[politics] freedom not-to-starve

[trochee]

For 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.

Comments

[fructivore.livejournal.com]

A few thoughts:

- 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 trochee or imtboo or someone touched on, part of the ferocity of the American work ethic may come from the presumption that everyone has to bend their nose to the grindstone, shut up, and do what the Man says, too. If that's the case, then I say it's high time for us to evolve.)