I have two major points against welfare.
The first point, is that just because something is the kind or decent thing to do, just because it is morally right, doesn’t automatically make it the responsibility or role of government.
If I held a gun to your head and forced you to give me a portion of your money, kept some of it, then gave the rest to someone else, who in that scenario is being generous? Which of us is displaying a moral virtue?
It wouldn’t be you because you are being robbed, forced against your will under threat of violence to pay for my act of “goodwill”. If anything, you are demonstrating a lack of courage in failing to stand against an immoral act. A lack of courage is a vice not a virtue.
I am not displaying any moral virtue either, in fact, I am committing a crime of robbery. The fact that I freely gave a portion of the money to someone else is in no way a moral act either since the money I gave was not mine to give. There is no generosity in being generous with someone else’s possessions. Additionally, I am keeping a portion of your money for myself. I am rewarding my own immoral act which is no virtue.
The person I give a portion of your money to, regardless of how badly he needs it, is not conducting any moral virtue either. He may be thankful, he may be in genuine need, but he is taking something that belongs to someone else.
Certainly, this example seems straightforward enough, but as we all know the actual welfare system is a little more complicated than this. For one, there is the concept of consent of the governed. You could argue that because we as a people willingly consent to being governed that we are not being robbed, we are giving the money of our own free will which negates much of the immorality.
This is an important element, but we still haven’t added in enough detail to paint the full picture. There is another major element of our current political welfare system at play which needs to be considered, and the concept of consent of the governed is just the Segway we need to turn our attention to it.
We are many generations past the initial signing of the declaration of independence, and the formation of our system of government. Each of us today was born into the political system that was created and agreed upon by the people long ago. Today our consent of the governed is carried out through elections. We continue our consent to be governed, because we retain the right to elect our own officials. Our independence is preserved through the fact that if the elected officials fail to act in our best interest we can remove them from office, and all their subsequent power, by electing new officials.
What gives me the power to hold a gun to your head and demand money? Why do I get to choose how much money you owe me, and who I can give it to, and for why? Because you provide your consent for me to govern through an election. But I take your money, and offer it for free to someone else, provided of course that they vote for me, then what I am really doing is using your money to buy other peoples votes. I use their votes, paid for by your money, to stay in political power, acting against your best interest.
As soon as the voting majority reaches a point where they receive more benefits from taxes, than they pay, I have stolen the consent of the governed from the tax payer. I have stolen the privilege of my elected position from the people and negated the consent of the governed thereby returning the whole example back to immorality on all three parties.
Their crimes start during the campaign trail. Politicians make promises to provide the people with “free” goods and services. Free healthcare, housing, education, universal basic incomes, smart phones, food, and on and on. They promise that if we vote them into power they will give us good and services. But there is a problem with this, however appealing it may seem on the surface. Governments don’t produce anything. They don’t have anything to give, other than what they take from others. They aren’t promising to provide anything for free. They are promising to tax someone and are offering that person’s money in exchange for votes. It is a crime, plan and simple.
Does this mean it is wrong to help those in need? Of course not. But stealing from someone else and using violence to punish those that don’t comply isn’t offering your help. Its a thinly vailed justification to commit theft and violence. Generosity requires free will. When you detach freewill from goodwill you remove the virtue from the act and you replace the virtue with violence or servitude. When governments take over charity and goodwill it removes the virtue from the process.
The second thing I have against welfare is that it removes one of the healthiest elements from a society.
A while back, I started to experience knee pain. As it turns out the cause of my knee pain was due to a muscle imbalance in my legs. I had been doing very well in the squat rack but was slacking on deadlifts. As a result, the front facing muscles of my legs were overpowering my rear facing muscles. This imbalance started pulling my kneecap out of its correct position. My kneecap no longer in its correct place, it began to rub against my leg bones which caused me pain.
Understanding that my pain was a result of an imbalance in my muscles I decided to change my workouts. I backed off my squats a little and started doing deadlifts again. Within literally a few workouts, my pain was completely gone and hasn’t returned.
The alternative would have been to ignore the cause of the pain and treat the symptoms with medication. This of course would not fix the issue. My kneecap would continue to rub and eventually wear away the cartilage. If left unfixed long enough the only solution would be a knee replacement.
Similarly, if you place your hand on a hot burner you are met with instant pain and without even a fraction of a second of delay you instinctively remove your hand before your brain even processes what is happening.
Imagine for moment that you did not feel pain. What if the first indication that your hand was resting on a hot burner was the smell of burning flesh? How much more damage would be done to your hand in that situation? What if the imbalance in my leg didn’t manifest itself as pain and I went on in life unaware that I was wearing away my knee?
What if pain felt good? I accidentally rest my hand on a hot burner and the result is great euphoria. It loot at my hand to realize that the situation is not healthy, but it feels so good I think, I’ll just give it a second to enjoy the feeling then I will remove my hand before any serious damage.
Pain is a powerful and even instinctive motivator to change. Yes, it is unpleasant, but it is precisely its unpleasantness, often times even severe unpleasantness, that provides all of its value. It is easy to see that if pain were not unpleasant that its capacity to serve the purpose it is intended for would be greatly diminished or eliminated altogether.
In the case of my knee pain, I didn’t treat the pain. I didn’t take any pain killers. I left the mild pain in tact. It was the motivation I needed to change my behavior. Instead, I changed my behavior and treated the cause of the pain. That is a critical distinction to make; treating pain versus treating the cause of pain.
In this light one could argue that pain is one of the healthiest things your body does for itself. While unpleasant at best, it serves a very necessary purpose. Pain is what tells you that you need to change. It is what motivates you to change your behavior and fix the root of your problems.
Proponents of welfare say that providing people goods and services is what enables them to overcome their challenges and improve their lives. While this may be the case for a small percentage of people, the evidence for the majority is very much to the contrary.
Providing welfare is like providing pain killers, it makes you feel better, at least in the short term, but it doesn’t fix any of the issues. It only removes the pain that is telling you that you need to change your behavior. In the long run it only makes the situation worse. In fact it provides incentive for its recipients to ignore their issues and not to fix the root cause. Deliberately removing pain from someone’s life while ignoring the cause of that pain is one of the worst and inhumane things you can do to someone. It will only lead to worse pain down the road.
Bad things happen to good people. Tragedy is a real thing. When tragedy strikes those we care about it is only human to help them. We should help them. Unfortunately, our system of welfare assumes tragedy as the cause of all human need. It completely ignores the reality that many of the people on welfare today are not on welfare because they were stricken with unforeseen tragedy and need some help to get back on their feet. Many are on welfare as the result of poor life decisions. They had children that they had no means of providing for. They failed in school, didn’t seek advanced education or a marketable skill and are now unable to provide for themselves. They formed drug or alcohol habits they can’t control.
Providing free and continuous welfare to these individuals is providing them a means and an incentive to continue making poor decisions, because these poor decision are now profitable. It will never make their pain go away. It will only make it worse. Welfare is not helping them face reality. If it does anything, it only makes you feel good because it gives you the illusion that you are helping. But you are not helping them. You are enabling them to make their lives worse. Any sense of virtue you claim from the act of welfare is tragically misguided.
As acknowledged, bad and tragic things do happen to good people. It is in our nature to want to help people who need it. That is the benefit of being social creatures and living in an orderly society. Neither of these two points is intended to be against promoting our mutual wellbeing or providing a safety net for when it is needed. Caring for each other and building that into our system of government is a wonderful thing.
The argument is that our system of welfare has been so corrupted over the decades that in many cases it is not promoting our mutual wellbeing and that creating and incentivizing dependency is not healthy but destructive, and destructive more so for the dependents than anyone else.
We must also be aware that it is becoming common practice to manipulate people’s emotions, even positive ones like genuinely caring for others, in order to promote agendas that we may not approve of outside of manipulation. Authorities (read despots) gain power by creating dependency, that is how they control people. The intent of government is to protect and secure our individual human rights, not to create dependencies that transfer power from people to government.
It is wise to have contingency plans in place to care for people when it is needed. But these plans need to be enacted in such a manner as not to remove virtue and not to turn pain into destruction by removing the motivation to change your behavior when that behavior becomes harmful.