Desiring Machine

The legendary liberal economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, died Saturday in Cambridge Mass. at 97 years of age. May he be remembered for a long time. I am not that intimately familiar with all his work but what I do know of him, he has always impressed me. I saw him recently on C-SPAN he was great. And he made a very simple straight forward comment about welfare. He acknowledged the fact that there are certainly cheaters within the welfare system but this does not give cause to condemn the system. Welfare is a cost to society to keep things fair and more importantly stable. And with this notion I entirely agree. I think too little is paid to success stories. I consider myself one of those success stories. I grew up in very impoverished circumstances, my parents received public assistance and food stamps from time to time. I was fortunate enough to go to college during the Clinton years and I received pell grants and the occasional scholarship. All this welfare has benefitted me greatly. I have a comfortable middle class job and I live a nice lifestyle. But I know that I would not be where I am today was it not for all the charity and assistance of others and my society that enabled me to be where I am today. I know there are dedicated, hard working, industrious people like me all over the world but they don’t have the same advantages. Their society does not have a safety net at all, and they fall through the cracks every day. I thrive today because of the ideas of men like Galbraith, but I know others are not so lucky, and are forced to live a life of bitter, debilitating poverty and subservience.

The trenchant criticism of welfare seems to hinge on this idea of “cheating the system”. This rhetoric, more than anything else works because it generates a strong moral adversion. This is perfectly understandable. Cheating is an affront to anyone who has worked hard in their life and made an effort to achieve what they have achieved. This kind of rhetoric is perhaps more effective on the underclass than the upper class. People working minimum wage jobs with little to show for at the end of the day are certainly going to be more disgusted by their neighbor who “pops stamps” to buy alcohol or drugs, than someone who is wealthy enough to worry about capital gains taxes. But the criticism often seems unfairly focused on the poor. And moreover it misses the larger point that the costs of welfare are economically justified when weighed against the the economic costs of angry and impoverished citizenry. And moreover the price of a few cheaters in the system is far outweighed by the moral and common good that government serves by keeping children fed, students educated and people housed.

What I don’t understand is why cheating is so prominent in the debate on welfare, but not in other sectors of our society. It seems to me that our society deals with the cost of cheating in many facets of our economy without dismantling the entire institutions and systems in which the cheating occurs. There are cheaters, liers and louts everywhere in our society. In the corporate boardrooms, in the houses of congress, in the judiciary, in the housing projects, in the suburbs, in business, in schools, in churches, in retail, in gambling, etc. In all these other sectors cheating is approached in rational terms and addressed but never offered as a justification for condemning the entire system. Vegas and gambling is full of cheats but no casino owner in his right mind would suggest that the entire city be shut down because of cheaters. Take retail, the business that decided they must crack down and involuntarily detain and frisk customers as a counter measure against shoplifters would quickly have to shut its doors. Shoplifting is a cost of doing business. Some level of corruption is tolerated and accounted as an expense in any retail business. This doesn’t make the corruption anymore viable or less offensive, just the approach to it is sane. Even at the height of the corporate accounting scandals where Ken Lay and Bernie Ebbers fleeced investors in the billions, there was an ordered and staid response to the problem. No one in power called for the wholesale dismantling of the investment banking system because of a few bad apples. And yet people will always easily fall into a line of argumentation that advocates wholesale dismantling of welfare because some people abuse the system. Even with my background, I often find it difficult to resist the temptation to view with a cynical presumption the homeless person who asks me for spare change. Do they really need my change? Do I need to pay money to this guy who is likely to spend it on alcohol or drugs? Its a defensive conditioning. I shouldn’t even really care what they do with change I might give them. The fact of the matter is that I would rather not reach into my pocket and hand this person change, however I am fully sympathetic to the plight. I think these problems should be dealt with structurally and on a system wide tax payer supported basis. A system that provides substantial low income housing and services is better than being nickle and dimed on the street corner. To be perfectly blunt, it is like the difference between a toll road and a freeway. I would much rather the highways and infrastructure be dealt with by the treasury and through taxes paid by all than by having to slow down and pay a small amount each time. It just makes sense to achieve economies of scale and efficiency when dealing with physical infrastructure. The same thing applies to human and social infrastructure and support.