Without A Net

Talk to a statist about his beliefs, and you will often hear the words “safety net” mentioned. Well, not so much mentioned as boldly, even aggressively declared, stated as a challenge, as an affirmation and declaration that theirs is the side of right, goodness and nobility, and presented with exclusionary ownership. The “safety net,” the presumed yet uncodified social contract that, statists tell us, authorizes the use of government force to protect those in society who don’t have enough (the definition of “enough” decided by them), is trotted out as the ultimate trump card against any effort to rein in government spending and social programs. I’ve seen, heard and been part of so many discussions that devolved to a binary state: if you’re not for government safety net programs, you’re against safety nets, if you don’t support them wholeheartedly, you want to throw granny on the street and leave grandpa to die of exposure in the gutter. It’s one of the more common straw men in political debate.

To be fair, when the hyperbole goes away, even most statists will acknowledge that there must be limits, there must be some point where the system says “you’ve received enough,” especially since they understand that they’d sound absolutely nutty otherwise. My personal experience is that those words are just that – words – and that in practice the answer to “where’s the line” is “to the left of where those heartless Republicans want it to be.” In other words, base partisan politics. Not that the Republicans are particularly courageous on this topic. For reasons of practicality, I imagine, accusations of heartlessness send Republican politicians and pundits scurrying. Mitt Romney shoved his entire leg into his mouth when he inartfully mumbled that the “poor” are already well provided for in this country. The argument has merit, but it must be handled very carefully in an environment where the press is in the tank for statism and redistribution and where short attention spans mean that one sound bite can have a disproportionate impact on people’s opinions.

Lets consider, though, what the safety net has accomplished and what incentives it creates. We have been engaged in a War on Poverty since the 1960s. We have had Social Security, a “safety net” retirement program, for 75 years. We’ve had Medicare for 50 years. The latter two programs, both shining stars of progressive politics, both trumpeted as epic successes, are going to fail without major modifications and curtailment of outlays. Their unfunded liabilities dwarf the national debt, and if politicians continue to ignore that stark fiscal reality, they will break the nation. We also have over a hundred different public assistance programs, costing hundreds of billions of dollars at the federal level. We borrow hundreds of billions of dollars to fund the government every year, borrowing that has built the national debt to an unfathomable 17 trillion dollars, with nary a glimmer of hope on the horizon for doing anything but continuing to grow it. None of this can go on forever – not Social Security, not Medicare, not our deficits, not the national debt. Most people who pay attention know this, but too few of them actually want things fixed. I believe this terrible abdication of responsibility derives from simple selfishness, which can manifest as “I don’t care if it breaks as long as I get me mine,” or as “I’m old enough to get what I’ve got coming to me before it all collapses,” or as “if our side tries to fix it, the other side will turn it against us in the next election,” or as “some smart person will figure this out when it really becomes a problem.” On top of that, there are many, many who simply aren’t paying attention, and are satisfied when “their” politicians tell them everything’s fine.

There is and always will be a segment of society, a percentage of the population, that lives lah-dee-dah like Aesop’s grasshopper, without a thought to the future, without any sense of obligation to one’s self. The motivations and justifications vary, but they don’t matter – it is sufficient to recognize that they will always exist. There is also a percentage of the population that avails itself, without shame and often without respect for the law, of whatever largesse and assistance there is out there. Herein we find the people (both public workers and those in the private sector) who will use sympathetic, colluding or bribed doctors to get themselves on disability, people who have figured out how to live entirely off the various forms of public assistance and have no interest getting off the dole, “welfare queens,” people who work “off the books” so that they can continue to receive assistance, and so forth. These two segments certainly overlap, but not fully. There is nothing society can do nor any quantity or breadth of legislation and regulation that will be sufficient to make these segments of society disappear – it’s a reality that there will always be people who’d rather have the latest iPhone than save for their retirement, and that there will always be people who exploit any system of assistance, public or private. This is a boon for statists and statism. The perpetual existence of the former ensures that the War on Poverty will never go away and the justification for retirement safety nets will always be there. The perpetual existence of the latter ensures that there will always be votes for those who promise to perpetuate redistribution and government largesse.

Despite the incontrovertible conclusion that those on the receiving side of the safety net will never go away, we needn’t throw in the towel and wave the white flag of surrender. We can set an initial goal of shrinking the size of these two incorrigible populations, and then move forward with breaking the presumption that a safety net must mean a government-operated one. To do so, we would start with an honest assessment of what government redistribution has accomplished and what effects it has had on society over the last 75 years. Yet, this sort of assessment is anathema to many, because it can directly contradict a lifetime’s devotion to a cause, or endanger decades worth of life on the government teat. There’s a reason government programs go on forever. No businessman, no program manager in the private sector, no teacher, no parent, no athlete, no dog trainer with a gram of competence would for a moment consider continuing a particular behavior or activity without assessing its efficacy or, worse, in the face of evidence that it’s not working, yet that’s exactly what politicians do all the time.

Since feedback and corrective response to it is apparently of low priority to politicians, all sorts of bad behaviors and unintended adverse consequences get to grow unabated. Consider Social Security, a program that many honestly believe is a pension fund, where their dollars are squirreled away for their retirement. It is not. It is a tax on the wages (not income) of those who work for the express purpose of providing benefits to those who have stopped working and to those who have incurred some sort of disability. Were it a pension fund, its managers would all be in jail for reckless mismanagement. Since it is politicians who ultimately decide how much benefit gets doled out, when it gets doled out and to whom, actuarial and financial realities are subordinated to vote-getting. The earliest retirees got far more than they put in, the adjustments necessary to reflect realities such as increased life expectancy aren’t made, the “trust fund” (which never really existed as such) got raided and replaced by IOUs, and the utterly false belief that the program is sound is perpetuated. The same holds true for countless smaller programs. Head Start, a program that the government’s own analysts say is an absolute waste of time and money, is getting its funding increased because it makes for good sound bite. Beyond this “supply side” recklessness, we have the “demand-side” folks who manipulate the system, legally and illegally, to collect more than they should, and the advocates for the poor who prosper when spending gets increased.

Without feedback, without proper assessment of success and efficacy, and without real, hard, market-force-like checks on abuses, safety net programs can and do get out of control. Rather than working as real safety nets for those who genuinely need them – nets that are supposed to prevent people from injury when they fall, so they can get their lives back together in an orderly fashion, they end up fostering dependence and sowing a sense of entitlement to what others have earned.

Back in the 60s and 70s, accepting welfare was considered a low point in one’s life, a mark of shame for family breadwinners. The zeitgeist was such that even television shows reflected this reality – fathers would be depicted as devastated and broken men if they couldn’t provide. Today? When was the last time you saw or heard someone lamenting having to take public assistance? Even those who do don’t have their stories told. Today there’s no shame in taking public assistance, and if you dare question why someone who runs marathons continues to collect disability, you are the bad person.

Social pressure and acceptance are major drivers of behavioral changes. We’ve known for half a century that cigarette smoking is extremely unhealthy, yet it persisted through the 70s and into the 80s. Something shifted, however, and smoking became “not-cool.” The government followed up with prohibitions and bans, but in many cases it was hopping on a bandwagon that was already rolling. In other cases it went and is going too far, well beyond what the science tells us, but it remains that if smoking hadn’t become a “bad thing” in the public’s eyes, the bans and restrictions would probably not have happened. Divorce used to be a scarlet letter, especially for women, and in many cases people chose to remain unhappy in bad marriages rather than suffer social stigma. Today, society doesn’t castigate people for divorce, and while many argue there is a deleterious result, in terms of liberty it can only be a positive to be able to escape a bad, failed or even abusive marriage without the fear of being a social outcast.

Thus is the way of the government safety net. When a large enough number of people decide taking government handouts is not a sign of failure or a stigma, the pressure to treat those handouts as a temporary “catch me when I fall” last resort goes away. And, if the degree of assistance is such that one might actually be worse off taking an entry level job than simply staying on the dole, then what motivation does someone on assistance have to get off it? Advocates for the poor insist on ever-more money for social programs and most politicians are all too happy to oblige. Those who have the courage to point out the truth, who dare say we’re already providing vast and overlapping safety nets to far too many people, don’t get very far in politics.

So, spending grows, new programs get enacted, existing programs continue on and are expanded (their actual efficacy notwithstanding), more and more people receive assistance, and the War on Poverty continues on. The Cato Institute reports that there are at least 126 government assistance programs, spending nearly a trillion dollars across all levels of government. 1 American in 3 receives benefits from at least one of these programs.

If this were a real war with victory as the desired outcome, it would be considered a brutal loss. If the government’s goal in the War on Poverty were to reduce or end poverty, half a century and $15 trillion worth of spending by some reports should have produced significant results. A proper measure of an antipoverty program’s success should be a steady decrease in its rolls. Spending should be on the wane, and the number people who receive assistance should be low. Instead, we have the figures I cited in the previous paragraph. Certainly, what the government is and has been doing isn’t working. Instead of providing safety nets, we’ve institutionalized poverty, created broad and overlapping senses of entitlement, normalized the receipt of that which others have worked for, and fostered cultures of dependency, envy and divisiveness.

Those memes have infiltrated society so thoroughly that many lower wage and manual labor jobs are beneath one’s “dignity” while living off food stamps, housing assistance, Medicaid and a laundry list of other handouts are not. Saying “I’m not managing to take care of myself or my family, my hat is in hand” is not. Hand-in-hand is the dislocation of failure. We honor children merely for participating, rather than encouraging and rewarding success. We validate the notion that things are never one’s fault. We bail out those who have failed in their endeavors, and in doing so encourage recklessness and discourage prudence. We institutionalize “too big to fail” while simultaneously penalizing some who are “too successful.”

Statists tend to conflate “society” with “government” whenever they perceive that a societal obligation exists. Talk of a “social contract,” an duty individuals have to those around them, very quickly becomes a justification for the forced redistribution of wealth by those who have taken it upon themselves to enforce that contract. Yet if a social contract is truly part of the zeitgeist, there’s no need to force its fulfillment. If the obligation to help those who need it most is part of our psyches, part of our sense of community, we’re going to do it without some gatekeeper or hall monitor doing it for us. We’ve witnessed the incredible largesse of Americans rich and poor toward those who have suffered from natural calamities foreign and domestic, we know Americans are caring, generous and giving people, and there are many studies that show even the poorest will help those who they deem worse off than themselves. In short, the safety net exists and will continue to exist even without government there to provide it. By institutionalizing it, we do and have done enormous damage to our society. The desire those who engaged in the War on Poverty, the desire to improve society, has had the exact opposite effect.

What, then, is the solution? What can be done to undo the harm that has been done? Some success was achieved back in 1996 with Welfare Reform, where, among other reforms, time limits were placed on some forms of welfare. Unfortunately, the recession and weak recovery have encouraged the opposite behavior in our politicians, with extensions of unemployment benefits well beyond what that system was designed to provide and with massive expansion of programs such as food stamps. Rather than shrinking the net, or setting it closer to the ground, the government has expanded it, added layers, and decided to leave it in place longer and longer. The solution, and it is a politically difficult one, is to shrink the net, to reduce the number of public assistance programs, tighten the eligibility requirements, and shorten the timeframes for receiving assistance. The death-spiral the nation is on must be reversed, ere we crash into the ground.

There must also be a shift. At some point, society, not government, must be trusted to provide for its weakest. That trust, history strongly suggests, is well-founded, yet yielding control in favor of trust scares the bejeezus out of statists. They presume that trust will prove insufficient and that what people are willing to give won’t be enough to cover all those who need (they also don’t want to cede control for selfish reasons). They don’t want to trust those who are worthy of trust. Yet, the current system benefits those who’ve proven untrustworthy. Beyond the scammers and exploiters, there are those who don’t honor their end of the social contract, who, once on the dole, find it easier to ride it as long as they can than to use the “soft landing” to get back to productivity and self-reliance. There are also those who, knowing the government intends to be there for them in the future, live the grasshopper’s life. Are they more worthy of trust than those who take care of themselves and, demonstrably, reach into their pockets whenever they perceive a real need in others? Is that the pinnacle of our social contract?

Removing the government safety net should be the ultimate goal of a healthy society rooted in liberty. It won’t happen overnight, nor should it. It took half a century or more to build the culture of dependency, it’ll take time to wean it away. People step up in times of need and distress, on both sides of the equation. If the pressure to care for one’s self is there, people will care for themselves. If there are people in true need, others in our society will meet that need. History supports this conclusion. In removing the net, we will do more to provide the needed benefits than in expanding it. And, I believe, help be more efficient, more compassionate, and more compatible with human dignity.