A rebuttal

[keenman]

Two people on my friends' list have responded negatively to the following quote from Barack Obama earlier on this evening :-

"For over two decades, he's subscribed to that old, discredited Republican philosophy - give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else. In Washington, they call this the

Comments

[queueball]

Guessing that I might be one of the two: my disagreement isn't with the concept. It's with the way it's inevitably implemented. LiveJournal isn't the place for political debate, so I won't try to start one up over specifics. :) But it does shock me that so many people automatically assume it's a debate between helping people down on their luck, or not doing so - as if I actually want people to die in the gutter if they can't take care of themselves. It's just that it's more complex than "have a safety net" or "don't"; there are a lot of really important questions of "how" and "how much" to be answered, and they make all the difference. When a safety net is done wrong, it causes some people to end up in downward spirals, committing suicide, etc. because of the "help." It's got to be done carefully.

[keenman]

You win the jackpot. :-P Yeah, I'm totally with you there: the implementation specifics are key, and yeah, in Canada, it's not implemented perfectly either. To a degree, both of my parents had trouble getting out of welfare when they were in it: in many ways it was the easiest route for them to take, and even I found it really frustrating that any time I got a job in high school, that any money I made immediately went to the government. Where's the incentive to work there? We should talk about this more in person sometime: I think it'd be fascinating.

[queueball]

I try to keep as an article of faith that one day a president will come along who's going to make substantial and worthy, though not complete, inroads in bridging this gap in thinking about government assistance. I mused on it here. I had really high hopes that Howard Dean was gonna be the one; alas.

[colinmarshall]

cobalt999 once passed on what I thought was a very smart quote of yours: "A libertarian is a socialist who's read the fine print."

I understand why there should be a discussion about what the government should do for poor people - I'm in the help-the-poor camp myself, though I seem to use "poor" in the same way that another would use, say, "destitute" - but what makes me truly uncomfortable is when the concept of desert is brought into politics, somewhere it most definitely does not belong. Phrases like "conservatives think the rich deserve to be right and the poor deserve to be poor" and "the poor deserve government help", make my skin crawl. Desert is for morality plays, not government.

[john1082]

I believe that it is, in part, a cultural thing. The US was settled by those who received very little, if any, government aid. You could homestead a farm and get the land for free but that was about it. I think that notion has carried itself through to today. More government aid is available now but it is still constrained by history. And also perhaps by the self interest of those who do have a larger share of the wealth. Add to that a vocal religious base with Calvanist tendencies and you get the American notion of do it yourself.

[keenman]

Yeah, it's understandable from a historical perspective, but it is a bit frustrating that the US is so one-sided on the 'self-made man' side of things. People should help each other out in times of need. I guess the question lies is whether the government should feel the same obligation: I feel it should because everybody deserves at least a little help if they've hit on hard times, and "the market" won't be there for everyone. Now the trick is tying government handouts to labour, or something else, so it's not a one-way system that makes beggars of its recipients.

[queueball]

Actually one of the things that most concerns people like me is that the U.S. has a long history of people helping one another out through voluntary associations. The rise of huge government programs to perform the same task, crowding out the private actors, was correlated with increases in crime and poverty and illness and every other bad thing you can name, including static cling. It's not all government's fault, but government seems to have had a substantial hand in it. And it was trying to help, is the sad part.

This isn't an argument for Reaganomics, though, just an argument for being careful. Welfare programs inevitably get tied in with drug laws, child support laws, and a bunch of other laws that send well-meaning people into exactly the kind of tailspins you want to avoid. That's what so sad about the silly American left-right debate: decent people on both sides want the exact same thing, and never seem to get past name-calling to understand their only disagreement is, "What will actually work to help people?"