I was debating a statist about welfare schemes and their effect on the poor. My thoughts: The welfare state/forced wealth redistribution helps those that are poor and wish to be poor. However, it makes accumulating wealth more difficult for the aspirational poor due to creating artificial barriers to entry, disincentivizing work, and promoting inflationary monetary policy. When considering the question, should we look at it from the perspective of each poor individual? Since value is subjective, whether or not welfare is helpful to the poor depends on whether or not each poor individual accepts it?
Sorry if this is confusing, I guess I have two questions, one regarding economics and the other regarding praxeology.
well i think government policy in helping poor can only go so far. Generally speaking, it can help some people in the short term but in the long run, it is unsustainable. And, i think, the end result would be that you end up with an even greater number of people that are poor, which in turn, results in even more expensive government policy to help the new poor.
If the government really wanted to help the poor, they should put off with all the restrictions required in order to get a job. Think about it, in America, in most jobs, you need an address, a social security card, and an id. Well if one is homeless, they dont have an address. Not many homeless have a SS card and/ or an id.
Yes and no, and it depends on how you define helping. Some of us think that it donesn’t matter how bad things are people are still better off under anarchy. Vice versa, some think the same thing about other ideologies, obviously. People just try to help and it’s not always the best way.
Sure even in the ideal world where government is efficient and is only “Helping” the poor, the receiver of government redistributed wealth, loot, booty, graft, etc is always better off in the short term. But even in this case the issue is as always that these are real resources that have to come from someplace else. It is the someplace else that loses their SAVINGS to provide for immediately gratification of the “poor”. These savings are far more valueable to society and especially the poor as they get used by entrepreneurs to build new products and services or increase the purchasing power of consumers and mainly the poor.
In the real world the situation is a whole lot worse. Government in a stupid effort to help the poor must also kick back some money to the not so poor folks. This is especially true for the upper classes in wealth as they have savings that they can squander to lobby the govenrment. So government ends up having to buy its attempt to help the poor by helping everyone else. Of course this is not sustainable so government has to increase its theft from other folks. And again the other folks use their wealth to stem that theft. So govenrment eventually gets around to stealing from people who have not been born yet thorugh debts. This is in a nutshell where the EU and Japan are today. Add in the structure of the US Government and its lack of Constitutional Limitation and you add in a gigantic military industrial complex on top of the normal level of corruption and theft.
So even in the best case, helping the poor thorugh force is always and everywhere bad for society in the long run.
I’d say that in most ways the welfare state simply creates a dependency on the state. There are a great number of poor folks that are working and still need food stamps or subsidized housing to get by, so in the sense of immediate well-being and survival, welfare most certainly does help the poor. That said, I think the welfare state does a lot more destruction to communities than it does help them. Usually the way the projects are designed alienate them from the surrounding urban geography, breaking down any social activity that could potentially occur between their inhabitants and the other residents of the urban jungle. Food stamps and the like carry such a social stigma that although there are large portions of urban populations that depend on them, there are few that will admit it.
While there are still a large number of folks who have no chance of surviving without some sort of welfare, the solution should be community based mutual-aid programs that encourage self-sufficiency instead of helpless dependency on authoritarian institutions.