogether, be helped to retain an economic presence. So, for example, foodstamps make a lot less sense to me than a cash benefit payment which allows the recipient to 'spend' within the economy, without being effectively coralled into a closed and deeply uncompetetive, separate tier of that economy.


As a socialist, I believe in a very basic premise: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Now obviously, in practice life is not that simple. People are not that simple. People do not always do what is best for themselves, or the rest of us. And without an impetus to work, or contribute, good intentions eventually dissolve into selfishness. Badly handled, assistance can exacerbate distress, or sanction selfishness to the detriment of the whole.

At the end of the day it is a matter of balance and judegement. Weighing up the social and economic harm of having large swathes of underclass alienated from the mainstream of the economy and engaged instead in a kind of sub-economy, from which are drawn few or no taxes, and which carry little or no consumer weight. Essentially, weighing up the harm of allowing people and families to fail to such an extent that they are no longer able to function as effective members of society. At the same time, weighing up the social and economic harm of giving assistance, of sanctioning a self-selected exclusion from the active economy, by a few, in order to prevent the unwanted exclusion of a much greater group (imo).

Most western countries, the US included, have got a handle on the idea that they don't actually want large numbers of people starving on the streets. It is not desirable that we have children chasing tourists in the train stations, begging for coin. So, to varying degrees we implement safety nets. But because we wish to deter as many people as possible from seeking those safety nets, we make the assistance offered unpalatable and humiliating.

This seems a retrograde step to me. If the assistance on offer is unpalatable and humliating, then those who have no choice but to seek it for long periods can become psychologically damaged by the experience. Not only have they become excluded by circumstance from the economy, but they have also become excluded from mainstream society and culture. Far from encouraging greater levels of effort on their part, this is actually more likely to compound the problem: their life becomes demotivating, depressing, and deskilling. The ritual humilliations involved in accessing such assistance serve to damage self-confidence, increase the social gaps, and entrench the individual (and even whole families) in inactivty. It makes them less likely to get through an interview successfully, both because they are less able to finance jobsearch, travel, interview clothes and so on, but also because a lack of self-confidence and self-worth do not make for good interviews.

You said at one point in this discussion ( I think) that the answer is not to throw money at the problem. I see things a little differently. I see the past twenty-five years as a race to the bottom. Lower and lower benefits, harsher and harsher conditions, greater and greater levels of approbation. We have long since dispensed with the carrot and have been using bigger and bigger sticks. Yet, no matter how harsh we make life on welfare; no matter how humiliating we make the process; no matter how pitful the sum given; no matter how many people we exclude from assistance, the need has not diminished.

In the early 19th century, Britain altered its approach to dealing with poverty. Poor relief, once given to families out in the community, along with wage top-ups given to certain workers during periods of need (the speenhamland system) were scrapped. Instead relief would be given only through becoming an inmate in the workhouse. At the same time, those workhouses were deliberately made as terrible as possible. This was documented, in debates and letters, in which the main designers of the New Poor Law expressed the idea that, in order to ensure that the idle sought work and saw relief as an absolute last resort, it must be made as unpalatable as possible, that food should be sufficient for continued life, but not sufficient to remove hunger; that men and women should be separated, even if married, and children housed separately from their parents. They were given meaningless, body-breaking work and subjected to brutal regimes. Uniforms identified and dehumanised them in the same way as prisons do now.

It didn't solve the problem.

They chased the bottom: they never reached it.