Don’t know where that smiley came from. I hate smileys and never use them, but…
I think you’re still missing a critical part of the libertarian/cconservative (as opposed to social conservative) mindset. It’s this:
I was born a free person. I am no one’s chattel. I live in a society, so I should follow rules that society sets up to keep people from interfering with each other, and a social contract that provides for the public infrastructure necessary to maintain a civil society.
But you cross a line when you vote to essentially put a gun to my head and force me to give money I earned to someone else, in the name of ‘social justice’. You have just turned me into a slave. This is fundamentally different from taxing me to pay for my share of the public expense.
This has nothing to do with charity or lack thereof. It’s a basic fundamental position: No one has a right to make demands on the freely earned property I have collected in the course of living my life merely because someone else ‘deserves’ it more, or has a ‘greater need’ for it. The parts of the social contract I reject are those that treat citizens as commodities - sources of revenue for the ‘greater good’. We are free people, and government is our servant. Not the other way around.
That’s the philosophical argument. The practical argument is that this is the best way to construct a society anyway, because people work best when they work in freedom, and the market is a very good mechanism for allowing them to interact with each other. When government meddles in the market for social reasons, it does economic damage. Government is not, and can never be, as efficient as the market. There are sound technical reasons for this. And because the market is more diffuse and diverse, when mistakes happen they are localized in impact and corrected quickly. When government gets involved, mistakes can have huge impact. And governments make mistakes all the time.
The final conservative argument is the slippery slope. Regulations beget more regulations. Pass a law setting a speed limit, and suddenly you find yourself having to pass laws against radar detectors and plastic windows over your license plate. Add a new tax for something, and before you know it you’ve had to pass fifty more new regulations to deal with the side effects or close loopholes. The growth of regulation spreads until society begins to choke under their weight. Government is dangerous. Power corrupts. We run the risk of death by Nanny-State or a mutation into Fascism or Socialism.
Like the frog in the water slowly being turned to boil, you don’t see it while it’s happening. Unless you’re vigilant. This is probably the ‘core’ argument for conservatives of both kinds. The worry that an increasing tide of regulation will lead away from freedom and back into authoritarianism or tyranny. So we view proposals for new regulations with skepticism, and we tend to be strict constructionists because we see constitutions as the primary protection against a majoritarian drift into statism.
So poor people have a lot of babies. There’s nothing new or different in that.
I once thought that one defining characteristic of a conservative was to support a large military establishment and military campaigns overseas, and liberals to be basically anti-military, accepting at best a very small military in a purely defensive role, with very few (if any) forces outside of the country.
I know that that was a very simplistic view, and that many times we have liberals and conservatives (who often oppose each other) advocating similar (or even the same) policies.
What I don’t notice in this paragraph is a justification for private property protections being paramount. But that assumption appears in your next paragraph.
Private property protections are every bit the social fiction that taxes are: they basically constitute your putting a gun to my head and telling me that I’m not allowed to sleep on the land where you sleep.
Don’t get me wrong: I think this social fiction is pretty necessary for maintaining a civil society. However, so are other social fictions, such as taxes.
Daniel
Obviously, it’s your choice of bumper stickers.
Still doesn’t answer the question.
Okay, let’s give you the rosiest possible scenario: governers outnumber people of mercy by ten to one; a million and a half orphans aren’t starving in the streets of Zambia; homeless people are not organizing for recognition in Europe; today’s technology compared to Victorian technology is a non-factor in the efficiency of charity — let’s give you all that despite whether it’s accurate.
The question is, how do you know that those governers — however many there might be — care more about disease and starvation than they do about their own interests?
The answer is that you don’t care. Only the outcome matters. Which I think answers your earlier post too, although perhaps with more brevity than you’d prefer.
You don’t. You try to build their interest into the system.
Sam Stone:
I share this fear, and, more specifically, the fear that the structure of public-assistance type programs is prone to create social structures that keep people stuck where they are and/or otherwise swells the state bureaucracy. I totally agree that the biggest perpetual threat to our freedom is always our own government.
Where I tend to part company with libertarians in general is the perception many of them have that the recipients of public assistance, food stamps, special cheap or free housing, or other social programs designed to act as a safety net to help the poor stay in their situations out of “soft apathy”, i.e., the attitude that “I’ve got enough coming in, skimmed off you hardworking taxpayers, that I don’t have to work, so I’ll just laze around collecting”.
In my seldom humble opinion, any pretense of understanding capitalism has to include the following fundamental facts regarding how it operates:
• The less you have, the less you are able to obtain more. This is true of raw monetary assets (if you have a billion in hand, you almost have to be congenitally obtuse to avoid making millions off it just as a consequence of where you store it; if you have a couple thousand, you can invest in a room to rent, get a phone, print up some resumes, and buy interview-appropriate clothing, but you’d better land a job in your first month of searching; if you’ve got 37¢ in your pocket and everything you own is in a pair of plastic bags and your clothes have been slept in for 3 days, a job may be practically as challenging a prospect as socking away a couple million by the end of the month).
• The system “needs” the poor, it needs “losers”. In part, this is true in the same simple mathematical sense that 50% of all residents of Wyoming are shorter than the average person in Wyoming. It is also true in the additional sense that at any given time, employees are sought to perform various functions and the system, as system, operates when there is a pool of potential employees who are motivated to seek employment. A hypothetical system in which absolutely no unemployment existed —where employees are found only by luring them away from other jobs they already have, thus immediately generating a new “hole” to be filled — would not be stable. A hypothetical totally successful liberal program to educate the underclasses — where there is absolutely no one to be found anywhere who does not have several PhD’s, MCSE’s, MBA’s, and certifications in salon nail care — is not going to fix that, either. There simply has to be a pool of people wishing to work, seeking work, pretty desperate for work and not too picky about what they’ll take, but nevertheless not currently employed, or the existing system falls apart. It’s not because of Welfare Queens and it’s not because the underclass hasn’t been given the opportunities that would allow them all to get jobs. It’s because you can’t fucking have capitalism without desperate poor folks snapping at whatever job-bait comes along.
• As a consequence of the above two, it is pretty much inevitably going to be in the nature of the jobs on the lowest tier that job security is near to zero, that turnover is rapid, and that therefore, for any given person obtaining a job on that rung, it is not a permanent or stable solution to unemployment and poverty.
The social welfare programs tend to manifest two attitudes simultaneously: “We need to have a safety net, so people who have no resources at the moment don’t just starve and suffer”, but “We need to provide the safety net only for people who haven’t and/or can’t get back on their feet, and not mollycoddle them or make things so cushy that they just relax in the safety net and don’t clamor for jobs”. Paradoxically, the result tends to be the opposite of the apparent attitudes:
• In the name of ensuring that applicants are duly qualified, i.e., sufficiently without resources and genuinely trying to get on their feet, procedures and qualification-barriers are established which tend to make the services of the so-called “safety net” unavailable to those who are not already in it, or at least unavailable until they expend substantial energy securing qualification / negotiating application procedures. Example: you may not be able to get “welfare” if you do not have an address, a verifiable address at which you can prove you receive mail and for which you have some form of rent receipts.
• In the name of making the safety net fully available to those who do properly apply and qualify and participate in the safety-net programs, the portions of the qualifying tests that genuinely apply to testing whether or not participants are trying to get out of their situations are often so leveled to least-common-denominator that they are meaningless. Example: unemployment insurance may require applicant to submit names, dates and addresses of five! whole! jobs! for which they submitted applications and resumes in the last week. Or two weeks. Or three jobs in the last two weeks. Example: rehabilitation centers ostensibly set up to expand applicants’ skill-sets and give them experience that will make them more employable may be uniformly required to attend classes that teach them how to tie their shoes and run a washing machine, and then given a broom and a wastecan to sweep up litter and dispose of it from subways or public areas.
• In the name of justifying help rendered by directly showing it to be limited to initiatives designed to get participants back on their feet rather than constituting some form of mollycoddling, participant discretion is eliminated in nearly every instance. So rather than a qualifying applicant being given a menu of possible forms of help and choosing from among them, and then, having thusly acquired resources, choosing how to use them based on his or her own strategy, the qualifying applicant is most often confronted with a binary yes/no option of accepting a broad-scale form of help that imposes a plethora of rules and regulations (most of them jaw-droppingly stupid, cumbersome, and without discernable purpose aside from regulation for its own sake) that tend to paralyze the applicant for being able to do anthing but continue to participate in the help-program, receiving the static benefits thereof but generally but generally held back from being able to lift him/herself out of the situation without running afoul of the rules. Example: the care center for homeless adults may demand that applicants participate in day programs that are intrinsically incompatible with attending college or being present at day jobs. Example: accepting a part-time job that doesn’t pay enough to cover the rent may cause cancellation of public assistance benefits with a penalty time before applicant can reapply.
Sam and company, we could really get on the same page here as far as the godawful state of governmental programs, I know we could. We might even be able to craft some solutions (at least partial solutions) that would make upward mobility more possible from the bottom and make the transitioning process more efficient (while making no pretense that there won’t be a perpetual layer of people passing through that stage, btw).
But you aren’t going to ally successfully with the likes of me if you don’t rethink some of the victim-blaming y’all tend to do, and you’ve also got to learn the difference between folks who, like me, are harshly critical of social-welfare systems, and old-style big-government liberals who defend them and attribute every problem to there not being enough such programs.
I think this is overstated. Some recipients are like this; others are not. Those that are not tend not to stay on welfare for very long.
When conservatives talk about a culture of dependency, they are talking about a subset of the poor. I realize that some have a vested interest in blurring that distinction, but it is there nonetheless.
Which is why welfare reform was structured the way it was. Most people who are on welfare don’t stay there for the rest of their lives. Thus the three-year limit or five-year lifetime limit did not affect them. Those limits were aimed at the subset who were not making a reasonable effort at getting themselves off welfare, and needed a kick in the pants to get going. How successful that kick might have been is debatable, but it was not based on the notion that anyone who qualifies for welfare is worthless or lazy.
Well, sure, but that is hardly unique to capitalism.
The interesting thing about US-style capitalism is that people who start off with even average or below average asset levels can make it out of poverty. If you graduate from high school, don’t have children you cannot support, get married and stay married, and stick with whatever job you can find without quitting before you have a better job - even if it is unpleasant - you tend not to stay poor the rest of your life. And none of these conditions seem all that onerous to me. The notion that I ought to be taxed so that those who cannot or will not fulfill these conditions can live beyond their means - that seems unfair. YMMV.
I don’t see why either system would fall apart. Wages would rise rapidly, no doubt, in either system - up to the point where it became cost-effective to automate the menial jobs. But high labor demand is hardly an unsustainable condition for capitalism - see the economic history of Europe after the Black Death for an interesting exposition on the position of the marginal laborer. Wages went up substantially, and the conditions of the farm laborers who made up a majority of the working populace benefitted. Stadtluft macht frei. 
Don’t see what this has to do with capitalism.
Same objection. ISTM that this is largely a function of bureaucracy, especially those administered at the government level.
Wouldn’t it make sense, therefore, to encourage many smaller-scale efforts, administered by (for instance) smaller, local charities, that would avoid the “one size fits all” approach? Which is in support of the conservative notion of decision-making at the lowest practical level - i.e. limited government and private charity over big federal bureaucracies?
Regards,
Shodan
I think it confuses matters greatly, unless you can explain away the apparent contradiction. Why does it not matter whether governers are charitable when it does matter that the outcome of their efforts is charity? Doesn’t that mean that you’ll have to force them to be charitable? And if they have the armies, how do you do that?
But they, as governers, are the system builders, aren’t they? They write the laws, interpret the laws, and execute the laws, right?
I think you almost have to interpret the “make sure their interests work toward the common good” as an endorsement of capitalism.
Or, to put it another way -
[ul][li]If you spend your own money on yourself, you want the best value at the lowest price. []If you spend someone else’s money on yourself, you want the best value, and price is no object. []If you spend your own money on someone else, you want the lowest price, and value varies with the value of the person. [*]If you are spending someone else’s money on someone else, neither price nor value is a concern.[/ul]Welfare workers tend to fall more into the last category.[/li]
Regards,
Shodan
Shodan:
Agreed. In my post to which you are responding, you will find what’s practically a treatise on what structural economic factors (including those intrinsic to capitalism and those endemic in social-welfare programs) conspire to perpetuate that culture of poverty. It (C of P) doesn’t mostly persist due to chronic culturally-passed character flaws, but, rather, those character traits are adaptive in the face of the structures that I’ve described.
In particular, the welfare systems (regardless of the intent of their designers) tend to charge, as the price of receiving help, not so much their “sense of pride” and “self-respect” and other abstractions (although it may do that as well), but rather their freedom of motion and choice, and does so in such a way as to enforce system-dependency and interfere with mobility upwards-and-out.
Please re-read.
Yes, and they are held accountable, to a greater or lesser extent, by the law and by the populace.
If they grab total power and are not accountable, well, they have total power and are not accountable.
How does that differ from any position of power, whether governmental or charitable?
Well, you’ve alleged that capitalism requres some people to be poor and desperate, but I don’t see how you have demonstrated it.
But that runs counter to the observed fact that most people who receive welfare do not do so long-term. If capitalism requires people who receive welfare to be dependent on it, why don’t most people who receive welfare become dependent on it?
Regards,
Shodan
if you are Liberal, you think that things should change somewhat, in the name of one’s own self-interest.
If you are Conservative, you think that things should stay about the same, in the name of one’s own self-interest.
Let me give you a perfect example: Public health care. The slippery slope here is that once the government is paying for my medical bills, suddenly my lifestyle choices become valid targets of government regulation. I was saying that 20 years ago, and people laughed when I’d say things like, “you watch - you let the government control our health care, and before you know it they’ll be telling us what we can or can’t eat, what hobbies we can enjoy, what safety equipment we must have, ad nauseum.” I got accused a lot of being hysterical, because ‘reasonable people’ would never agree to something as foolish as say, a tax on snack food.
But the definition of what’s ‘reasonable’ changes as new norms are adopted. I remember the fight over mandatory motorcycle helmets. Once that passed, the fight shifted to mandatory bicycle helmets. And mandatory seat belts. The usual argument? “We have to pay for your health care, so we have a public responsibility to make sure you don’t cost us more than you should.”
Just a couple of days ago my wife pointed out an article on CTV.Ca, entitled, “Junk Food - the new Tobacco”. The argument went on to say that government was beginning to recognize that the new battlefront in public health was overeating, and that a consensus was shifting towards governments regulating the industry or taxing it or otherwise passing laws to stop people from eating what they want.
I don’t think you get my argument. I’m not stereotyping poor people or claiming they are especially lazy. The economic argument is simple: When you subsidize something, you get more of it. Subsidize poverty, you’ll get more poverty. This has proven true time and again. In countries that have very liberal sick leave laws, for example, more people tend to call in sick for work. If you compare countries that have more generous unemployment benefits to those that don’t, you’ll find that people tend to stay unemployed longer. When New Zealand subsidized fertilizer, farmers over-fertilized.
The problem with welfare is that the longer you are on it, the more destructive it becomes. You become less employable, more children are born into welfare families and learn bad habits, etc.
This is not a knock against the poor. You can find the same thing when rich people are subsidized. For example, subsidized federal flood insurance has had a nasty side-effect of causing more rich people to build expensive houses on eroding beachfront property - areas where the insurance would otherwise be prohibitively expensive or impossible to get.
The people hurt most by these big-government anti poverty programs are the poor.
I also forgot another argument against government before - regulatory capture. This is widespread and insidious. What happens is that grassroots campaigns cause laws to be passed against industry to ‘protect’ the people. But once the laws are passed, the activists go away and stop paying attention. But the companies affected by those laws deal with them daily, and they establish lobbyists, fund politicians, and otherwise twist and subvert the laws to their own benefit. The recording industry would be a good example. Or the dairy industry.
This is less true when you think of utility instead of absolute income. In other words, a billionaire can make a million dollars easier than I can, but a million dollars means much, much more to me. In terms of actually being able to measurably improve my life through my own labor, I can do just as well as the billionaire, or maybe even better. The absolute amounts are smaller, but the percentage gain may be larger.
Not at all. You’re engaging in the ‘zero sum’ fallacy here. Here’s a thought experiment for you:
Let’s say I’m really good at making chairs, but I’m lousy at making tables. I can make four chairs a week, but it takes me a year to make a table. You, on the other hand, are great at making tables, but lousy at making chairs. You can make a table in a month, but it would take you four months to make four chairs.
So, if we don’t trade, I’ll have a table and four chairs in a year and a week. You, on the other hand, will have a table and four chairs in five months. You’re more productive than I am. You’re ‘richer’.
So you come to me with a proposition: You’ll make a table for me, if I’ll make the chairs for you. Now you make two tables in two months, give one to me, and I give you four chairs. Are you better off?
In the meantime, I can make eight chairs in two weeks, because I’ve got a cool chair-making machine. So after two weeks of labor, I get a table and four chairs. Am I better off? Yes. Who got the ‘better’ deal? Which one of us ‘lost’?
We are clearly better off trading with each other. Society and both individuals. When government enacts regulations and selectively taxes society, it puts roadblocks in front of many otherwise mutually advantageous transactions. That has a large economic cost - estimates are in the trillions of dollars per year for the cost of regulations to society. They force capital to flow in directions other than where it wants to go. They also distort the value of goods and services, which leads to inefficient choices.
This is not true. I understand your point of view, but I see the issue from a completely different perspective. To me, ‘the unempoyed’ are just citizens who have not chosen to enter into a contract with someone for pay. Presumably because there are either no jobs to be had, or the person is not willing to work for the wage being offered. That’s his choice. There will always be low paying jobs, because some jobs are only worth doing if they can be done with very low labor costs. It’s not an arbitrary thing, or social snobbery, or the rich keeping the poor down. If people were willing to work for $2/hr, you’d see all sorts of jobs being offered doing things like picking up litter, collecting recyclable materials from ditches, and other very low-value tasks.
The minimum wage, absent government regulation, would be the natural line dividing the types of work we are willing to do from the work that has so little value that no one in our society will do it for the money it’s worth. It’s a reflection of reality.
But it’s not expected to be. Most minimum wage jobs ARE temporary. Not too many get a retirement watch from McDonalds. Minimum wage is simply the wage offered for the lowest value jobs we are willing to do. If you think you are worth more than that, it’s up to you to convince potential employers of it. It’s your responsibility. And if you join McDonalds and flip burgers for forty years without any attempt to better your situation, then you got paid exactly what you were worth.
That’s just about it for me. I’m actually for a fair amount of social spending, because I do think that wealthy people have a responsibility to the truly destitute and needy. The handicapped, the elderly, children, people otherwise disadvantaged for some obvious reason. I also believe that if you let your poor become too poor, you destabilize society. You get riots and burning cars. So we do need a safety net.
But yes, welfare should be temporary, and it should not be easy. It should be society’s emergency funding being used to help you get on your feet. I would like to see it take the form of things like job training assistance, financial aid to help someone stay in school, or catastrophic medical coverage for those who would be wiped out by sudden illness. I don’t think we do anyone any favors when we gather our poor into neighborhoods and ghettos and then give them subsidy checks every month that tends to keep them there. The poor are the ones hurt the most.
These are technical matters. I’m not interested in using my philosophy as a backdoor means of screwing over poor people. If I didn’t think they should get help, I’d say so. That’s not the case. If there’s a problem with indigent people not being able to get welfare because of no fixed address, we can solve that problem and close that loophole. I’ve got no problem with that.
So government doesn’t work very well. That’s kind of my whole point. Those who depend on government soon find that government isn’t very dependable. Lets do less of that.
And I’d say the best way to help those move up from the bottom is to create a vibrant, healthy, fast growing economy in which they get to start from a position of being on a rising tide lifting all boats already. The poor of today are, on average, richer in America than they’ve ever been. Not just in per-capita GDP and all the standard measurements, but by living in a society that has created cheap computers, more reliable vehicles, better entertainment, cheaper travel, and better health care. They also benefit when we land men on the moon or crack the human genome.
The poor have more opportunities today to move up than they’ve ever had. The internet has allowed the creation of micro-businesses. Minimum wages are rising. The cost of products is coming down in real terms as growth outstrips inflation. The poor have access to better materials, healthier foods, cheaper fruits and vegetables, and access to the same internet resources that the rich have. You can educate yourself if you have to, just sitting in front of your computer.
And yes, I know there are some people who do not have homes, let alone computers. Those are the people we need to help.
I hope you can see now that I’m not victim-blaming.
I was going to add that welfare’s not a big issue for me. Honestly after welfare reform was enacted in the U.S. and Canada, I don’t think it’s all that bad the way it is. I would like to see more creative market-driven solutions applied to helping out the inner cities, because that’s where the real problems are.
The biggest danger, from my perspective, is simply the growth of entitlement programs. That’s the giant elephant in the room. It’s not very stable when politicians pass laws that cause huge intergenerational exchanges of wealth, which is what happened with Social Security. And that problem is getting worse. Medicare is another.
After that, I’m more worried about direct government manipulation of the economy through subsidies, discriminatory taxes, and tariffs, and civil liberties violations like hate-speech laws, laws against flag burning, and espeically regulations restricting political speech.
Welfare’s pretty far down the list of concerns for this quasi-libertarian.