Let's get rid of all the doctors, since people are still sick.

Great Debates
1

I’m gonna make this short and sweet. Just because a system designed to address a certain problem has not eliminated that problem does not mean that we should scrap the system entirely. To wit:

The welfare system is imperfect. It was designed to provide a safety net to lift people from poverty, and there are still poor people. However, welfare does not cause poverty, no matter what the libertarians coughSmartasscough would have you believe. In fact, were it not for welfare, there would be more poor people, and that would be (sorry Kimstu) a Very Bad Thing.

OSHA is imperfect. Its regulations are sometimes needlessly complext and its bureaucracy is byzantine. But the solution is not to do away with OSHA, as some libertarians coughSmartasscough would have you believe. In fact, were it not for OSHA, workplaces would be far less safe, and that would be a Very Bad Thing.

Public education is imperfect. We’re graduating people who can hardly read or write, and using your tax dollars to do it. But the solution is not to privatize the schools and base educational quality on ability to pay, like some libertarians coughhell, all y’allcough would have you believe. In fact, if education was a fee-for-service commodity, we’d see illiteracy (and crime, and poverty, and unemployment) skyrocket in this country, and that would be a Very Bad Thing.

Affirmative action is imperfect. Race-based selection criteria are distasteful, and seemingly counter to a goal of a meritocratic, color-blind society. But institutionalized inequity is still preventing a level playing field, regardless of what some social scientists coughDinesh D’Souzacough would have you believe. In fact, were it not for affirmative action programs, the disparities in quality of life would be even greater between ethnicities, and that would be (all together now) a Very Bad Thing.

I know y’all think the market can just take care of everything. I know you regard social programs as the worst form of government interference. But the fact remains that, as imperfect as those programs are, we’d be worse off without them. This is especially true given the utter impracticality of Libertaria, or any other sociopolitical context whose success is predicated upon the proliferation of peaceful, honest people. Ain’t gonna happen, guys.
We believe, as a society, that the world would be a better place without disease and poverty and dangerous workplaces and rampant illiteracy and injustice. Seems like a safe enough assumption. And we’ve decided, in the manner of a constitutional federal republic, to work toward diminishing these problems. But just because we haven’t quite hit on the right way to go about it doesn’t mean that we should abandon our goals. No one has yet convinced me that the profit motive of the market, if given free rein, would do anything but make each of these things worse. Which is fine, 'cause that’s not what it’s designed for. But you have to understand that most people want health and education and safety to be accessible to the poorest among us–something that wouldn’t happen if these social programs were left to the dictates of an unfettered market.

(Yes, Matt, the Tom Tomorrow quote is eminently appropriate here–but you used it just the other week! Oh, okay…“It’s clearly time to stop addressing these problems–and start ignoring them!”)

2 
I think we have to examine whether or not the program has been effective or not. Nobody expects to eliminate all of a certain human behavior through certain legislations. But when such programs are shown to be utter failures over a period of decades then I think it is safe to say that the program should be ended or undergo signifigant changes.

Marc

3

and the fact that socalism doesent work:)

“This is especially true given the utter impracticality of Libertaria, or any other sociopolitical context whose success is predicated upon the proliferation of peaceful, honest people. Ain’t gonna happen, guys.”

no libertaria is based on giving the people what they want. If you honestly think that govermental people are just morally better than us your a idiot:)

There would be less poor people without welfare.

4

Wow, that’s…utterly irrelevant. Unless you’re claiming that public schools are evidence of creeping socialism. And hell, I forgot public libraries–why, they’re downright communistic! Think about it: You can take a book from a community collection without paying for it, and return it when you’re done. The books are there for everybody, rich or poor, honest or freeloading alike. And we’re letting children make use of this! I call for a congressional inquiry.

Yes. That’s what I think. I think governmental people are just morally better than us. What an accurate summation of my views. Oh, wait. I said nothing that even hinted at that.

Let me ask you something, though. With what part of this passage do you disagree:

“We believe, as a society, that the world would be a better place without disease and poverty and dangerous workplaces and rampant illiteracy and injustice.”

Hmm? I understand that Libertaria is “based on giving people what they want,” but those wants can often contradict each other. Libertarian solves the conflict by envisioning a society of peaceful, honest people who’ll provide for the sick and the poor through private charity. I’m saying that’s not realistic, and that there are some things which we, as a society, can pretty much agree upon as being important.

Explain how.

5

Fair enough. And I’d be the first to agree that there are problems with the social programs in this country–though my solutions are likely a hell of a lot different than yours. But how do you determine if a program has been effective? By what criteria do you judge failure? To me, the world would be worse without a safety net–there’d be more poverty, more hunger, etcetera. Same goes for public education, or affirmative action, or workplace regulation. So while I’m open to reforming these programs to more effectively meet their objectives, I’m opposed to scrapping them entirely without putting something better in their place. And scrapping them entirely, of course, is what many conservatives and libertarians advocate.

6

Gadarene wrote:

You’re starting off with a false analogy. The nature of the problems faced by these various institutions are very different, and you can’t simply plug one into a syllogism about another. What makes Medicine imperfect is a very different issue than what makes the school system, the welfare system, and affirmative action imperfect. Furthermore, you build a straw man by suggesting that replacing an institution with the hopes of establishing a better one, such as with privitization of the school system, is the same as simply eliminating it with nothing to take its place. This may be what some people argue for in terms of the welfare state, but this doesn’t make it logically analogous to eliminating Medicine and simply letting health take care of itself.

You’ll want to stick to making your arguments for these institutions individually, and drop this alalogy to Medicine, because it just isn’t going to work.

7

I think it’s a great analogy. Medicine does not see its goal as the eradication of illness, but as taking care of those who are ill. There is an implicit recognition that, at least in the near future, there are going to be sick people. Most people are not sick for a very long time, although some people are. Some people are sick through their own fault, while some can’t help it. We can eradicate certain causes of illness (i.e., smallpox) and greatly reduce the incidence of others. We can make great strides to help people avoid being sick. But when people get sick, we take care of them.

A great social welfare program would work similarly. It would not see its goal as the eradication of poverty, but as taking care of those who are poor. It would recognize that, at least for the near future, there are going to be poor people. Most people are not poor for very long (despite what most people believe), although some are. Some people are poor by their own fault, while some can’t help it. We can eradicate certain causes of poverty, and greatly reduce the incidence of others. We can make great strides to help people avoid being poor. But when people are poor, we take care of them.

To carry the analogy, the anti-welfare folks might say that we shouldn’t have insulin or hypoglycemic drugs available. “What incentive do people have to take care of themselves and avoid diabetes if they know that drugs and insulin will be there for them?”

Dr. J (for whom everything is a medical analogy these days)

8

DoctorJ wrote:

And a good millitary does not concern itself with killing everybody, just with taking care of those who need killing. It’s still not analogous.

For the forseeable future, there’s going to continue to be a market for pencil sharpeners. So what? This is a thin basis for an analogy.

Everyone is sick for a very long time, and this fact is so universal that every language has a word for it – our word is mortality.

Sure, only a hundred some-odd generations. Where did you get this notion that most people aren’t poor for very long?

So this means that we should tax the deserving poor for welfare costs the way we tax smokers for healthcare costs? I don’t think that’s what you mean, but that’s carrying out your own analogy.

Yet, one of the common arguments against the welfare state is that it becomes a major cause of poverty in itself, because it encourages behavior patterns that perpetuate poverty. Medicine, on the other hand, is not a significant source of illness.

As though poverty can simply be avoided. How do you propose it be done, by washing our hands and brushing our teeth?

Doctors heal the sick because that’s what they’re paid to do. The welfare state serves the poor so that they will not revolt against the system they have come to depend on.

Now this is just a point-by-point refutation of your analogy, which I make just for the sake of completeness. In fact, this formulation of the false analogy misses the point altogether because even if we take it that these paralells you draw are really paralells, and I have shown that they are not, they are not paralells of relevant criteria in determining whether two institutions can be reguarded as equally indispensible. CD-Roms resemble tortillas in many respects, but if you’re stuffing tortillas into your computer, you’re failing to distinguish relevant criteria.

9

I suppose that the medical industry can enjoy a degree of pride when it justifies its existence by pointing to the mountain of evidence that they have in fact made a difference, that people are better off due to the medical profession.

My wife and child would be dead instead of happy and healthy were it not for the medical profession. The average person’s life is greatly extended and it’s quality is much higher due to the same.

The sad fact is that many social programs cannot make the same claims, and have no evidence to support those claims if they did. Some can of course.

The intention of “curing proverty” does not alone justify a social program’s existence.

10

Gadarene’s topic is very close to something I’ve suspected for a while, having read many of the threads in Great Debates: that ideological battles are being fought over problems that are managerial in nature; ideological solutions are simply inappropriate in many (most?) cases.

My father is a senior civil servant for a provincial government in Canada; he works in the Department of Social Services (responsible for the administration of welfare and other social programs) at the level just below those political appointees that accompany every administration, and recieve top government jobs while their party is in power. He’s seen several wide swings of government policy.

He started when the New Democrats were in power (left wing). They lost to the Progressive Conservatives (right wing). The Conservatives, in line with their political views, cut payments to recipients and radically increased the welfare fraud section of the department (my father was in charge, for a while). Ten years later, the New Democrats were back in power.

Under the Conservatives, welfare fraud increased, as did the number of people recieving welfare. When the New Democrats returned to government, they eliminated the welfare fraud section, and used the money to increase the number of case workers and include a small increase to recipients, while reducing the welfare budget overall. Welfare fraud dropped; so did the number of recipients, along with the bureaucratic snafus that accompany badly managed government offices.

My point is that the ideological move of the Conservatives to take a very harsh line on welfare recipients failed, while the New Democrats succeeded because they accurately saw the problem as one of administering welfare. Decrease the funds, increase the motivation of recipients to defraud the system. Increase the attempt to police welfare recipients, and create a criminal mentality among the recipients that hampers administration. Decrease the number of case workers, making applying for and receiving welfare more difficult, and decrease the amount of direct supervision that recipients recieve and are subject to.

What succeeded was switching from policing to supervising, and from treating recipients as deadbeats to people who will eventually get off welfare. Recipients were better directed into training programs that helped them get jobs because they were better supervised by case workers; obvious fraud, like collecting a transportation allowance to collect a cheque when the recipient lived a block from the office, was easily caught because case workers knew their files better; people who lived together to pool expenses, while collecting cheques as people who live alone (meaning a higher cheque) were caught; people who collected cheques while driving their mother’s cadillac were noticed pulling into the parking lot.

Another successful program was implemented that involved letting single mothers collect certain benefits in addition to any money they earned from a job, allowing them to increase the money they got every month by finding work; it’s a common complaint among recipients all over North America that, considering the jobs that are available to them, welfare is better because it includes medical benefits, and it sometimes pays better, too. This solved that problem by cutting recipients off on a sliding scale according to the job they got; the overall effect was an increase in employment among single mothers, a decrease in government handouts to them, and a better living for them and their children.

The Conservatives failed at welfare reform because they imposed an ideological solution that was pragmatically unworkable. The New Democrats succeeded because they imposed good administrative changes on the system that weren’t particularly ideologically correct (in fact, they took a lot of heat from the radical elements of the party), but worked. Both parties agreed that people shouldn’t be allowed to starve in the streets; both parties agreed that welfare needs to be transitional support and not a vocation. The Conservatives let their ideology get in the way; the New Democrats (in this case) didn’t.

Take your favorite issue, and try viewing it through this lense: what problems are basically about managing things and not about the political principles of the warring factions? As SingleDad pointed out in his thread The Next Civil War, gun control is almost entirely about the practical issues of allowing the citizenry to be widely armed while avoiding the gun violence with which America is plagued today.

Offhand, abortion is the only issue that strikes me as intractably ideological in nature. Gadarene correctly points out that OSHA, public education, and affirmative action all suffer from practical difficulties in meeting their aims and being applied justly, but that their stated goals aren’t really disagreeable to most people.

The answer to bad management isn’t political orthodoxy, be it left wing or right wing. It’s good management, which is taking the stated goals and critically examining how well or how poorly they’ve been achieved, then changing things as necessary to meet those goals better. I doubt that non-rabid conservatives would have any problem with a well-run welfare or medicare system. I doubt that non-bleeding-heart liberals would have a problem with widespread gun ownership in the absence of widespread gun violence.

Kinda takes the wind out of a lot of debate, doesn’t it?

11

JohnnyAngel wrote:

Wait a sec; isn’t “replacing an institution with the hopes of establishing a better one” instead of with another definite system exactly “the same as simply eliminating it with nothing to take its place”?

hansel wrote:

Absolutely, dead-on correct. I am so much in agreement with you, I’m going to do something I almost never do, and shut up (only in this post, of course!).

12

xenophon41 wrote:

Nope. Look up the word “replace” in any standard dictionary.

hansel wrote:

The problem is that administrations are hard to change, beaurocracies are self-perpetuating and rigid by their nature. The changes you’re describing as a case in point of changing an administration over waging idealogical battles is actually evidence against you, because it was clearly idealogy that gave the left wing the necessary push to actually change the administration. That change was in itself an idealogical battle.

13

Damn. Since I’m shutting up, I guess I don’t get to suggest that you look up the words “insitution” and “hope” and then reexamine your statement until you understand that replacing an organized system of standards and practices with an idea through which such a system might or might not be developed is the same thing as replacing something with nothing. (Try this experiment at home: Have a friend pour milk into your left hand. At the same time, wish into your right hand as hard as you can. Monitor and record which hand fills up first.)

14

xenophon41 wrote:

This is merely a point of grammar. You think that whatever comes after the with' must be the indirect object of the verb, whereas with’ also introduces phrases concerning the purpose or manner in which the action of the verb takes place. When someone says, “He talks with great pride” they don’t mean there’s a guy named Great Pride talking back. For with' phrases introducing purpose, try looking for key words that express intention, like: intention,’ purpose,' hope,’ `idea.’ e.g.: “He drove to the house with the notion that she might be home.”

15

It’s merely a point of grammar? Haven’t you been calling me out over what are essentially matters of semantics?

Look, I think the medical analogy is a valid one. Like DoctorJ said, the job of the medical field is to alleviate what is perceived to be a negative condition in society–sickness. Doctors aren’t perfect, nor are they able to treat everybody. If good health care were more affordable and more prolific, there would be less sick people. But just because the medical profession is unable to help every single person doesn’t mean we should scrap the whole thing and start subsidizing homeopathy and herbal remedies. Far better to improve upon the existing institutional structure–facilitating efficacy and tending to systemic defects.

This is the part of my point that you’re missing, Johnny. (Even though hansel appreciated and articulated it quite clearly.) Hell, I italicized it in the OP. A social safety net, affirmative action, OSHA, and public education are all attempts to alleviate certain social conditions–intractable poverty, institutional racism, unsafe workplaces, and crime/illiteracy/uncivic culture/etc. None of these are perfect solutions–but each of them are more effective at addressing the problems than are the proposed alternatives: private charity, color-blind meritocracy, self-policing, and privatization. Given that, we should keep the institutional contexts we’ve got and attempt reforms, rather than scrapping 'em all just because they haven’t worked exactly as planned.

Hansel’s dead on: it’s not an ideological issue, it’s an administrative one. If you’d like to demonstrate that another solution would work better, fine…but simply pointing out the faults in the intitutions we’ve got proves nothing but that the institutions aren’t perfect. Get it now? So there’s no straw man here; I’m not saying critics want to tear down existing institutions without replacing them with anything. I’m saying that critics haven’t given good enough reasons to tear them down just yet.

16

**** wrote:

Sure. So are company policies and tax laws and cultural mindsets. I don’t see how this argues against treating administrative problems as primarily non-ideological.

I don’t follow you. If the New Democrats had followed ideological lines, they would have radically increased the welfare budget (they decreased it slightly), jacked up payments to recipients (increased only to the extent that the reduced budget permitted), thrown money at training programs good or bad (no changes except that case workers were better able to direct recipients to appropriate programs), and given up on controlling welfare fraud as a byproduct of capitalism (the increase in case worker’s directly reduced fraud). As it were, they listened to the senior civil servants, and implemented administrative changes over the objections of party theorists, then gave them a chance to work.

I’m not suggesting that left wing ideology was absent. I’m saying that it was secondary to improving the administration of welfare as a practical matter.

Do you disagree with my claim that “non-rabid conservatives [wouldn’t] have any problem with a well-run welfare or medicare system… [and] non-bleeding-heart liberals [wouldn’t] have a problem with widespread gun ownership in the absence of widespread gun violence”?

17

Another point–everyone seems to take as given that our social welfare programs are dismal failures. Says who?

Like I said, I don’t see the goal of the programs as reducing the number of poor people, but of taking care of those who are poor. As bad as it may be for some people, very few people starve to death or freeze to death in this country. That is what I consider the goal of these programs to be, and they appear to be doing a pretty good job of it. (Health care equity is another story.)

While I’m certainly not giving all the credit for this fact (that few freeze or starve) to our social programs, and I believe they could be better, I do think that many more people would freeze or starve without them.

Johnny Angel:

I’m referring to people who receive welfare. I don’t have the numbers handy, but the majority of people who receive welfare don’t receive it for very long. (In fact, under the new laws, you really can’t receive it for very long.)

Boy, where have you been? You must have missed those reports a few months back claiming that physician error was one of the top ten causes of death in this country. That’s not to mention adverse reactions to treatments, nosocomial infections, etc.

What I mean is that we can provide education, job opportunities, and other ways of helping people get out of poverty. Your perception of “the poor” seems to be of people that are born poor, die poor, and live fat off your precious tax dollars in between. People rise out of poverty. People who are not impoverished slide into poverty. There will always be poor people, but that doesn’t mean that the same people will always be poor.

Our welfare programs allow those who don’t have enough to get by to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. That’s what I pay them to do.

Dr. J

18

Gadrene wrote:

No, you are making an argument from analogy. An argument from analogy is valid only if the things being compared are similar in ways relevant to the conclusion. Semantics is the study of signs and symbols used to express ideas – not just any picking apart of somebody else’s writing counts. I did not object to your signs and symbols. I claimed that your conclusion did not follow from your premises – i.e., your argument was not valid. And I didn’t just assert it either. I explained what I meant. And when DoctorJ elaborated on the analogy, I took pains to show point-by-point how his formulation was invalid both by disanalogy and by irrelevant criteria.

You have not responded to my objections except to restate the invalid argument that you started with. As it is, there is no reason why anyone should take seriously the idea that eliminating social programs would be in any sense equivalent to eliminating the institution of medicine, or even that objections to social programs in any sense imply that they simply need to be gotten rid of altogether.

19

DoctorJ wrote:

If the numbers show what you’re saying, it’s still not a relevant criteria for an argument from analogy whose conclusion is that eliminating social programs is effectively as absurd as eliminating medicine.

I see your point, and I agree. If, for example, we were to nuke Europe, California, New England and even Oregon, Texas would become a very significant source of wine. Medicine has eliminated so many causes of illness that the numbers of physician errors can be bloated into ominous significance. I stand corrected. However, this still does not demonstrate a relevant analogy, because the welfare system has not eliminated most other causes of poverty.

I come from urban blue collar stock that came from poor hilbilly farmer stock that came from poor European farmer stock. My perception of “the poor” is that I am one of them. You, I take it, were born middle-class, since you have the impression that poverty is fleeting.

Fair enough, but that also is proof of a disanalogy. The people paying for the service aren’t the people recieving it.

20

Semantics: the study of meanings; the historical and psychological study and the classification of changes in the signification of words or forms viewed as factors in linguistic development; a branch of semiotic dealing with the relations between signs [not actual signs, knucklehead] and what they refer to and including theories of denotation, extension, naming, and truth (Webster’s Ninth Collegiate).

You’re telling xenophon s/he’s quibbling about definitions while announcing to me that I’m saying something other than what I’m really saying. Seems like semantics to me.

Your point-by-point refutation was, frankly, incoherent. And your objection was to the relation of the thread title to the OP–my main point was a hell of a lot more involved than, “Hey, medicine is like welfare and public education!” I’ve taken pains to show you–as has DoctorJ, and hansel, and xenophon–why your objections to the validity of my argument were themselves invalid. Not to mention irrelevant.

If you want to debate whether we’d be better off with something other than social welfare or affirmative action or OSHA or public education, please do–that would be a valid objection to the OP. If, instead, you’d like to talk about pencil sharpeners and brushing our teeth, I’d courteously suggest that you might not be in the proper thread.

Then forget the freaking medical analogy and address the damn argument on its merits, will ya? And open up your eyes–people are suggesting that social programs should be “gotten rid of altogether” all around you. Asmodean did so on this thread, implicitly, in a claim he hasn’t yet begun to prove–“there would be less people without welfare”–and Libertarians a-plenty are suggesting scrapping public education, welfare, and OSHA on what seems like every third thread on this board! Not to mention the fact that the second-most common objection to affirmative action, after “we shouldn’t judge people on the basis of the color of their skin”, is “fighting discrimination with discrimination just compounds the problem.” This rationale is used–surprise!–to justify ending affirmative action altogether.

Johnny, the type of illogic to which I’m referring is all too prevalent–and I think hansel is right; it’s ideological in nature. You don’t like the core values behind something–using my tax dollars to feed poor people is bad, for example–so you point to how it hasn’t worked and propose, as libertarians do, that we abandon government assistance for the private charity of peaceful, honest people. All this while claiming to share the core value of feeding the poor. But the best way to reform an imperfect system, if you share the stated goals of the system, is not to tear down the system and start anew.
There’s no evidence that privatized education would accomplish the objective–a better educated, civic-minded citizenry–more effectively than current or reformed public education.

There’s no evidence that letting companies police their own workplace safety would accomplish the objective–minimized workplace accidents and health hazards–more effectively than OSHA, however byzantine OSHA’s regulations may be.

There’s no evidence that abandonment of race-based preferences would accomplish the objective–a level playing field–more effectively than some form of affirmative action.

There’s no evidence that private charity (or whatever else people would propose to replace welfare) would accomplish the objective–the alleviation of poverty–more effectively than a social safety net.

If you don’t feel that it should be society’s job to accomplish these objectives, then you better work on getting elected or otherwise changing public opinion. Because right now, people want less poverty, equal opportunity, accessible education, and safe workplaces. And most of them are willing to spend some part of their tax dollars on a solution. All that’s left then is to tinker with the details, a job (again, as hansel pointed out) more administrative than valuative.