The natural danger that threatens such associations consists in the removal of the sense of responsibility. No individual can ever be relieved of responsibility for his own actions without incurring grave perils and difficulties for the future.**56 If the day should ever come when all our citizens say, “We shall assess ourselves in order to aid those who cannot work or cannot find work,” there would be reason to fear that man’s natural inclination toward idleness would assert itself, and that in short order the industrious would be made the dupes of the lazy. Mutual aid therefore implies mutual supervision, without which the benefit funds would soon be exhausted. This mutual supervision, which is for the association a guarantee of continued existence, and for each individual an assurance that he will not be victimized, is also the source of the moral influence it, as an institution, exercises. Thanks to it, drunkenness and debauchery are gradually disappearing, for by what right could a man claim help from the common fund when it could be proved that he had brought sickness and unemployment on himself through his own fault, by his own bad habits? This supervision restores the sense of responsibility that association, left to itself, would tend to relax.
Now, in order that such supervision may bear its full fruit, the mutual-aid societies must be free, must have certain well-defined prerogatives and be in complete control of their own funds. They must be allowed sufficient flexibility to adapt their regulations to fit local needs.
Suppose that the government interferes. It is easy to imagine the role it will assign itself. Its first concern will be to take over all funds on the pretext of centralizing them; and, in order to make this measure more palatable, it will promise to increase them out of resources taken from the taxpayer.**57 “For,” it will say, “is it not entirely natural and just that the state should contribute to so great, so generous, so philanthropic, so humanitarian a work as this?” The first unjust act will be to force into the society, through taxation, citizens who have no right to share in the benefits. The second unjust act will be to propose, in the name of unity, of solidarity (call it what you will), that all associations be merged into one, subject to uniform regulations.
But, I ask, what will happen to the morality of the institution when its treasury is fed by taxes; when no one, except possibly some bureaucrat, finds it to his interest to defend the common fund; when every member, instead of making it his duty to prevent abuses, delights in encouraging them; when all mutual supervision has stopped, and malingering becomes merely a good trick played on the government? The government, to give it its just due, will be disposed to defend itself; but, no longer being able to count on private action, will have to resort to official action. It will appoint various agents, examiners, controllers, and inspectors. It will set up countless formalities as barriers between the workers’ claims and his relief payments. In a word, an admirable institution will, from its very inception, be turned into a branch of the police force.
The state will perceive, first of all, the advantages to be gained from adding to the vast throng of its appointees, from multiplying the number of jobs at its disposal, from extending its patronage and electoral influence. It will not realize that, in arrogating to itself a new function, it has also placed upon itself a new, and, indeed, a frightening responsibility. For what must the immediate consequence be? The workers will no longer look upon their common treasury as property to be administered and maintained by themselves, with their own claims on it limited by the extent of its resources. Little by little they will become accustomed to considering unemployment benefits, not as something provided by the limited funds that they have accumulated by their own foresight, but as a debt that society owes them. They will never admit that society cannot pay and will never be satisfied with the benefits they receive. The state will constantly be obliged to ask for new additions to the budget. At this point, encountering opposition from the treasury officials, it will find itself in inextricable difficulties. Abuses will increase all the time, and the government will shrink, as it always does, from rectifying them until there comes the day of explosion. But when this happens, the government will discover that it has to reckon with a population that has lost the ability to act for itself, that looks to a cabinet minister or an official for everything, even its livelihood, a population whose thinking has become so warped as to have lost any notion of right, property, liberty, or justice.