Posted on 02/07/2016 5:32:46 AM PST by Kaslin
More than 400 years ago, the British adopted the Poor Law system, under which local communities were made responsible for the relief of poverty. For the next four centuries the Poor Laws were amended again and again, as the following argument went to and fro: Was the system providing necessary relief or was it in various ways interfering with the natural workings of the labor market by subsidizing idleness and encouraging indolence.
At one point a royal commission recommended the following two tests:
The history of the British Poor Laws makes for interesting reading and even more interesting is their treatment in the novels of Charles Dickens and Frances Trollope and later Jack London.
But before continuing, let's stop and ask a pertinent question. Do you see anything wrong with this historical approach to welfare?
Think about it. The central government (the British Parliament) was passing laws telling local communities how to deal with people. The standards all have to do with making sure that welfare is no more attractive than work. But this only works if the "paupers" are all the same. The system becomes completely dysfunction if what one person views as "uninviting" is different than what someone else regards as "uninviting." Or if conditions that one person views as "worse" or "better" are different from what others view as "worse" or "better." Treating people at the bottom of the income ladder as if they all viewed the world the same way is not only foolish, it's the sort of thing no private charity would ever do. (More on that below.)
So, the biggest problem with the Poor Laws is that they tended to treat everyone seeking relief as if they were the same when in fact they were not at all the same. (Just read Charles Dickens!)
Flash forward to the current era and we find that the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute and the left-leaning Brookings Institution have come together to find common ground in a new report on how to reform the American approach to welfare.
Among the recommendations: such conservative ideas as attaching a job requirement to the food stamp program and provisions to encourage marriage and birth control; such liberal ideas as a small increase in the minimum wage and more federal investment in early childhood education and community colleges; and what I suppose is a left/right idea: increasing the amount of the Earned Income Tax Credit.
Even getting this much agreement was not easy according to a report in The New York Times. Just so l get this exactly right I am going to quote directly from reporter Eduardo Porter's account:
The two sides will never entirely agree, of course, partly because they view the causes of poverty from such different angles…
To the left, deprivation is caused mostly by factors beyond the control of the poor. These include globalization that undercut good jobs previously within the reach of the less educated, an educational system segregated by race and class, lack of parental resources, discrimination, excessive use of prison.
Experts on the right, by contrast, put a lot of the weight on personal responsibility, often faulting the bad choices of the poor. And government support, by providing the poor with an income with few strings attached, has made their choices worse.
In other words, after four centuries of fruitless debate, not much has really changed. Scholars sitting in a room in Washington, DC are arguing about the motivations and the behavior of millions of people they have never met and never will meet and both sides feel free to generalize about the whole lot of them.
Meanwhile, the system continues in its dysfunction. In the Wall Street Journal, House Speaker Paul Ryan and Sen. Tim Scott write:
The federal government now runs more than 80 different antipoverty programs at a cost of about $750 billion a year. Yet 46 million Americans are poor today, and the poverty rate has barely budged: from 19% in 1965 to 14.8% in 2014. If you were raised poor, you're as likely to stay poor as you were 50 years ago.
Yet there are programs that work and Ryan visited one in Dallas the other day. They are almost always in the private sector, supported by voluntary contributions from people who would never even think of contributing to the Food Stamp program.
Ordinary people living in the communities with others who need help have far more common sense than scholars or bureaucrats or legislators who are miles away.
That's why Michael Stroup and I recommended 30 years ago letting taxpayers decide where their welfare tax dollars go, instead of leaving that decision to bureaucrats. (See these Forbes posts here and here.) More on that in a future column.
Funny how the rats come up with these poverty programs that make them appear to be caring and humain yet their primary goal is to make money on the impoverished get them to be dependent and vote for thier agenda
The less eligibility test: a pauper should have to enter a workhouse with conditions worse than that of the poorest free labourer outside of the workhouse.
The workhouse test: relief should only be available in a workhouse in which conditions were to be so uninviting that anyone capable of coping outside them would choose not to be in one.
Yep - subsistence w/o any of the luxuries to weed out the able-bodied parasites - and a return to the "olden days" when one had to be contributing to society in order to be eligible to vote - why give panhandlers and leeches a vote that can be used to make it illegal to deny panhandlers and leeches enough of your hard-earned money to be comfortable?
Good article.
Until the end, when he claims that some program or other is effective. Even realists can be tempted into foolishness by hope.
The strongest argument against welfare programs is three simple words:
They.
Don’t.
Work.
In earlier times, people had a safety net in large families and the church.
Today, families with only children usually don’t have any social safety net at all.
The causes of poverty are as complex as human nature. My feeling is we can manage it but we’ll never be able to completely lick it.
No society on earth has managed to do it. The Christian ideal is communism and that never really worked except in monasteries.
Communism is state enforced giving. Christianity is PERSONAL responsibility. These are 180 degrees apart.
“The poor will always be with you”.- Jesus
A lot. The approach does nothing to structurally motivate anyone to increase the value and productivity of the supplicant to the point that they move up and out. It is a prison with punishment as its only currency. That motivates no one to work even at the menial tasks offered inducing yet graver punishment.
This shows total ignorance of the antipoverty system in the Torah. Socializing the poor enslaves us all, as the national debt makes evident.
Deuteronomy 15:4 However, there should be no poor among you, for in the land the Lord your God is giving you to possess as your inheritance, he will richly bless you, 5 if only you fully obey the Lord your God and are careful to follow all these commands I am giving you today.
Effectively, what Messiah was saying is that the people will never follow the Law in spirit, much less by the letter.
Yes; every time I come to Free Republic I can see that.
Good read.
I only laughed at one portion of one sentence: “Scholars in Washington...”
You mean this:
That's why Michael Stroup and I recommended 30 years ago letting taxpayers decide where their welfare tax dollars go, instead of leaving that decision to bureaucrats.
Where, I pray did he say that?
Did you even read the op-ed
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