October 15, 2012
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A question for conservatives
JDN 2456216 EDT 14:14
Suppose I were to agree, for the sake of argument, that poor people are lazy. In fact I don’t agree with this, but suppose I did.
What are we supposed to do with these people?
Even if it’s really the case that there are millions of single mothers literally too lazy to work to feed their own children, what do we do with all those children? Let them starve? Tough luck? Too bad your mom is lazy, kids! No school lunch or food stamps for you!
It actually is the case that millions of homeless people are addicted to drugs and alcohol, suffering from mental illness, unable to hold down a job. That’s not laziness exactly, but many of these people definitely have made a long series of very bad choices in their lives. It’d be better if they quit drinking, got on medication, found jobs. But they aren’t doing that; they don’t know how. What do we do with them?
A lot of this really comes down to behavioral economics.
If you assume that people are perfectly rational, then all you have to do is create a system that provides the right incentives, and people will work. There’s still the issue of equality of opportunity (which we do not have right now, and if you think we do you’re obviously not paying attention); but once that’s in place, if people are broke, well, they are choosing to be broke because they value their free time more than their material possessions. Basically, those aren’t poor people, they’re hippies.
But when you realize that this is not how the world works, that people aren’t rational all the time, they make stupid decisions, they act on impulse, they get addicted to drugs; well, at that point, incentives aren’t going to work. The incentives were already in place! It’s alreadyincredibly stupid to inject yourself with heroin, even once, even with a clean needle, I don’t care how good it feels–but people do it anyway. It’s already a terrible idea to drink a six-pack of beer every day from the time you’re 12, but people do this–as my aunt did, and now, big surprise, she has Korsakov’s Syndrome. It’s already moronic to drive a motorcycle on the highway and not wear a helmet, but people do it. And we have to ask ourselves: What do we do with these people?
If there weren’t any externalities, maybe we could just let them be stupid. And sometimes, maybe we really should; actually with helmet laws my favored policy is that you don’t have to wear a helmet as long as you’re an organ donor. If you’re not going to use your brain, maybe we can use your liver! But I return to the example of the single mother who lives on Welfare and instead of working drinks all the time. What about her kids? Should they be made to suffer because she is an alcoholic?And even without the externalities, think about the people who have ruined their lives. What do we do with those people? Think about my aunt. She has made a long series of incredibly stupid decisions over the course of her life, starting with when she began drinking at 12 years old. She has been extremely irrational, and the person most harmed by it has been herself. Now she suffers from dementia and is less self-reliant than most 8-year-olds. What do we do with her? Do we just let her die, because it’s her fault? Can you really be that heartless?
Okay, my family can care for her, and guess what? We do. But what about other people in similar situations who don’t have families to care for them? Or what about the financial troubles my family actually is going through right now, making it very hard for us to cover her care? Medicare and Medicaid have allowed us to afford to care for her! That socialism is the only reason my aunt isn’t dead already.
And how is that unfair, really? It’s not like she put herself in this situation on purpose. She didn’t set out at 12 years old thinking, “I’m going to drink so much that I erase my memory with vitamin deficiences and become a drain on society! That sounds fun!” She was abused by her father, which destroyed her emotionally, and for the rest of her life she went down a long spiral of mental illness and alcohol addiction. There were many chances she had to make things better, and she should have; but she didn’t, so now what?
It’d be one thing if we couldn’t afford it. But we can. We have plenty of money in this country–in fact, we have such mind-bogglingly huge amounts of wealth that when Keynes predicted them a century ago, people told him he was crazy (even though he actually underestimated slightly). We set out as a society to maximize the amount of stuff we could make, and we succeeded.
Now we need to start talking about what we’re going to do with all this stuff. I for one think we should spend a little of it caring for people who need help.
Comments (16)
Let me add to your list: It is incredibly lame to amass a level of personal monetary wealth that could not even be spent by one’s descendants seven generations hence, even if they themselves did not earn a bloody cent of their own, from one’s own children on. People do it, anyway.
It is weirdly stupid to run cold water, for twenty minutes at a stretch, across twenty or thirty motel rooms, just so the guests may have a hot shower. People in Florida, and elsewhere, do it, anyway.
It is downright insipid to require residents of a city to throw away bottles, cans and paper and put it all in a landfill, because “the cost of recycling is too great”. Cities and towns do it, anyway.
It is nonsensical to base one’s diet on inexpensive junk food, then cry foul at the cost of the care needed to heal the resulting illnesses and conditions. Millions of us do so, anyway.
What we do with the disadvantaged is love them, unconditionally. Sometimes that means saying “No”, to their whimsical requests. It never means abandoning them.
Your first premise is false. Society is not “supposed” to do anything with anyone.
Such a concept is raw, violent tyranny.
And all that money out there doesn’t belong to you. What gives you the right to other people’s money?
I know several young mothers that work and have a hard time feeding their children because there is not enough left after paying for child care so they have opted to be stay at home Mothers because on wellfare they do have food stamps and health care for their children and they can pay their rent…this is a problem with in the system if a mother wants to work help them with food and child care so they can make ends meet.
The biggest problem with those who are truly addicted to drinking/drugs is that their kids go without anyway. I have family that have cheated with their food stamps by just buying groceries for other people and then those people give them cash for the groceries. All so they could buy alcohol and cigarettes. EBT cards even have a cash option where if you qualified for the assistance, you can just withdraw the cash from an ATM and they can’t track what you spend it on.
@PrisonerxOfxLove -
It belongs to us all, the collective product of human endeavor for centuries. We are always redistributing wealth. The question is whether we will do it using markets, or taxes, or charity, or something else.
Or are you the sort of arrogant, ungrateful idiot who thinks that he made everything he has all by himself?
No doubt you mined all the tantalum, designed all the circuits, machined all the parts, laid all the fiber optic cable, in order to post on my blog? And you never inherited anything from your parents, and you’ve never used any public services of any kind?
@firetyger -
That’s definitely a problem. It’s sad how resourceful addicts can be at feeding their addiction, when a small fraction of that effort could be used to cure themselves.
I can’t think of any good solutions to this problem though; can you?
@pnrj - The money you earn is your own. It belongs to no one else.
If you do not own 100% of the fruits of your labor than you are a slave.
That is the basic premise that proves that what you believe is unethical. Since the fruits of one’s labor belong to no one in particular, that means that everyone is a slave since they do not own the fruits of their own labor.
Yours is the philosophy of mass poverty that governed the world until the ancient Greeks discovered being and with it Natural Law.
@PrisonerxOfxLove -
YOU FAIL ECONOMICS FOREVER.
And history, for that matter. And ecology. And ethics.
What is the most important determiner of long-term economic growth? Technology.
Consider all the technology you have in your life: Where did it come from? You sure as hell didn’t make it yourself. 99% of what you have is the result of work done by people who died before you were born. People like those Greeks! People like Newton, and Darwin, and Einstein. People like Faraday and Turing. You were born into a world that already had roads and airplanes and electronics and calculus. In the immortal words of our President, you didn’t build that. 99% of the rest of what you have is a result of what other people have done since you were born, like the invention of the Internet. Only 1% of 1% of your wealth is directly the result of your own labor.
And that’s not even getting into all the natural resources and environmental services you depend upon for your survival, things that are difficult if not impossible to monetize yet valuable to the point of being almost priceless.
Now, you do (presumably) contribute something to the world by your work, and you deserve to be compensated for that. And we all deserve to share the fruits of what has been produced by our progenitors. But if we really only gave you value proportional to the labor you put in, you’d have one ten-thousandth of what you have right now. You would live like a hunter-gatherer, as indeed most humans did for most of our history as a species.
I’m actually not opposed to capitalism, at least in a moderated form like the one most of the free world presently has. I do not begrudge the rich their wealth as long as they contribute to a system that lifts us all up. I merely ask that they have some perspective, some gratitude for all the people who came before them, some appreciation of all the hard work done by people who aren’t rich.
@PrisonerxOfxLove -
Also, by your definition, the majority of wage laborers in any capitalist society are “slaves”, and the shareholder class are their “masters”. Your argument cuts both ways.
@pnrj - Sorry, but only your leftist-Marxist economics is the failure.
Things aren’t failures because you say so. Your economic philosophy has failed at all times, in all cultures and in all locations that it has been tried.
Free market capitalism has done more to pull the disadvantaged out of poverty than any other economic system.
@pnrj - In free market capitalism, labor is paid for by the capitalist who provides the job in the first place. The name for that payment is “wages.”
Government, on the other hand takes money from the laborer through force and the threat of violence without doing a thing to earn it.
The name for that extortion is called “taxes.”
Slavery is working for nothing. When the government extorts our money it has turned us into slaves.
Capitalists pay the market wage for labor. That is the opposite of slavery. That is called a wage-earning job.
@PrisonerxOfxLove -
I am not a Marxist. I am a social democrat, and heavily influenced by Keynesian ideas, which you’ll note are the foundation of the modern consensus in mainstream economic theory.
I guess I would seem Marxist by comparison to someone as radically far-right as you, in much the same way that a conservative would seem liberal in a room full of fascists.
@pnrj - Social democracy is a more civilized name for fascism.
And like its close cousin Marxism is a form of tyranny.
@PrisonerxOfxLove -
This is what you don’t seem to get: The government doesn’t just take money. They use that money to provide public goods. We need those public goods; indeed we would literally die without them.
I don’t think wage laborers are slaves. But I also don’t think that slavery means receiving less than 100% of the product of your labor, because if that were so we would all be slaves, always. If you received 100% of the product of your labor, there would be no point in having an economy. There would be no trade, no comparative advantage, no cooperation.
Seriously, take some classes in economics. Read about “externalities” and “public goods”. Because right now you’re just spouting ignorant nonsense.
@pnrj - Keynesian economics was proven a failure by both FDR and President Obama.
Whatever money Government spends it must first take away from wealth producers in the form of taxes, borrowing or printing money. Such actions retard or kill economic growth.
That is why Keynesian economic policy fails basic logic. Economic stimulus that works keeps wealth with wealth producers. Government taxation, borrowing and printing money deplete wealth and thus cannot stimulate economic growth.