The Welfare Farm
In last week’s Budget 2021, the government allocated an extra $32-$55 per week for an adult beneficiary, a supreme act of “social justice.”
Forget the money. That’s a red herring. Focus on the almost Orwellian modern redefinition of “social justice.” The word “justice” is Latin, predating all that Jesus stuff, and comes with a decent definition: suum cuique, “to each his own.” If you don’t like this, you can try three words: pacta sunt servanda, “promises are to be kept.”
“Social justice” is a legal definition of justice, not moral, which is why the redefinition is so Orwellian. It is true that if promises are not kept, and if each does not receive his own, that would be an injustice. And it would also be justice if each receives his own, or all promises are kept.
The fundamental question for welfare beneficiaries is not how much money they receive. Instead, the question is: has the government promised payment X to recipient Y? If so, then X belongs to Y – promises must be kept because failure to pay would be an injustice. If not, no payment is owed and payment is both an injustice and a theft from the State.
But welfare is less about justice and more about creating a paternal dependency between the government and the citizen. As Aristotle and George Fitzhugh pointed out, this relationship is like that between a) parent and child, and b) master and slave. Indeed, the English word for an adult unrelated dependent is “slave.”
So, under “social justice”, it is just for me to buy milk for my daughter because I have accepted the obligation of caring for her as a dependent. In return, dependency implies authority: because I feed my daughter, I get to tell her what to do. Dependency without responsible authority leads to moral degradation, which, I have to say, kind of describes present-day New Zealand.
The crazy thing is how desperately people refuse to see that beneficiaries are technically slaves. Progressives approach it indirectly with policies like “welfare reform” when they realise that although the slaves are nationalised, they should also be made to work otherwise they might go feral. Somewhere, Thomas Carlyle laughs.
A dependency relationship exists on the same terms as slavery. Davy Jones was completely correct when he told Jack Sparrow, “Then you were a poor captain, but a captain nonetheless!” Modern governments are terrible captains and the long-term trend is toward even terribler captaincy, but they are captains nonetheless.
Is it just for governments to make its slaves work? Absolutely! Because they are slaves – to each his own – and the duty of a slave is to work. A dependent who can, but does not, work is not acting justly – he is cheating his master. But beneficiaries do have a job. Their job is not to riot. How much does that cost? About $300 by April next year, according to the recent Budget.
I wouldn’t want to be too overgenerous in saying the master must support his slave. However, if Scrooge had owned Bob Cratchit and frozen him to death for lack of heating the office, I don’t know how much legal sanction he would have faced in most slave societies. Cratchit would have left Scrooge’s employ before allowing himself to be frozen to death. Since Scrooge had no legal means of preventing this, Scrooge was not Cratchit’s “master.”
But if the government “fires” a beneficiary in Ponsonby, she won’t find another entity willing and able to provide the same level of support. This means long-term dependents in a welfare state are just slaves with poor masters. If the master were to disappear, the slaves would have to work, but they would be deprived of the master’s support.
Slave codes in every civilised society that allowed the practice always required the master to protect his slave. The British in the West Indies were more humane masters than the French and Spanish; the Americans were more humane than the British; and within America, the Deep South was the worst place to be. But those slaves were still the responsibility of the master. Slavery is basically just a form of feudalism, and the shared nature of the feudal obligation was understood by everyone who practised it.
This is what welfare really is. But what most people don’t want to realise is that welfare is probably the root source of their working income as well.
Sure, a couple of Korean grocers set up shop, and there are lots of doctors, labs, lawyers, gyms, pizzerias, bars and supermarkets dotted around the neighbourhood. But every single one is paid with government money, once removed. It’s easy to complain that beneficiaries are paid to be lazy, but it seems obvious to me that the government is paying them in order to pay everyone else.
If the government put the Korean grocer on a state salary to operate the store, the public’s eyeballs would explode. And if the government sent a liquor store owner a monthly cheque to offer Heineken at affordable prices, there’d be riots. But that’s what’s up. I haven’t looked through their financials, but I can say with full confidence that all the revenue generated by KFC is a wealth transfer from the government.
Perhaps the solution is that the beneficiary gets a job to pay for his own damn liquor and groceries. This is true. But the point is that if he had a job, he wouldn’t stay in that neighbourhood, and KFC would collapse. Therein lies the problem.
I am not saying the system inadvertently reinforces poverty; I am observing that it is completely impossible to restructure the way poverty is handled because millions of people depend on it working this way. And the economic disruption for the 25 years it would take for everyone affected to reorganise would be catastrophic.
Maybe you don’t like that we’re all slaves, just not everyone knows it yet. So, let’s reframe the argument.
We could say the welfare state is degrading because the payments don’t come with good personal and professional supervision. The armies of social workers were never going to perform this job well. Have you met a social worker? They’re full of enthusiasm, empty of practicability.
One way for the government to deal with this “social justice” responsibility would be to privatise it, transferring its slaves from public to a private charity, like the Salvation Army. Any recipient is still a dependent – still a slave – but the new master would be an organisation. It would be a reprivatisation of slavery, of allowing corporations to accept the paternal role.
Most progressives would probably balk at this, but how could it be worse than what we have now? And the thing is, such a world may be just around the corner.
The economy is built to ensure the free flow of money between people's pockets. Figuring out a way to do this better than others is the definition of good business. Welfare is pretty much a government-sanctioned method to ensure everyone can consume. The calculation is logical: if people are consuming, they’re not rioting.
But do you remember when Facebook supported a basic income? Companies like that are perfectly happy to perform the role of government, not just in surveillance and security, but in economics and welfare as well. If Facebook has the resources and the will to do this, surely Amazon has similar ideas as well. Wouldn’t you want to find out?