The Public Policy

...Rather, she said, the government was requiredto do so...

...This is the way I see it...

...the hardship to those few who might ultimately be reinstated must, it seems, always outweigh such considerations...

...The Court then goes on to argue that where the termination of welfare is at issue, "due process" requires more than administrative determination of ineligibility...

...Trouble sets in when attention is fixed on free-lance marketers of literary output, artists who receive no salary checks, denizens of Tin Pan Alley, and others equally uninhibited by intimate knowledge of what Schumpeter called "practical affairs...

...But this means nothing to the Court...

...They fail because we fail them and all that is required for their success is that we equalize environments to produce the New (necessarily socialist) Man...

...In addition, the decision seems likely to impose an immense burden on the state...

...Their termination involves state action that adjudicates important rights...

...Its "sociological" statement of the "benefits of welfare" reflects, at the very least, a certain insularity from the practical experiences of the United States in this area...

...Let us find out how much truth there is in the assertion that gifted men and women who are unhamThe Public Policy by Peter Rusthoven Lijb, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Welfare Among the many television delights served up by last year's Democratic National Convention was the appearance of a speaker for the National Welfare Rights Organization...

...Literary criticism flourishes even though critics disagree as to whether particular pieces ought to be treated as literary productions or interpretative journalism...

...The board allowed such individuals to request a "fair hearing" after termination of benefits, with provision for judicial review if benefits were not reinpered by entanglement in practical affairs "elicit, guide, and form the expressive dispositions within a society" (Shils, p. 5...

...But the brunt of the speaker's anger was directed at the obtuse failure of the convention and the American people to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Organization's demands...

...Welfare benefits, it said, "are a matter of statutory entitlement for persons qualified to receive them...

...390 U.S...

...These criticisms of Goldberg v. Kelly are both substantial and, to me, persuasive...

...Indeed, in a certain sense, the very function of public policy is to reflect a society's view of which fights shall be deemed most deserving of society's endorsement...

...While welfare in some form has acquired a certain legitimacy in the body politic, most Americans do not view it as a "right" in the traditional sense of that term...

...The Court achieved this result in Go/dberg, Commissioner of Social Services of the City of New York v. Kelly, et...

...By all means let us get on with probing study of these important and imperfectly understood people...

...Kelly, et al...

...P, ev;,ew I.Q...

...Welfare, they contended, was a basic property right...

...and indeed, the recipients were entitled to such payments as a matter of fundamental right...

...Surely, "No termination of welfare without a pre-termination evidentiary hearing" has not yet become the twentieth-century equivalent of "No taxation without representation...

...the recipients deserved such payments...

...Moreover, the Court said, "termination of aid pending resolution of a controversy over eligibility" would "adversely affect [the recipient's] ability to seek redress from the welfare bureaucracy...

...Government employees are fired by administrative decision...

...Numerous things can be said about this decision...

...Q.E.D...

...Yet both the employee and the taxpayer have clearly been deprived of property in a purely administrative proceeding, without a "pre-termination evidentiary hearing...

...254), a full two years before the Democratic Convention of 1972...

...yet no one contends that the due process clause requires the government to continue paying such employees until the validity of their discharge has been established at a trial...

...If IQ is principally inherited, then much of our compensatory education efforts for lowerclass children are wasted, and failure may run in the genes...

...Her particular speech was distinguished, however, by the unusually high degree of anger and self-righteous fervor with which it was delivered (a none-tooeasy distinction, considering the competition she had in this area...

...in the Meritocracy Nature, nurture, or not sure...

...While the words "due process" prohibit capricious governmental action in depriving people of life, liberty, or property, it is well established that administrative procedures satisfy the requirements of due process in many con~ texts...

...I~t us find out whether novelists who bear their fruit in the grime of New York City or put an ocean between themselves and the miseries of their countrymen write better novels than storytellers who hole up in Mississippi or draw a university paycheck for meeting classes three days a week...

...7.95 distortionists, abetted by silence or faint defense from liberal opportunist~ Knowing the IQ of a child in second grade, one can predict with a high likelihood of success his IQ twenty years later (little or no change), and his social status as measured by occupational level...

...The Court, in essence, agreed...

...The Coleman Report and the studies done recently on Head Start indicate that spending more money than the average on this child's education, or giving him special classes, is likely to make no difference in his future performance...

...Of course, this kind of review is a several year process, and no one supposes that, should the government win, it would have any realistic hope of recovering the money it has paid to the ineligible recipient while that process was going on...

...In part, I suppose, she was irritated by the time-slot granted her--most of the minority reports were heard around 3 A.M...

...ficiently in running the country to know what is going on...

...but again, no one urges that the Fourteenth Amendment dictates giving the taxpayer the benefits of the claimed exemption until a a judicial proceeding confirms or denies the validity of the IRS choice...

...but even if true, it is a distinction not mentioned, much less sanctioned, by the Constitution...

...It is virtually impossibIe to find evidence that welfare has been an effective guard against "societal malaise...

...Both groups, I submit, have failed to recognize that "rights," like ideas, are not created equal...

...cry those who believe in individualism: men are infinitely varied and the free society offers the myriad possibilities appropriate for such multifaceted creatures...

...protested that this was insufficient...

...Justice Black, the lone dissenter from the majority, described the probable results in this area very well...

...It is merely a distinction which appeals to the particular sensitivities of the Court...

...And then there is the constitutional criticism...

...The only distinction one can draw between them and the welfare recipient is that the "property" of the latter may be a good deal more immediately important to him...

...Commissioner Goldberg's antagonists in this action were a group of welfare recipients in New York who were about to be stricken from the rolls after investigation by the welfare beard had determined them to be ineligible for benefits...

...I suspect, however, that Senator McGovern and the other men directing the course of the convention were rather glad to have only a small segment of the electorate listening to the angry young lady from NWRO...

...It required instead, as the petitioners alleged, a "pre-termination evidentiary hearing," including right to counsel and adversary procedures...

...As Black put it, "This decision is thus only another variant of the view often expressed by some members of this Court that the Due Process Clause forbids any conduct that a majority of the Court believes 'unfair,' 'indecent,' or 'shocking to their cons c i e n c e s . ' . . . Neither these words nor any like them appear anywhere in the Due Process Clause...

...and the Court, as so often in recent history, is not adverse to using the Constitution to actuate those sensitivities...

...It is difficult, indeed, to see how welfare has fostered "dignity" or enabled the 20 The Alternative January 1974 poor to "participate meaningfully in the life of the community...

...And those same Americans would probably have been surprised to hear such an idea advanced in the forum of a national convention of the current majority party...

...A welfare family of four, she contended, should receive something in excess of $6,000 a year from the federal government...

...Supreme Court, I think most Americans would agree with that statement...

...It is one thing for the government to attempt to supply welfare assistance to those it determines to be needy...

...The ultimate implications of the Court's decision, he argued, would require the payment of benefits to any recipient whose eligibility was challeuged until he had the opportunity, no doubt with the aid of a court-appointed and publicly-paid lawyer, to present his case to the Supreme Court...

...Probably the only people who witnessed this speech in its entirety were insomniacs and those individuals who, like myself, are so fascinated by national political conventions that they are unable to turn them off no matter how late the hour or bering the subject matter...

...The book, I.Q...

...It is the attitude endorsed, albeit in more sober, restrained, and judicial language, by the Supreme Court of the United States...

...Which is the primary determinant of intelligence: heredity, or environment...

...Conversely, Black points out, the government may respond to the Court's decision in Goldberg by becoming very strict about letting people on the welfare rolls in the first place...

...The Court indeed emphasizes this...

...The fact that a given individual may be qualified for welfare by statute does not give him a "right to welfare" which is worthy of the same praise, the same veneration, the same encouragement, or even the same protection as, say, one's right to a trial by jury in a criminal proceeding, or one's right to worship as he sees fit...

...Some things can be inherited, like tallness or blondness, and others not, like the preference for Chevrolets over Fords...

...Accordingly, the state must continue to pay benefits until the controversy is resolved...

...Historians of science invest little energy in argument about where magic leaves off and science begins...

...And while we are finding out these things let us be painfully careful not to overlook Schumpeter's charge that talent plus immunity from responsibility plus innocence of knowledge drawn from firsthand experience breeds an irresistible impulse to shake the body politic until its teeth rattle...

...It is quite another to say (again quoting the dissent of Justice Black) "that the government's promise of charity to an individual is property belonging to that individual when the government denies that the individual is honestly entitled to receive such a payment...

...Finally, the Court argued that this was really in the best interest of the state, since welfare represented part of the "Nation's basic cemmittment . . . to foster the dignity and well-being of all persons within its borders," and could also "bring within the reach of the poor the same opportunities that are available to others to participate meaningfully in the life of the community...

...The constitutional challenge cannot be answered by an argument that public assistance benefits are 'a "privilege" and not a ~'right...

...One wonders how they would react on learning that the idea of "welfare as a right" has already been e n - dorsed and decreed the law of the land by the Supreme Court of the United States...

...In Black's words, "While the Court will perhaps have insured that no needy person will be taken off the rolls without a full 'due process' proceediug, it will also have insured that many will never get on the rolls, or at least that they will remain destitute during the lengthy proceedings followed to determine initial eligibility...

...And since the government is not overly strict about letting people on the welfare rolls in the first place, it is quite likely that anyone the government decides is ineligible really is unqualified for benefits...

...And despite the NWRO and the U.S...

...It is not at all clear that the Constitution requires a "pre-termination evidentiary hearing" before the government can terminate benefits which the government itself has decided to confer...

...Moreover, the Court blandly asserted, "welfare guards against the societal malaise that may flow from a widespread sense of unjustified frustration and insecurity...

...Then, too, the NWRO resented, as did a number of groups at the convention, what it perceived as the expedient scuttling of its position by prospective candidate McC~vern now that the nomination seemed within his grasp...

...But this was not something the government should do out of charity, or even for vague reasons of "social policy...

...This would not only involve considerable additional funds for exhaustive investigations of eligibility, but would also (a) lead to the ultimate exclusion of some who are qualified for benefits and (b) force anyone who is qualified for benefits to go without until his investigation is complete...

...And it is still another matter to elevate the receipt of such payments to the status of a personal "right" guaranteed one by the Constitution of the United States...

...Similarly, taxpayers are constantly denied exemptions by administrative deCisions of the IRS...

...If men are bern equal in skills, claim the first group, then they succeed or fail because of what has been done or not done for them and to them...

...In short, the speech was not the kind of plea for "sensitivity" or "appeal to the conscience" that one has come to expect each time social legislation is advanced...

...in the Meritocracy, is a cogently argued elaboration of the defense of "hereditarianism" which Dr...

...C h a r l e s S. Hyneman stated, and a promise to pay all erroneously withheld funds should the individual be determined eligible after all...

...This, of course, is precisely the view of the rather angry and self-righteous National Welfare Rights Organization...

...Hogwash...

...What evidence there is seems distinctly to the contrary...

...This individual was one of a long line of advocates of various minority planks which the Platform Committee, in its wisdom, had not seen fit to adopt as part of the 1972 statement of the Democratic alternative...

...Under the Fourteenth Amendment, states cannot deprive one of property without "due process of law...

...others say people are endowed with a wide variety of abilities and disabilities at birth, endowments which are beyond the reach of social engineers...

...Trouble starts, it seems clear to me, because writing about these "irresponsibles" (Schumpeter again) is governed by a wish to credit the class with contributions a few notches higher on the quality scale than the contributions coming out of the people more intricately involved in the ongoing life of the nation...

...The Alternative January 1974 21...

...But there is, I think, an even more serious objection...

...The prospect for doing all this will be distinctly brightened if we purge our writing of labored argument designed to prove that most of the people who do intellectual work ought not to be thought of as intellectuals...

...It was instead a demand that the government cease to deny a basic right to a certain level of welfare payments...

...Herrnstein first proposed in the September 1971 Atlantic Monthly, it also contains some shocking tales of Herrnstein's villification by radical by Richard Herrnstein Little, Brown & Co...

...Since welfare was so important a right, due process of law in this case had to mean no removal from the welfare rolls until after a full evidentiary hearing, complete with counsel and adversary procedures, had been conducted, and all avenues of appeal had been exhausted...

...For public policy to claim that such rights are equal would be absurd...

...The failure of programs like Head Start generate two different reactions: some say not enough was done, more money must be spent...

...Richard Herrnstein, a professor of psychology at Harvard, has had the courage to present part of the voluminous evidence indicating the heritability of intelligence and he has endured the contumely of those who espouse egalitarianism and environmentalism...

...In a nation with a history of concern for individualism and the virtues of self-reliance and responsibility, it is inconceivable that welfare, if it is to be viewed as a "right" at all, should be considered a particularly revered right...