Our Moral Responsibility

 

(This essay originally appeared in the Tampa Bay Mensa Sounding in late 2001 or early 2002.   It's original date was November 7, 2001.

 

 

Almost every appeal we hear for one good cause or another is couched in terms that remind us we have a “moral responsibility” to help the less fortunate.   Really?   Do we?

Yes, we do, but there's a caveat.   “Moral responsibility” loses its connection with morality when coercion enters the picture.   “Moral responsibility” cannot exist without the ability to fail to take responsibility.   Like light and darkness, neither can exist without the other.   When our behavior is coerced, when there is no choice but to do that which is “moral”, morality no longer has anything to do with the issue and “moral responsibility” all but evaporates.   This is the situation we are placed in by the welfare state:   we are taxed in order that we not shirk our moral responsibilities to those less fortunate.

If that were the entire problem, it might be sufferable.   We would shrug our shoulders at the venality of our politicians and continue about our business.   Unfortunately, that's not the entire problem.   The recipients of that concern for the less fortunate cannot see the ultimate supplier of their aid; they see the taxing authority as their benefactor and they understand that they are entitled (by virtue of being less fortunate) to the aid they receive.   Because they are entitled (that's why they call such things “entitlements”) there is a reduced incentive to act to become independent.   When all charity was private (that is, not tax-supported) the poor were painfully aware that they were dependent on the kindness of strangers and, as a general rule, did what they could to escape that unpleasant situation; that is, they found work and saved so that they would no longer have to rely on handouts (and this still happens even if not as predictably as we might wish).   Private charities, moreover, were able to granulate their effect: they exercised individual discretion; if an obviously able-bodied person seemed not to be making an effort to get off the dole that person could be cut off without a long, arduous investigation and mountains of paperwork designed to forestall a legal challenge.   The change from private charity to tax-supported charity created what many of us see as the fatal flaw of the welfare system: that consecutive generations are dependent upon it.   The lack of granularity is a primary cause of this: the government must grant citizens equal protection under the law, and this works to prevent the bureaucrat cutting off that able-bodied slacker.

Many adults today, having grown up in a world where “being on welfare” was something to be avoided until and unless absolutely necessary, cannot imagine how our current situation could have arisen and because they find the world around them so inexplicable they assign the blame for it to...   themselves.   The government, after all, is working to undo that horrid situation, isn't it?

In a word... no.   That “horrid situation” did not exist in the form we see it today until government decided to act.   It is true that some people were poor before The War on Poverty was declared, but even Jesus is reported to have said “…the poor will always be with you…” so it's not exactly a new problem.

The War on Poverty defined “poor” as having an annual income below x (and I don't know what “x” originally was).   Such a definition, note, must be local to the defining authority.   There are rich people in Third World countries who would gladly become poor Americans.

With a definable underclass government may now proceed to remedy the situation with subsidies, grants, and gifts.   As the defined underclass is pushed up from the bottom, the bottom does not simply disappear.   Those who are now poorer than the ones pushed up become the new bottom.   Indeed, the poor shall always be with us; somebody has to be on the bottom just as somebody has to be on the top.

Viewed this way, it becomes clear that The War on Poverty is another war which can never be won.   Well, maybe it can't be won, but what's the alternative?   The alternative is to return a measure of granularity to the process, something we can do quite easily: by returning to the situation of “private charity”.   We will still, under a regime of private charity, have poor people, but we will also have some assurance that they are poor because of their own choices, rather than because someone somewhere has defined “poor” to include them.

 

Thoughts for St Patrick's Day

 

Catherine Connoly, President of Ireland, yesterday opined that immigrants are as welcome in Ireland as was immigrant St. Patrick.

There's a difference, however between St. Patrick and the 3rd world immigrants now flooding into the Emerald Isle.   St. Patrick came to save Ireland.   Those 3rd-world immigrants mean to destroy Ireland.

Primarily Muslim, but not insignificantly from other parts of the developing world, these recent immigrants come not because they value Irish culture, but rather because they see the generosity of the Irish people as an opportunity to permanently embed their culture within the existing Irish culture — fully expecting that by doing so, they will make their own culture dominant with the fullness of time.

In particular, Islam requires of its adherents that they have no higher loyalty.   That is, they may not be so loyal to their 'adopted' country that their loyalty to Islam takes second place.   The reason for that is that Islam is not focused on the eternal;   it is a temporal ideology that seeks world-wide domination of the temporal (as opposed to the eternal) space.

The Irish, alas, seem thoroughly infected with 'suicidal empathy'.   Their concern for their fellow man persists even when their fellow man declines to reciprocate and, in fact, has concern only for their own long-term goal of an Islamic Ireland.

St. Patrick weeps.

 

The Theory And Practice Of A Welfare State

 

In a welfare state, wealth is transferred from those who have wealth to those who don't.  Ideally, the recipients of welfare state charity are those who are needy through no fault of their own and who are making an effort to become self-sufficient.  Too often, however, the modern welfare state provides support for those who have no ambition to become self-sufficient, and which is a primary factor in how they became 'needy' in the first place.  A modern industrial society can actually tolerate a certain number of able-bodied slackers, although it's never a good idea since it tends to encourage others to take that low road.

In a modern industrial society, those with ambition and talent can live in comfort not generally available to welfare beneficiaries.  This is, in fact, the primary element that makes the welfare state possible: some people are producing wealth far beyond what is actually necessary for subsistence, and that extra wealth can be tapped in order to provide for those whose wealth-generating ability is below what is necessary for subsistence.  Voila!  A source of wealth and a place to use it.

If the recipients of welfare largesse are encouraged, cajoled, or coerced to end their reliance on public charity, a welfare state can operate for a very long time, and the more robust the underlying economy, the longer the game can be played.

We know, however, that entropy always increases, and this is true even in a modern welfare state.  As benefits become more lush, more people find themselves comfortable with the idea that they are wards of the state.  Eventually, that group becomes a powerful voting bloc, and at that point, the system, like a star that has run out of fuel, is on the path to a spectacular end.  In fact, without a mechanism that forces welfare recipients off the dole after a limited time, that path begins when the welfare state is first established.  As the number of participants who produce no wealth grows, the burden on the actual wealth-producers becomes more and more onerous.  If the number of wealth-producers is also falling (as it is in America today) the collapse of the system is easy to foresee.

Things get out of control when newborns are eligible for state-supplied welfare because there is an incentive, usually in the form of larger payments than are strictly necessary for the newborn's survival.  That is: having a baby becomes profitable and the incentive to become productive and leave the welfare rolls decreases, even if only slightly.  This also moves society toward the point where welfare recipients constitute a voting majority.

In Minnesota recently, a modern scam involving their welfare system threatens to bankrupt their economy.  Working mothers whose income is under a certain figure are eligible for $1,000 per child per month for child care expenses.  A company is formed for the purpose of delivering 'child care' and subscribes a group of families.  It then hires those mothers as 'attendants', and pays them minimum wage for 25 hours per week to watch their own children!  The company bills the state for the 'care' at the maximum allowable rate and, it appears, funnels the excess offshore.  It should not come as a surprise that the proceeds of this scam are used to bring Mom's relatives over from the home country so that they can apply for and get welfare benefits here.

Meanwhile, the sources of the funds for doing all this are having children at a much decreased rate.  The next generation will be much smaller, but supporting a much larger group of welfare clients.

This can't go on.

 

Birthright Citizenship

 

The current hot-button domestic issue is something called 'Birthright Citizenship'.  It is the doctrine that anyone born in the United States (with a few exceptions) is automatically a citizen of the United States.  The argument centers around children of illegal aliens: a pregnant woman crosses the border illegally, births her child, and then demands to stay because her child is a citizen and she can't leave her child, can she?  The child is called 'an anchor baby'.

The problem arises because the 14th amendment says (right up front):

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

This is pretty plain-spoken and can be misinterpreted only in the presence of a serious Jones to do so.  Those who wish to misinterpret it will explain, slowly and carefully so you catch all the words, that this was phrased this way in order to enfranchise slaves who had previously not been considered 'persons' and that no one had anticipated people coming here just so their offspring could be natural-born citizens.

That position is probably correct, but the wording of the 14th amendment sits there staring back at us.  That may have been what they meant, but that's not what they wrote.  They wrote "all persons" and "subject to the jurisdiction" and "are citizens".  If this ever goes before SCOTUS and they rule that anchor babies are not really citizens, they will be 'legislating from the bench', something the GOP hates when Democrats do it, and the Democrats hate when the GOP does it.

Further, the whole debate dances around the real issue, carefully ignoring it — because if we can ignore it long enough, no one will notice that it's there — we hope.  The real issue is that we have turned the United States into a stereotypical welfare state.  Can't afford food?  Yes, you can have food stamps.  Can't afford rent?  Yes, you can have an AFDC supplement.  Don't worry about school; it's free.  Arrested and can't afford an attorney to defend you in court?  Miranda!

The people worrying about 'anchor babies' and 'illegal aliens' are really worried that somebody will arrive on our doorstep and demand a piece of cake that should justly be reserved for Real Americans™.  They will deny it, of course, but it has to be true.  We are in a job-surplus position at the moment — too many jobs and not enough people to fill them — so if Real Americans™ were worried them Messicans were going to take our jobs...  which jobs?  The ones there aren't enough workers to fill?  The only thing 'adding more workers' to the mix would do is bump the GDP up a notch or two.  Horrors!

We don't have 'an illegal alien problem'.  We have 'a welfare state problem'.  Fix the 'welfare state problem', and the illegal alien problem will evaporate like dew on a Summer morning.

 

The Coming Crash

 

Government (at all levels: Federal, State, County, City, School district, etc.) now takes 47% of GDP, and people are starting to notice that it takes 2 incomes to live.  As American labor becomes more expensive, more jobs are driven overseas — and times get tougher.  Eventually we will have too few Americans employed and paying taxes to support the lavish government programs which have become a fixture of modern life.

We are in a destructive feedback loop in which taxes and regulations impel salaries upward and rising salaries impel outsourcing.  How did the world's most productive economy get to this point?  As the unemployment rate rises, salaries and wages should fall to compensate, but they don't.  At the very bottom of the scale, wages are forbidden by law from being adjusted downward.  This 'loss to friction' means the economy cannot completely adapt to changing conditions.  And we will soon understand that it is beyond the power of the Federal government to change that.  Nevertheless, we have politicians promising to raise the minimum wage, and thousands of potential voters cheer them on as they promise to make a bad situation worse.

With government costing us 47% of everything we earn it's as if each one of us has a whole second person to support with our labor.  No wonder stay-at-home-Moms are a thing of the past.  Our standard of living is incredibly high, no doubt about that, but that's a normal progression.  Marian the Librarian lived much higher on the hog than did Hypatia of Alexandria but their taxes weren't noticeably different;  our high standard of living is not due to careful stewardship by the government's minions.  We should expect the SOL to rise if the government does nothing but fend off the barbarians.  Unfortunately, we should also expect that (pretty soon) our SOL is going to fall enough that we'll all be SOL.  Here's what's going to happen:

1. As unemployment rises more people will find themselves dependent on the dole;
2. the welfare system will become over-stressed; benefits will be scaled back; taxes will rise;
3. regardless, the number of tax-producers will decrease as the number of tax-consumers increases;
4. at some point the system will implode.  Either a depression will happen, or the currency will be inflated a la Germany at the end of WW-I, which is actually the same thing.  A military dictatorship may stave off the end for a while, but collapse is inevitable.

There are precious few things we can do to prevent this.  Prime among them is to reduce the size and cost of government, and thus reduce the tax/regulation burden on the producers.  Of almost equal importance is to granulate the effect of charity;  this can only be accomplished by removing it from the control of the 14th Amendment — equal protection — which presently operates to impede welfare agencies from culling able-bodied slackers.  In practice, that means returning the function — all of it — to the private sector where the 14th Amendment is not operative.

Most certainly, we will no longer be able to afford an Armed Forces three times larger than necessary to defend the United States.  Troops pulled back from the 150-or-so countries where they are presently deployed will be spilled into a labor pool already filled to overflowing.

Large numbers of people will go hungry for the first time in our history.  Alexander Tytler laid out the game-plan two hundred years ago:

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government.  It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasury.  From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship.

"The average age of the world's great civilizations have been two hundred years.  These nations have progressed through the following sequence:

• from bondage to spiritual faith,
• from spiritual faith to great courage,
• from courage to liberty,
• from liberty to abundance,
• from abundance to selfishness,
• from selfishness to complacency,
• from complacency to apathy,
• from apathy to dependency,
• from dependency back to bondage."

I believe we have arrived, at last, at Tytler's last stage.  Only a very great deal of luck (and the passage of time) will restore us to liberty.  Along the way we will have to give up the notion that democracy is an unalloyed good to be instituted here at home and spread abroad, by war if necessary.

Now would be a good time for that.

As in Atlas Shrugged, the motor of the world is about to stop.  We haven’t been oiling the things that make it go;  we’ve skimped on its maintenance.  Some would say we’ve actually tossed sand into the gears.  At the bottom line, those who make the world ‘go’ are wearing out, and when they’re gone, we’re all gone.

The US Dollar is now trading at nearly two-to-one against the Pound Sterling, a ratio that has not been seen since 1992, but the British Pound is not a special case.  The Dollar is trading soft against almost every major currency.  It’s not that they’re doing so well, as that we are doing so poorly.  At some point, OPEC is going to abandon the Dollar for something more stable...  the Euro, perhaps.  Countries that hold large stores of Dollars and use them to buy oil will, at that moment, lose the last reason they have for taking a position in Dollars;  they will shed their Dollar reserves, and the US economy will tank overnight.  It will be ‘1929’ all over again.  Brother, can you spare a dime?

When we recover...  if we recover...  we will have to construct a system which will not be subject to the excesses and abuses to which the current system is heir.  Tytler’s prediction gives us a roadmap back.

To avoid the trap in which tax-consumers vote themselves largesse, we will have to restrict the franchise to tax-producers.  Public school teachers (if there be such) will not vote, but private school teachers will;  policemen, firemen, mayors, aldermen, and county clerks (and their staffs) will not vote;  Congressmen will not vote, nor will FBI agents or food inspectors.  The kid who makes your sub at Quizno’s will vote, but the clerk who issued his driver’s license won’t;  airline pilots will vote, but the air traffic controllers who guide them in won’t.  W-2s (or what passes for them in any system-to-come) will show income in two classes:  tax-derived and non-tax-derived.  If the Tax Due is more than the total of tax-derived income, you’ll be issued a permit-to-vote;  if not, not.  The incentive to get a productive job will be enormous;  the incentives to get a ‘cushy government job’ will evaporate before our eyes.  As a result, government service will attract only those who get fulfillment from such activities.  We should expect very few people to make a career of it.  We will return to the Founders’ vision of the townsman who is drafted by his peers and sent, possibly against his will and better judgement, off to Washington where he will serve one term or two and then return to his original occupation.  Political campaigns will be long, expensive, and brutal only when deep-seated philosophical divisions rear their ugly heads;  we should expect very little of that.

I’m trying hard to see a ‘down side’ to all this.  There must be one, but I can't seem to find it.

 

Asking The Wrong Questions in Arizona

 

Arizona has begun their own  'immigration enforcement program',  stopping anyone who appears to be in the state illegally  (that is:  if they look like Mexicans)  and requiring them to prove their right to be where they are.

Now, don't get me wrong:  my position on  'the powers of states'  (I hate the meaningless term 'states rights')  is that Arizona may legally do what it is they're doing.  I just think it's a remarkably poor idea.  It's another one of those all-too-common examples of the syndrome I call  'ask the wrong question;  get the wrong answer'.

The  'wrong question'  in this case focuses on  'immigration', and it will generate the wrong answer:  send 'em back where they came from.

If you ask any of those  'illegal immigrants'  why they come here, they'll tell you it's because they want to be able to support their families.  Few...  make that 'none'...  will tell you they've come here to get on the welfare wagon.  Similarly,  few of those in favor of Arizona's draconian new  'Papieren, Bitte'  regime will admit that what's behind all this is an attempt to keep those  'illegal aliens'  from using up all of our valuable public services:  police, fire, food stamps, unemployment compensation, etc.  Yet, that is the baseline problem.  The supporters of that new Arizona law firmly  (and in their own minds, justifiably)  believe that those 'benefits' are for the use of citizens, dammitol...

So...  we frame the problem in terms of  "they're doing something illegal and we have to stop all this law-breaking behavior".  This allows us to completely ignore the underlying problem:  that we make it attractive for slackers to live in this country.

Again, I'm not saying those illegal-border-crossers are coming here to stick their snouts into the welfare trough.  It may be true, but I'm not saying that.  It's irrelevant, in any case.  What is relevant is that we American citizens stick our snouts into the welfare trough with a frightening regularity.  Given the kinds of jobs those illegal-border-crossers typically work at, there also seems to me some room to doubt they've just come here for 'the easy life'...  although it's almost certainly easier than what they're used to south of the border.

Raise your hand if your ancestors arrived here as immigrants.  Hmmm....  there's a lot of you out there...  OK,  should we have sent all those immigrants back?  No?  Why?  Because they applied for entry 'legally' during a time when there were no 'quotas' for immigration?  (And, surprise! no passports, either, which did not become 'mandatory' until 1941!)  At a time when anyone who knocked on our door was allowed in as long as they weren't carrying plague or a felony record?  That's not the way the world is today, but I'm sure you know that.

Today, we require new immigrants to apply months or years in advance, go through a lengthy investigation, fill out a mountain of forms.  The process is a pain-in-the-ass...  deliberately.

Given all the good things immigrants have done for this country in the past few centuries, why do we now make it such a PITA?  Now we're asking the right questions, or we're about to.

The process is now a royal PITA because unchecked immigration could overwhelm our welfare system.  This was not the case when your great-grandfather/mother arrived from The Old Country.  Back then we didn't have a welfare system to overwhelm, yet people came to us nevertheless.  Why?

They came because America was The Land Of Opportunity.

In the absence of an all-pervasive welfare system, it would be again.

Are you ready to start asking the right questions?