This guy has no money, no wealth, no family, no friends, can’t read or write or do math, can barely speak, is bankrupt, has kids to feed, a criminal record with several felony charges, and a bad drug addiction.
Every time I argue against social welfare and mention that the redistribution of wealth is unethical, this guy comes up. In my opinion, it is an emotional appeal. I’m left wondering what some effective strategies are for arguing against the “hopelessness” of this fellow, or the need to use force to assist him. Does the existence of a social assistance program even help him?
What I’m looking for is a quick response to get people to realize that a welfare state causes this problem more than a lack of state welfare.
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At least one argument has crossed my mind:
Social assistance does not help this man. It just gives him a free ticket to continue being this way. If he had no state income, he would at least have to deal with the shame of asking from other people, who would be able to provide basic assistance to him, because the means to providing the basic assistance weren’t stolen from them to begin with.
“So are you admitting that you wouldn’t help this man without government forcing you to?”
Disclaimer: I’ve never used this one (although I have said similar things), but it could be pretty funny.
You should have added that there is an ice storm outside, he has neither coat nor gloves, has 8 kids to feed and all the mothers are in rehab.
I would say that most of the groups that can provide help immediately were not originally government financed. These were charities like the Red Cross, Salvation Army, etc. Beyond the immediate:
These items in the Welfare state hurt this man:
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Minimum wage. He could complete for work more effectively if he could sell his labor below the arbitrary minimum.
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Taxes on wealthier people. Wealthy people have always been generious and without 50% or higher tax burdens they could return to this state.
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Social security and medicare. These systems hurt the poor. The wealth collected here is sent to wealthy old people the mass majority of whom could afford or would have been able to afford to live without these systems but were suckered into them. This mess sucks wealth from society that would go to people like your example.
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Public Schooling. Again you have giant amounts of wealth used for education instead of used by the private sector.
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Welfare bureaucracy. The bureaucracy does not care about this man and sucks up at least 2/3s of the wealth allocated to helping him.
Compassion, like all things, cannot be free. It will be wasted and taken for granted. Compassion must be conditional on the hopeless guy reforming his life.
Public welfare in this case turns compassion into a right of citizenship. It is no longer conditional on any form of lifestyle change. For those willing to reform, there is always plenty of compassion provided by the market.
Even if state-safety nets will work you shouldn’t prefer them to private safety-nets. Self ownership arguments aside, you can’t ever rely on government to uphold its side of the deal (i’ll take your tax dollars and do X with them. yeah right.). Charity would be much more efficiently allocated, because you are spending out of your own pocket bla bla.
Government has repeatedly failed to take care of the lowest echelons of society. Where they do succeed, they spend far to much money for not enough results. Government is the enemy of welfare.
http://media.mises.org/mp3/woods2/15.mp3
The above is Chapter 15 of Politically Incorrect History of USA, by Woods. He shows that all the gov’t welfare proggys to help Group X [X= poor, drug addicts, you name it] historically INCREASED the number of people suffering from Problem X. In other words, the welfare proggys ALL made things WORSE as far as the very problem they were trying to solve. He also explains in great detail why, and why this is inevitable.
Peter Schiff’s latest podcast [10/22/09] says the same thing happened with student loans and with housing loans, and explains why.
What happened to charity?
If we cut taxes and reduce the scope of government, then surely money donated to charity will increase. After all, leftists seem to acknowledge the marginal utility of money: they all claim that we need higher taxes on the rich “because they don’t need all that money.” Well, if money has diminishing marginal utility, doesn’t it make sense that lower taxes would increase charity giving?
Moreover, with less government interventionism, the economy would grow quicker. Wealth would increase as worker productivity would increase. As the supply of products within the economy increase, then it would be easier to acquire goods and services needed to keep the “helpless” alive.
Furthermore, higher economic growth would add to the diminishing utility of money, as described above. After all, if your wealth grows at 10% per year, do you really know what to do with all of that additional cash? Probably not. Charity donations would increase even more.