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[politics] freedom not-to-starve
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mythalethe, who has recently been posting political rambles:
somebody I was reading was frustrated about an acquaintance's (bad) decision to pursue music while on welfare.
I was thinking about that, and I realized I feel like welfare -- the freedom not-to-starve -- is something we ought to provide as an absolute like freedom of speech.
I wrote (with some modifications to protect the innocent):
I feel like being angry because welfare recipients don't act like we want them to is a little bit paternalistic, isn't it?But who are we to say? I like to think of welfare as protecting all of us from crushing poverty and destitution, regardless of our misapprehensions about our futures, in the same way as the first amendment protects all of us from censorship, regardless of our idiot opinions. I think the Lyndon LaRouche cultists out on the quad are goofy when they're not insidious, but I also respect their right to speak.
To me, welfare is (or should be) like a different part of the social contract: everybody eats, even if they're totally silly about how they're spending their lives. But accepting that contract means -- to me -- that we don't take that away from "undeserving" people, because deciding who's "deserving" is like deciding whose speech is worthy of public display.
I am not saying that [the guy is] making good decisions. (I don't know him; he might be the next big thing for all I know, or he could be the worst kind of lamer.) I'm saying we ought to be pround of the fact that we, as a nation and a community, support people, even in the face of their own bad judgment.
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I like the idea of a right not to starve, but I don't personally want to fund it.
Along [Bad username or site: trochee'/ @ livejournal.com]'s lines I'd much rather fund specific projects: a music scholarship would be a perfect example! But otherwise welfare is apparently sufficient to make many people not want to do anything more.
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Everyone gets, say, two years of modest financial support to spend however they wish. And importantly, they can take this time at any point in their adult lives. Of course ideally they'll be doing something creative and constructive with the time - volunteer work, community service, art, whatever - but if they want to just time out and spend the time watching TV and smoking weed then so be it.
I was on the dole in Britain for a couple of years after university, as were many people I knew. While it was by no means state sanctioned, it was certainly a common experience amongst the people I hung out with. And the city we lived in - Brighton - made it easy to live that kind of giro lifestyle, for a little while at least (at that time the city's mayor was an ex-squatter). And while they'd never admit it, I think the city thrived on us educated, creative layabouts staying in the city and adding colour.
It was a really important time for all of us. Me, I got politically active, I was in a bands, I volunteered, I took a course in counselling skills, I took parole kids potholing, and I took a lot of drugs and watched a lot of crap TV. Then after two years I got myself a decent job at the university and moved on with my life, and importantly, paid taxes that paid for all of the above...
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America has a system that doesn't unable artists to make a place for themselves. Funding is extremely limited.
In France for instance, a lot of artist slive on a thing called RMI ( which is a sort of welfare but accessible to anyone who isn't employed or can't find work in what they call their profession. So basically everyone can get it).
A lot of anger in America against people who abuse welfare comes from a place of scarcity. It comes from a place of knowing that welfare is a limited ressource. But let's face it. The us government has enough money to give welfare to all people who want it and then even more.
The system wants you to believe this way.
The system wants you to say things like this.
Have you seen the movie Slam ?
Poetry, music and the arts are valid fields of work. How is one supposed to make it as an artist if not for outside individual or governmental help ?
It's a huge problem in this country and please consider that you might have been manipulated into thinking what you think by a system which doesn't want you to believe that the government should fund the arts.
There are a lot of people in France who are mad at the young people who "call themselves artists but use the money to drink and do drugs !instead."
So be it.
Some people will abuse the system , yes, and the French government knows it happens but to deprive the whole of the population of it, because abuse exists, is a conservative and radical stand.
Also, getting financial help isn't shameful.
It's living in a world where resouces aren't equally shared and doing the best you can.
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Except, importantly, for our ingrained understanding that Taxes Are Not Evil. Au contraire....
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I call them important passionate issues.
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I like the idea of welfare, but it has a flaw in that it only works if the majority of citizens choose not to depend on it. Someone has to grow the food and take the garbage to the dump. In the case of the US, I'm sure we could provide decades of welfare for the cost of the war in Iraq. Of course the powers that be wouldn't profit heavily from Haliburton support contracts then. Maybe if we worked out a way for Haliburton to exploit the welfare program, we could stop with the endless wars...
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- fundamentality of rights: We made "general welfare" one of the goals of our government back when we founded it, alongside justice, security, national unity, and liberty. Definitions change from one era to the next, obviously, but one of the things this says to me is that it's unacceptable for any of our people to live in unrelieved destitution (however we may define that at any given time). It would seem to me a particularly orc-minded view to argue otherwise.
- pragmatic considerations, I: Economically speaking, a consumer capitalist system fares badly the poorer the mass of its people are. It's no accident that the national prosperity of the 1990s was congruent with a return to pre-Reagan Revolution progressive national economic policy. Warren Buffett, ardent capitalist, raised some eyebrows with his comments along these lines. So from that point of view, giving people money, outright, that they'll then "just spend" on food, entertainment, and consumer goods is exactly what we want to do when they can't, or won't, find productive work.
- pragmatic considerations, II: The US economy moves about $10 trillion per year. The national government spends about $1.5 trillion of it, less when it's not in the throes of insane financial mismanagement. If 10% of all Americans (a huge number compared to what we have ever historically had) were fully dependent on a welfare system that provided them with subsistence income (a huge amount of money compared to what we've historically paid out) the total would still only come to about $40 billion. That's not chump change, but it's pretty close: the equivalent, if the federal budget were reduced to a human scale, of a person with an upper-middle-class income giving a few bucks a day to panhandlers. It's also an order of magnitude less than Social Security, and only the weirdest troglodytes claim that Social Security is a threat to national prosperity.
- threat to the work ethic: Not a chance. <grin> Our people are among the most hard-working in the world, to an extent which is sometimes ludicrous. If massive social welfare doesn't sink the French or the Dutch and their (relatively!) relaxed work ethics, it's certainly not going to sink us. (On the other hand, as