Here Come Da JudgeFollow

Specifically, more people dependent on welfare (I'm using this in a very broad sense to mean basically any directed form of state provided assistance to individuals). Of course, that by itself isn't indicative of a problem because you could argue that more people receiving welfare just means that more people are getting the help they need (which is the traditional view espoused by most Liberals on this issue).

That view is correct if and only if those people who are receiving welfare would have needed it whether welfare existed or not. So you'd have X number of people in a specific set of financial conditions which would qualify them for the welfare assistance if the welfare didn't exist, and the exact same number of people in that financial state if welfare does exist. In that situation, the argument of the Left would have merit and we'd see welfare as a purely positive thing.


The problem is that, just as Conservatives have predicted for 40-50 years, the very act of creating various welfare-like programs tends to increase the number of people needing them over time. So if 40 years ago, 3% of the population was earning the equivalent of say $10k/year or less, today maybe 5% of the population is earning that amount. It's a pretty clear trend, if by no other measurement than the relative amount of money we spend on these programs and the continually growing apparent "need" for yet more.


A core problem with this is that the very methods used to measure poverty are weighted to help obfuscate this effect. There are a couple of broad methods to measure poverty, but both of them calculate poverty after accounting for government assistance programs. Thus, if each of those earlier mentioned people making $10k/year or less received sufficient benefits to raise the total "earnings" to a value just above whatever number we've designated as the poverty line, those people wont count as being "poor", even though they clearly are.


And that issues calls into question the point of the whole thing. With poverty comes a whole host of social problems. That's presumably why we do all of this in the first place. But another thing we've learned over this period of time (which shockingly was also predicted by conservatives) is that the social problems associated with poverty aren't largely correlated to the resulting "earnings", but the base earnings. Basically, a guy earning $8k/year, but receiving sufficient help to raise those earnings on paper to say $15k/year still tends to statistically suffer and cause the same social problems (crime, drugs, gangs, etc) correlated to an $8k/earner prior to implementing the program. In other words, welfare does not change the social "state" of the recipient. It just provides them with sufficient goods and services to meet some arbitrary economic equation we've cooked up. We aren't really solving the problems associated with poverty, we're just making the accounting books look good.


What we're basically doing is fixing the end numbers in some economic tally sheet, but actually making the problem worse. Nothing we're doing reduces the rates of crime, drugs, violence, gangs, prostitution, etc related to poverty, but we *are* increasing the rate at which people fall naturally into an economic state which will increase the incidence of those social ills. It's a horrifically bad policy to pursue. As I pointed out earlier, private charity tends to be self correcting. They don't become institutionalized. Whole segments of our society don't become dependent on it. And the true rate and problems associated with poverty don't increase over time. In fact, they arguably decrease (at least to some minimum under which we're unlikely to improve).


What is "obvious" about this is what I call the "free lunch" argument. If I ask a thousand people how many of them need a free lunch today, some will say they do, but most wont. They either have one, or can obtain one on their own, or are ok with not having one. If I open up a free lunch stand and start handing out free lunches, the percentage of those people who will line up to get the free lunch will increase. Not just a little bit, but a lot. The very act of providing something "free" will increase the rate at which it is used. This should be inherently obvious to anyone, yet it's a failure to recognize this very obvious thing which tends to form the core assumption behind welfare systems.

You forgot to ask how it makes him feel.

Edited, May 28th 2009 5:36pm by CBD

That's an incredibly complex thing though. As I already pointed out, there are gross variations in terms of what is labeled "welfare", the definition of "poverty", and the definition of "income", based on the source of the information. Trying to get "clean" data on this is very hard. You're welcome to try though. I've looked at numerous reports and papers and data over many years and my conclusion is that we do have more people (percentage obviously) receiving some kind of welfare assistance from the state today than 40 years ago. I'm not going to try and find all the various articles and papers and reports I've read over the years in order to prove it to you though.




That's not really a "false dilemma" though. A false dilemma is when one is forced to choose between a set of choices, but the one that best fits is missing. Saying that we must either support social spending programs or condemn people to starvation is a false dilemma. Saying that social spending programs don't solve the problem of poverty is not.

I get what you're saying though. Just because the direct entitlement/welfare type programs don't "solve poverty" does not mean that they aren't of use. Clearly, they fix the immediate problem of someone not having food to eat. However, my argument was that we could solve those most immediate problems via private charity just fine and avoid the "free lunch" problem I outlined earlier.

That other methods may exist outside of that isn't the issue. I also challenge the idea that a combination of solutions *is* solving the problem. Yes. In theory, the right set *could*, but it's pretty clear that what we're doing right now, and have been doing for some time, *isn't*. So it's somewhat moot. You're arguing a "maybe" in order to defend a specific set of actions which are not working. It's like saying that putting water in your gas tank instead of gas is ok because some other action taken elsewhere might fix the problem caused by doing so. That's great and all, but why not just put gas in the tank in the first place, right?

Same deal here. Private charities absolutely can prevent the most important social ills (homelessness and hunger), while avoiding a whole host of pitfalls that government run alternatives present. If it's really just about hunger and homelessness and a desire to help people in true need, then why not use these systems? They work much much better.



I already wrote this in the post you were responding to, so I'm confused.


Stop trying to fix people's economic problems with government programs. When people are truly in trouble, other people will help them. When they're scamming, other people wont help them. That's the beauty of a private system. We don't need anything else IMO.

Cite(s) prz??