WELFARE FAREWELL

In most science-fiction stories, even those set in the very far future, there’s an - underlying assumption that people need some sort of work to do, in order to be happy. Jobs are regarded as essential to the economy of the society, even future societies where most or-all of the manufacturing is completely automated. Or, increasingly, jobs are regarded as essential to the emotional well-being of the characters. People who are deprived of meaningful work are usually-shown as being miserable, dull, listless and generally behaving like someone in a TV commercial before the sponsor’s product springs its miraculous cure. This attitudethat work is good and even necessaryis a reflection of the so-called Protestant Ethic. It’s a bit surprising to find that the Protestant Ethic inhabits the thinking of so many science-fiction writers, despite the fact that for three generations there has been a significant and growing number of Americans who have never engaged in “gainful employment.”

At heart, the Protestant Ethic says that work is inherently good and man must work if he is to be happy, useful to his community, and pleasing in the sight of God. There is much to recommend this attitude. It helped to make western Europe and the United States the wealthiest and most powerful bloc of nations in the world. In a slightly rewritten form, it’s helping to mold Russia and China into s prosperous and powerful modern nations.

The Ethic is a reflection of the serious attempts of men to find meaning and significance in the world around them. Early Christianity was the ideal religion for slaves, with its belief that the Second Coming of the Savior was imminent and its conviction that the ways of the world were transitory and meaningless. What did it matter if a man was a slave, when the real prize was heaven, and the world of Rome and slavery was due to end any day now? A cynic might even say that the Roman Empire got more out of its slaves by embracing Christianity than by repressing it. But the slaves believed, and accepted centuries of misery, right on down to the time that Rome collapsed, and then even further into the Middle Ages.

In much the same way, people have believed the Protestant Ethic. Often called the Work Ethic, it is a product of the Reformation that began with Martin Luther in the Sixteenth Century. The Protestant Reformation coincided with, and reinforced, the rise of capitalism in Europe. The Work Ethic became a form of everyday morality well suited for a God-fearing man who was trying to make the tough and soul-wrenching climb from tradesman to industrialist.

The ascetic messianic faith of early Christianity did not, at all suit the struggling burghers of Sixteenth Century Europe. And the assumptions and attitudes of the Protestant Ethic no longer suit a huge and growing number of Americans: the welfare class. For three generations, since the Great Depression of the 1930’s, a significant number of Americans have lived most or all of their lives without working at paying jobs. Their number is growing and their problems are getting worse.

Because the Protestant Ethic regards work as good per se, working people are treated to praisewords such as “industrious, productive, a real go-getter, a credit to the community.” The other side of the coin is much uglier. Obviously, since work is inherently good, people who don’t work are inherently no-good. They are lazy, shiftless, cheating good-for-nothings who wallow in the public trough and produce nothing but more babies who, in turn, soak up more welfare money.

These pleasantries are reserved for the lower-class people who don’t work. Upper-class people who don’t work are called jet-setters. Or, as the philosopher once said, “If you drink in the morning at the neighborhood bar, you’re a lush. If you drink in the morning at the country club, you’re a sport.” The upper class seems immune to the strictures of the Protestant Ethic. The people who take the Ethic most seriously are those who promulgated it in the first place, and disciplined themselves to live by its rule: the middle class.

The 1972 elections showed that the nation’s middle classby far its largest percentage of votershas developed a hardened attitude toward the welfare class. Essentially, the attitude is, “Why should my taxes be supporting people who don’t-and won’t-work?” This growing resentment will end our present welfare system very soon. And, although the middle class’s anger is wrongly placed and largely based on cruel myths, the real question is not how to save the welfare system; the question is, what will replace the current system?

Before tackling that question, though, let’s take a look at some of the realities of the welfare situation. Polls in several major cities have shown that the people who complain about the welfare system fall into two categories: the welfare recipients, who don’t feel the system does them justice; and the middle-class taxpayers, who foot the bill for the system. The interesting fact, the pollsters learned, is that the complaining taxpayers almost inevitably have never known anyone who is a welfare recipient. After all, those poor people don’t live in our neighborhood! And they’re black!

It’s much easier to complain when you don’t know the realities of the situation. “Don’t bother me with the facts, my mind’s made up!” Well, here are some facts. Statistically, the majority of welfare recipients in the United States are whites, not blacks. Most of the recipients are mothers with dependent children; the fathers are nowhere in sight, and the children are too young to allow the mothers to work. The next largest group of recipients are elderly retired persons, again mostly white.

Much hullabaloo has been raised about cheaters on the welfare roles, people who double-park their Cadillacs to run in and collect their unemployment compensation checks. There are some. But very few. And in the same way that every honest cop gets hurt by the discovery of a crooked policeman, millions of mothers and kids and aged people get socked every time some clown gets caught cheating the welfare system. Incidentally, statistics seem to show that there are more cheaters among the welfare administrators than the welfare recipients. There’s lots more money to be made in kickbacks from doctors than from bilking the system out of an extra unemployment check.

The biggest problem with the welfare system is that the system requires a welfare class, if the system is to survive. Bureaucracies behave like organisms, and every organism tries its damnedest not only to perpetuate itself, but to grow. The welfare bureaucracy is no longer aimed at eliminating or even alleviating poverty; it is aimed at making certain that there are a large number of poor people who need the welfare system. With the best will in the world (perhaps) we’ve created a system that perpetuates poverty.

Before we all rise in righteous indignation, though, it’s necessary to realize that our national economy has probably reached the point where we need large numbers of people who will do nothing but consume the products that our factories produce. We don’t need more workers, we have too many workers already! Our work force has been too large since at least the end of the Korean War; the unemployment figures have seldom gone below five percent since the mid-1950’s, and they’re rising, not falling. And remember, most of the people on welfare are not men temporarily out of jobs: they’re mothers who can’t work, children who’ve never worked, elderly who are retired. These people aren’t even counted in the unemployment statistics!

There are too many workers, and not enough consumers. The situation could get worse as automation continues to take over more and more of our manufacturing industries.

The nation’s welfare class represents a group of guaranteed consumers. After all, the only way they can receive welfare money is by proving that they haven’t produced any goods or services. The welfare class, however, simply cannot solve the nation’s economic woes. You can’t expect people on subsistence incomes to consume enough of the nation’s goods to make a gain for the over-all economy: not unless somebody repeals the laws of thermodynamics, especially the one about entropy.

So where do we go from here? Is there a cure?

Certainly. It all depends on how much effort and treasure we’re willing to expend to produce a solution to the problem. Many proposals have been thrown into the public arena, especially during last year’s election campaigns.

One of these proposals has had the benefit of a real field test. And, at first glimpse, it seems to offer some real promise. Both political partiesand both Presidential candidates of 1972have claimed to support the idea, at one time or another.

The idea is the negative income tax.

It works this way: The cognizant government agency (and government here can mean federal, state or local) sets a minimum guaranteed income, and a reduction rate. For example, the minimum guaranteed income might be $3,000 per year, and the reduction rate 50 percent. This means that for every $1,000 in income the person earns on his or her own, the welfare money will be reduced by $500. This provides an incentive for the person to earn an incomefor the more income earned, the more money the person actually has in his or her hands. And the more money the person earns, the less the government has to dole out, as the table below shows.

Ea Gu To

rn ar tal

ed an Inc

Inc tee om

om d e

e Inc

om

e

$ 0 $3, $3,

00 00

0 0

1,0 2,5 3,5

00 00 00

2,0 2,0 4,0

00 00 00

3,0 1,5 4,5

00 00 00

4,0 1,0 5,0

00 00 00

5,0 50 5,5

00 0 00

6,0 0 6,0

00 00

This negative income tax idea has been tried experimentally in five cities, in a program sponsored by the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity. The cities were Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Paterson, Passaic, Jersey City and Trenton, New Jersey.

The most interesting feature of the experiment’s results was that the people who received the negative income tax didn’t simply, sit back and live off their government guaranteed income. They went out and got jobs, at about the same rate as people who had no welfare money at all coming in. In other words, this welfare system shows evidence of encouraging people to get up and work, rather than forcing them to remain officially poverty-stricken.

Now then, what would happen if the negative income tax became a permanent feature of our welfare system?

First, it would remove the money-handling from the welfare administrators. The negative income tax could be handled by the same jovial people who take care of the positive income tax: your friendly and efficient Internal Revenue Service. The IRS is set up to handle such a system, is good at finding frauds and cheats, and has an impressive record of victories in its court actions. People would qualify for welfare not by showing up at a welfare office in rags and tears, but by filling out an IRS form  the same as thee and me  every April 15. The rate of cheating might not go down, at first; but the rate of exposure and conviction of the cheaters will be impressive.

Second, when the nation’s unwed mothers no longer have to storm welfare offices to demand extra checks for winter clothes, perhaps the social workers will finally get the time to do the work they were originally trained to do: counsel and advise the welfare recipient; find the reasons why a woman will go through life producing babies who will be raised without a father; get the children to school so that they might learn how to cope with their environment; provide the health and social care that so many of the poor and elderly desperately need.

Most important, the new system will throw the responsibility for the welfare recipient’s financial status squarely onto the welfare recipient him-or herself. Instead of a paternal welfare office doling out checks for this and that, providing you prove you need it, there will be a regular income from the government with no strings attached to it. And that’s all. If the money gets spent on booze, it will be spent and there will be no more. The only additional money available to the welfare recipient will be what he or she earns.

The basic purpose of any welfare system should be to get people off the welfare roles and make them taxpayers, not tax burdens. The negative income tax might be a way to move the welfare class in that direction. Clearly, the welfare system that we have now is heading for disaster.

But what of the more distant future, when automation is complete, when fusion energy is cheap and abundant, when the economy is so incredibly rich that hardly anyone needs to work? Remember that, compared to the dawn-to-dusk labor of pre-industrial societies, we are now unbelievably wealthy and work very little. When the next quantum jump comes, from automated self-servicing machinery that can produce all the goods we want with hardly any human intervention, what happens to the Protestant Ethic?

The only possible kind of work for humans will be jobs that machines can’t do: services that require personal relationships, artistic endeavors, handcrafts.

Will we develop an economy in which our machine-based wealth makes the very concept of the Work Ethic unthinkable? Eventually, perhaps. But think of the social lag that now exists between our Protestant Ethic and the realities of the welfare class. Now multiply it to encompass the majority of the human race: unemployed, unemployable, restless, with plenty of time on their hands to get into mischief.

Maybe that’s why Cheops started those pyramids! THE EDITOR

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