Welfare and values.
Originally written in 2003 this essay now takes on new importance in light of the Kahui-King tragedy. This dysfunctional family, awash in welfare benefits, allowed someone to beat two small infants to death and are now refusing to cooperate with the police in order to lay charges against the killer.
The US Bureau of Justice Statistics recently said that their annual survey of households shows that crime rates in the States have dropped to their lowest numbers in 30 years. In the last decade the victimisation rate went from 54 per 1,000 down to 23.
But criminologists say that the drop shouldn't have happened at all-at least not according to their theories. The Christian Science Monitor notes that the experts are "quick to list the reasons why the crime rate should be going up. The economy has made it much more difficult for young people to get jobs, so more are out of work and hanging around on the streets. There's also a growing anxiety about the economy and threat of terrorism that could lead some people to resort to drug use. Then there's the diversion of police from walking the beat in the neighbourhood to terror functions such as guarding bridges and airports. Add to all of that the fact that states and local governments have been forced to cut back on social services, and you have a prescription for trouble."
Now add to this the fact that over the last ten years many US states have made it easier for individuals to carry concealed weapons and various welfare reform laws slashed the number of people who were eligible to collect benefits, According to the dogma of the politically correct, crime should definitely have risen dramatically.
The political Left is fundamentally driven by a belief that human nature is malleable responding to social conditions. People are criminals because they are victims. People have poor work habits because they are victims. The blame rests with "social conditions" and if we throw enough money at the victims we'll solve the problems. The more money you throw at the victims the better things will become. And, of course, if you reduce such "social" spending you'll make things worse.
But what if this theory is wrong? What if, instead of these problems being caused by poverty, they and poverty were both caused by another common factor? If social problems are merely due to poverty then throwing more money at them should alleviate them. As funding goes up we should see a reduction in crime, a reduction in illegitimacy, a reduction in school truancy, a reduction in alcoholism, child abuse, drug use, etc.
But if the problems are rooted in values adopted by the individuals in question it is then possible that more funding, instead of alleviating the problems, may magnify them. If, for instance, someone ignores the potential consequences to actions they take they may suffer. If we in turn try to help them out by reducing the consequences don't we, in fact, reenforce the original dysfunctional value? Haven't we merely emphasised for them that their actions don't have consequences?-at least not for them.
Harvard sociologist Edward Banfield, in his celebrated book The Unheavenly City, noted that within any culture there are subcultures with differing values. Those values may lead to specific characteristics for that group. These, "secondary characteristics are probably caused, directly or indirectly, by the primary one... In any case, each subculture displays distinctive attitudes toward -for example-authority, self-improvement, risk and violence, and distinctive forms of social organisations, most notably of family organisation." (p. 47).
Banfield refers to these groups as classes. But he makes it clear that this category is nothing like that meant when Marxists use the term. "As the term is used here a person who is poor, unschooled , and of low status may be upper class; indeed he is upper class if he is psychologically capable of providing for a distant future. By the same token, one who is rich and a member of 'the 400' may be lower class: he is lower class if he is incapable of conceptualising the future or of controlling his impulses and is therefore obliged to live from moment to moment."
As might be expected those on the lower end of the class scale are the primary individuals who seem most affected by social problems. Banfield describes their world view and value system:
At the present-oriented end of the scale, the lower-class individual lives from moment to moment. If he has any awareness of a future it is of something fixed, fated, beyond his control: things happen to him, he does not make them happen. Impulse governs his behaviour, either because he cannot discipline himself to sacrifice a present for a future satisfaction or because he has no sense of the future. He is therefore radically improvident: whatever he cannot consume immediately he considers valueless,. His bodily needs (especially for sex) and his taste for "action" take precedence over everything else-and certainly over any work outline. He works only as he must to stay alive, and drifts from one unskilled job to another, taking no interest in the work.
Banfield says such individuals are "unable to maintain a stable relationship," they are often "suspicious and hostile". They have no attachment to the community or neighbours and resent all forms of authority. The "lower-class" household is usually "female based. The woman who heads it is likely to have a succession of mates who contribute intermittently to its support but take little or not part in rearing the children." Children raised in this atmosphere tend to adopt the values of their parents and thus repeat their mistakes.
Of course values are not the only factor. Certainly, as Hernando de Soto has pointed out so well, the legal and property rights system can have massive effects on prosperity. But within each system the various classes still exist and the lower classes, in the sense of their values, tend to have disproportionate problems with their lives. It seems very difficult to escape the conclusion that values individuals hold, and not the balance of their bank account, is a prime cause for the problems they experience.
Within any community individuals need to co-operate and work together with one another to better themselves. This is one of the basic functions of the market. But in a community consumed by the values described by Banfield it becomes very difficult to establish the relationships necessary to prosper. Francis Fukuyama points out: "Social capital can be defined simply as an instantiated set of informal values or norms shared among members of a group that permits them to co-operate with one another. If members of the group come to expect that others will behave reliably and honestly, then they will come to trust one another. Trust acts like a lubricant that makes any group or organisation run more efficiently."
The realisation that one often needs to put off immediate gratification to be better prepared for the future is another such value. This acceptance of delayed gratification allows individuals to prosper in many ways. For instance one rarely benefits from an education in the short term. Education is an investment for the future. When one opens a savings account they are delaying present day gratification to be better able to satisfy their own needs or wants at a later date. Investments in stocks, bonds or even a family business means that one puts off today's satisfaction for long term benefits. But those whom Banfield calls the lower class tend to give no thought to tomorrow. They dismiss education in many ways. They don't attend classes, they drop out, and they excuse their children for doing the same.
Funds received on Friday are often spent by Monday. And while poverty is usually given as the reason for this happening the fact is that such people often have funds for alcohol, drugs, or cigarettes. They can support a drug habit but not feed their children. They have money for smoking but none for rent. Even these preferences show a certain amount of short-term thinking. Health issues are ignored because the real results of poor life-style choices are more likely to be long-term than short term. No thought is given to what years of drinking, smoking or drug use may do to them. Reports from the UK, for instance, show that the "poor" have shorter life spans than the rich. But the "poor" are more likely to smoke and that one factor alone accounts for half the difference in life expectancy.
The refusal to weigh long-term consequences against immediate gratification accounts for many of the problems experienced by the permanent underclass. Sex may be fun but it has consequences. If you ignore the consequences this results in greater levels of illegitimate births as well as higher rates for sexually transmitted diseases. Of course, in many places in the world this illegitimacy leads to few consequences and welfare policies often reward it. The United States has welfare policies mostly devolved to the state or local level. And that means there are many different systems which allows comparison of results. James Q. Wilson pointed out: "many scholars now find that states with higher [welfare] payments tend to be ones in which more babies are born to welfare recipients. And when one expands the definition of welfare to include not only AFDC [Aid for Dependent Children] but also Medicaid, food stamps, and subsidised housing, increases in welfare are strongly correlated with increases in illegitimate births from the early 1960s to about 1980."
The welfare state was originally justified to care for those who "through no fault of their own" were needy. But almost from the day it was born it began subsidising the dysfunctional members of society. It was forgotten that some people take advantage of precisely such generosity. A film from 1951 with Ethel Barrymore, entitled Kind Lady, illustrated this truth. Barrymore is a wealthy widow who meets an enchanting, but down on his luck, artist played by Keenan Wynn. Slowly the artist cons her into helping him. He uses his wife (Angela Lansbury) and infant son to attract Barrymore's sympathy and soon he and his family are living in her home. Bit by bit he takes over her household and just when she's finally decided to make him leave he brings in acquaintances of his with backgrounds as seedy as his own and takes the woman and her maid captive. Slowly he begins the process of selling off all her belongings. His plan is to steal everything she owns bit by bit while convincing others he is her nephew and that she's gone insane. She outsmarts him just as he was about to have her murdered and he is arrested for his crime.
Most people can recount stories of con artists who feign needs to get what they want without having to earn it. Often such schemes are elaborate and well planned. Yet it is assumed that such people are not attracted to the welfare system. Yet welfare is much easier to fool. It is cumbersome and bureaucratic and simply can't take individuals into account. Rarely are individuals in-vestigated before being handed benefits. It's a system that attracts the worst because it's so easy.
Yet most welfare beneficiaries are not consciously scheming the system for their own benefit. They are merely part of the underclass who have accepted a value system which helps keep them poor. They are actually poor but welfare doesn't seem to improve their lot. It merely subsi-dises a self-destructive life style. These are people who respond to incentives as opposed to being con-scious con artists. Welfare pays them more if they have more illegitimate children so they have more illegiti-mate children. They may not even consciously make that choice. But the incentive to practice birth control was taken away from them since each additional child allows them to stay on welfare for a longer period of time and/or increases the benefits they currently receive.
Dr. Theodore Dalrymple works with the British underclass. His book Life at the Bottom is a distressing look at the values and lifestyle choices of the mainly white British underclass. He has described how children who actually attempt to better themselves are ridiculed and attacked-and not just from their peers but often from family members as well. Virtually any quality that helps one improve their living standards is attacked in the underclass culture. "Intelligence is not the only quality that the modern culture of the slums penalises, of course. Almost any manifestation of finer feeling, any sign of weakness, any attempt at withdrawal into a private world, is mercilessly preyed upon and exploited. A cultivated manner, a refusal to swear in public, an intellectual interest, a distaste for coarseness, a protest against littering, are the objects of mockery and obloquy; and so it takes courage, even heroism, to behave with common decency."
And here is where modern welfare schemes go crazy. The more dysfunctional a family unit (usually a single, unwed mother and her various children) the more caregiving it is qualified to receive. On top of that the dominant theory in "social services" is the preservation of this family unit guaranteeing that the children are exposed to the dysfunctional values of the mother. The mother may be a part-time hooker, a drug addict, or negligent of the children. But the paradigm is one that says the unit must be preserved. The sons thus frequently grow up as petty criminals when young and violent criminals when older. The daughters find themselves pregnant long before completing school and the entire process starts over again having replicated itself with the help of "benevolent" handouts. Each "family unit" is surrounded by alcoholism, drug use, violence, and criminality. They rarely exhibit any work habits or dedication to education or self improvement.
And this is what differentiates the current underclass from previous generations of the poor. In the past people were poor and this poverty acted as a motivational force. Those who didn't make an effort had a hard time of things. The poor had a work ethic and were willing to forgo immediate satisfaction for long-term benefits. It may have taken time for them to pull themselves out of their poverty but they did it. And they did it without a welfare system since one had not yet existed. Those who could not move themselves forward were at least able to help their children start at a slightly higher level of prosperity. Successive generations found their lot in life vastly improved from that of their parents and grandparents.
The assumption of the welfare state was that poverty was merely a lack of material things. What they didn't realise was that real poverty was a lack of specific moral values regarding the world we live in. A rich man, with no work ethic, will have trouble remaining rich. A poor man with a work ethic will not long remain poor. Dalrymple, compared the poverty of a Third World country to that of the British underclass. The Third World lacked material goods but this lack of goods didn't have "the same devastating effect on the human personality as the undiscriminating welfare state. I never saw the loss of dignity, the self-centredness, the spiritual and emotional vacuity, or the lack of sheer ignorance of how to live, that I see daily in England... the worst poverty is in England and it is not material poverty but poverty of the soul."
By subsidising people with material things the welfare state inadvertently destroyed, or helped destroy, the values required for a lasting solution to poverty. The availability of such vast amounts of money encouraged profligacy and a poverty of values. It financed the dysfunctional making the dysfunction itself more beneficial. The result was an explosion of dysfuctionality-even as the poor were being made far better off in material ways. In the end the increased benefits didn't lead to the reduction of the social pathologies it was meant to cure. It had, instead, caused them to explode and breed in ways heretofore thought impossible.
For years we've been told that a reduction in benefits, work testing, or any measure that would reduce access to government provided services or funding would increase social problems. And for years more and more funding and services have been made available. Yet the result has been greater levels of the very problems the system was meant to cure.
But in recent years the United States experimented by cutting welfare benefits and limiting the period of time that any family could spend on the dole. When the measures were passed the welfare advocates on the Left predicted social disaster around the corner. Crime would skyrocket, they promised. Social pathology would get entirely out of hand because of such a heartless policy. Yet the results weren't what they predicted at all.
As we've already seen crime levels continued to drop after the welfare benefits declined, even in spite of the downturn in the US economy. Ron Haskins, of the Brookings Institute, pointed out that by 1999 child poverty in the US among single-mother families was at the lowest level ever. Black children in the US were economically better off than at any time prior. For the first time in recent history the proportion of black children living with married parents actually increased: from 35 to 39 percent.
Heather Mac Donald notes what happened after the reforms: "Asked to look for work in exchange for their welfare checks, hundreds of thousands of women found jobs. From 1996 to 1999, employment among the nation's never-married mothers rose 40 percent. In 1992, only 38 percent of young single mothers worked; by March, 2000, 60 percent of that group were employed."
Violence against children declined as well. Mothers who were good workers became better mothers as well. It seems that while a job put additional stress on the women it also taught her things about herself. It increased her self confidence and improved her ability to cope with other problems-including the problems of their children. Poverty declined, child abuse declined, crime declined. Virtually all the social pathologies decreased. Once the life blood of state subsidies was removed these social viruses started dying.
The social reality for people changed and suddenly dysfunctional actions, which in the past were rewarded, became less viable. The demand for dysfunctional actions declined as the funding did.
It is true that many people are needy and are so because of misfortune. But welfare didn't help the unfortunate as much as the dysfunctional. The creation of the welfare state did mean that small numbers of truly needy people were helped. At the same time the values of large numbers of people were corrupted in a way that destroyed their ability to care for themselves.
Many of those who had good work values, but were temporarily in need, were able to improve things for themselves and quickly left welfare. But the dysfunctional found the welfare state as a means of subsidising a destructive lifestyle. They weren't there temporarily. They became permanent fixtures. And worse, as these dysfunctional family units proliferated, fed by the welfare system itself, the problem became larger and larger. Welfare became intergenerational with the original recipient still on welfare, while several of her children now copied her life style and had their own families who also lived via welfare. As time went by the truly needy made up a smaller and smaller percentage of those receiving benefits. Instead the permanent underclass became the primary beneficiaries. Welfare subsidised most social pathologies so it should be no surprise that as the subsidies were allowed to thrive or expand the social problems continued or got worse. Where they were cut off or limited the problems withered.
If this view is correct, and I think it is, then social welfare itself is a crime and the taxpayers are not the only victims. Generations of people have been corrupted and destroyed by the system itself. One could almost say that welfare is genocidal.
All items in this journal reflect the personal opinions of the author and are not necessarily those of the Institute for Liberal Values or its Board members.
Previous (Lethal welfare?) - Next (Warfare, welfare and the follies of planning.)
Nannies to Right of Us, Nannies to the Left of Us.
Welcome Home: the journeys of David Mamet and George McGovern.
Dominion Post in needless panic
Does Liberalism Have a Heart?
The moral problems of state power in regards to war.
Kiwi health: spend more, care less
Hurricanes and hot air: the sequel
Morality and Consistency: Why Left and Right both threaten freedom.
Ageing, population and the welfare state.
The bankruptcy of conservatism.
More journal entries...
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Institute for Liberal Values, Friday September 10th 2010. |
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