I stumbled across another conservative blogger's "no handouts" tirade against Occupy Wall Street the other day. Her argument was that she, an able-bodied, educated, white woman had worked for what she had (well, after she moved out of her parents' house) and that everyone else could do the same. Why should the government have to help out lazy, irresponsible people?
Let's assume for a moment that we do actually live in a world where hard work is rewarded reasonably and laziness is punished (and this is indeed the world that the "no handouts" people are professing that we live in). Now let's watch what happens when a lazy person has a baby. If we truly want a "no handouts" society, that lazy person is not entitled to healthcare for her child, not even when she is pregnant or in labour. She and her child could easily die in childbirth or shortly thereafter. Now ask yourself: does that child deserve to die or live in severe poverty just because it was born to a lazy parent?
If you are like most people, your gut reaction is no (and I should certainly hope it is, particularly if you are a member of the anti-abortion lobby who continually claim that a baby's life is sacred and worth saving. I gather this is true after it is born as well). Clearly in the no-handouts society there should still be some provision for children, right?
And if you still say no, consider this. Parents can sometimes not provide health insurance or healthcare for their children. In a no-handouts society, this means no vaccinations, which means that your kid could be going to school with a little boy or girl with measles or polio. Is that what you want?
Let's now make the assumption that you agree with me, and that in some circumstances, to protect the very vulnerable who cannot help themselves, that handouts are ok. Even if you think that the best course of action would be to take children away from parents who cannot provide for them, that still means public financing of things like orphanages and foster programmes, which is just another form of hand-out, right?
It's hard to know where to draw the line, though, because when do those kids who required assistance suddenly get the plug pulled? When do they become ineligible for support? Is it when they're 5? 10? 18? And what about their parents? How can a mother care for her son or daughter when she is struggling because she is plagued with an illness that she can't afford to treat? Is it ok for her to have a hand-out to allow her to care for her child? Or is that going too far?
So let's take a long, hard look at the no-handouts world.
If you are a hard-working, productive adult, but you suffer a horrible accident that makes it impossible for you to work, if you have not taken the proper precautions and saved up enough money to last you the rest of your life (and assuming that your savings have not been emptied by an irresponsible Enron-like corporation), you will be allowed to die, because as a non-working adult, you are not contributing to society and deserve nothing in return. It does not matter if you are caring for a child, spouse, or ageing parent. They will just have to learn to fend for themselves.
If a non-working parent has a child, that child has no right to health-care and will be allowed to die.
The minute a person becomes unable to work and their savings run out, they will be allowed to fall ill and potentially die.
Aside from the clear moral problems here, there are some logistical ones as well. Some people seem to have assumed that by minimizing handouts, you somehow maximise the productiveness of society. But just think about someone who has a parent fall ill. That person will spend a lot of their own money and time to help care for their parent because they cannot necessarily afford healthcare. They may even work fewer hours or stop working altogether in order to give their parent the care they need. What you have done in that case is make society less productive, whereas if some care were provided for the ageing parent, you would have two people in employment instead of none (the person caring for their parent, and the carer that would then be employed to help provide care). The no-handouts people so easily forget that there are other people in this system, and that depriving one person of help can have far-reaching ramifications.
Ultimately, though, it seems we have lost sight of what the government is actually for.
If I have a great idea and I want to start a company, it doesn't just happen by magic. I might invest a little of my own money to get my idea started, but then I ask people to invest in my idea in order to really get it off the ground. I challenge you all to find more than a handful of successful companies that weren't reliant on investors in the initial stages of starting up (and probably after that as well). We recognise this as a completely natural model for turning high potential into high returns.
The government should exist as an investor, but what it should be investing in is its own citizens. It already does this to some extent. For example, we invest in our own safety with the military. We invest in commerce and communication with roads and other infrastructure. We invest in public health with sewage systems.
To some extent, we also invest in people directly. Public education, no matter how flawed, is meant to invest in the development of individuals to allow them to become productive members of society. These people, however, cannot take advantage of public education if they are sick, or if they are faint from hunger, or if they are secretly working to support their families.
Why is it that the same people who are so willing to give hand-outs to start-up companies, where the success rate is something like 1 in 10, are so reluctant for the government to give hand-outs to its citizens, where the success rate could be so much higher? How are we meant to build a stronger nation if no one is willing to invest in its machinery: the people?
If you look at countries that do invest in their citizens, you will notice that many of those countries are thriving. Those who wonder how China has become so dominant on the world stage need only look at the money the Chinese government has poured into things like education to understand that a short-sighted, tight-fisted view will help no one in the long term. So to the no-handouts people, I say this: it's time we all put a little bit into the investment pot so that we can start seeing the returns.
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