A Question of Humanity
BROCKWAY, GEORGE P.
The Dismal Science A QUESTION OF HUMANITY By George P. Brockway As we move from welfare-aswe-knew-it to welfare-as-wehave-never-known-it, an often acrimonious debate is continuing...
...The most enthusiastic advocates on the draconian side of the debate estimate that a high but unspecified percentage of welfare mothers will respond as intended to the stick approach—that they will seek and perform menial labor for substandard wages...
...And will the presumably selfish mothers even feel the pain of the punishment being meted out...
...Perhaps the invisible hand did not quite work the way Adam Smith had said it did...
...On the other hand, there is evidence that the carrot approach sometimes encourages welfare dependency...
...No one raised the question of why it was thought necessary to abolish by law, let alone by force of arms, what was economically unprofitable...
...But we finally managed to bring about both reforms, and neither one depended on considerations of effectiveness, efficiency or expense...
...The Dismal Science A QUESTION OF HUMANITY By George P. Brockway As we move from welfare-aswe-knew-it to welfare-as-wehave-never-known-it, an often acrimonious debate is continuing between those who contend that the change will be most effective if the beneficiaries are motivated by a carrot and those who favor a stick...
...Actually, this is a very old debate...
...Rousseau said the state exists to force men to be free, but such force is vicious if the state does not also guarantee the opportunity to exercise freedom...
...Drug users and dealers were designated enemies...
...The opium dens of Shanghai and Canton were celebrated in fact and fiction...
...Family values, of course, are only a couple of political catchwords that no one bothers to define...
...It went on during the years of AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children), and it is going on in our time of TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families...
...They are historical...
...Welfare has generally been understood to be temporary, because the economic system has conventionally been understood to be evolving toward perfection...
...Still more voters became choleric as careless teenage girls and shiftless older women were said (although the evidence was scanty) to make a living by producing babies while their male friends used welfare checks to tide themselves over when the drug-dealing or car-jacking business was slow...
...The first public housing built by the New Deal had to exclude interior plumbing, not because of the cost, but because private housing of the time and place ordinarily lacked it...
...Every apartment house or neighborhood or farm had a committee dedicated to uncovering enemies of the people...
...The thing about primary rules of right conduct is that they are not absolute, as 7+5=12 is absolute...
...In short, the fundamental economic problems are not solved—do not even exist—on so-called economic grounds...
...The press simplifies the story by calling the carrot people liberals and the stick people conservatives...
...We might have their tubes tied, but the Supreme Court is apt to consider this a violation of the Eighth Amendment's "cruel and unusual punishment" clause...
...Human beings are not a means to an end...
...Efficiency and cost-effectiveness, however, are at best secondary aspects where the lives of people are involved...
...Assuming the expectation is correct, moreover, we will still have a considerable percentage of women pursuing their procreative ways...
...The 40-hour week was a goal 60 years ago, and our forefathers talked of working from sun to sun...
...The last dragged on from Elizabethan times until 1929, when the Local Government Act changed the name, but not the nature, of the trouble...
...It is in this basic sense that we are all equal— equally absolute and absolutely equal...
...To be sure, we had to fight a civil war to abolish slavery, and it wasn't until 1938— eight years into the Great Depression— that we were able to get a child labor law through a Southern-dominated Congress and past a states' rights Supreme Court...
...Why else should we have abolished (to take the most vivid examples) slavery and child labor...
...Or are we going to turn children out in the streets, copying the culture of Calcutta...
...For many years we were apparently ashamed of what we had done...
...Nevertheless, one must wonder what is so important in our civilization that it requires putting children in orphanages or driving them into the street in order to punish the mothers...
...suspicion was enough to trigger the option...
...Workfare as we now know it does not guarantee that opportunity, and so must resort to carrots and sticks to trick or beat donkeys into line...
...With us, justice is more important than effectiveness, efficiency or expense...
...They are local, fora time and place...
...It does not take much imagination to see that little, if anything, has been accomplished...
...Other suspects were given the option of quitting cold turkey or being shot...
...For more than a hundred years after the Opium War (1839-42), in which the British forced China to allow the importation of opium, China was the typical case of the drug-plagued land...
...Hence TANF, with its lifetime limitations on welfare benefits, and the other restrictive provisions of the 1996 law, signed by the President amid a show of determination to fix it when he got a chance...
...Insofar as the length of the workweek and conditions of living are standards, they have nothing to do with either carrots or sticks...
...That the sentence was capital speeded things up...
...It was very simple...
...Both sides remain supported by innumerable anecdotal or imaginative reports and by many elaborate sociological studies, complete with chi-squares, regression analyses and multicolored graphs...
...It is barbarous to apply the carrot-or-stick metaphor to human beings...
...A few public trials (denunciations, actually) were held in athletic stadiums, followed forthwith by public executions...
...Yet there is a recent example of an efficient and cost-effective solution that not even the most absolute American drughater proposes we adopt...
...Although few defended, say, having half-naked children (and their mothers) scramble on all fours like stunted donkeys to drag carts of coal through constricted mine drifts, market forces did not work against such atrocities because they were cost-effective...
...For instance, the drug problem, however you want to define it, is considered one of the most serious facing America today...
...As ALMOST ALWAYS happens in sociology, and far too frequently happens in economics, we are asked what is the most efficient or cost-effective solution...
...The child labor problem was not too different...
...The quasi-Marxian conclusion of these claims was that the true force behind abolition was the profit motive, not the brotherhood of man...
...Formal proof was unnecessary...
...Many more voters were angered when the late George Wylie's Welfare Rights Organization and others, including some government officials, worked to inform distressed families of the help available to them...
...The principal reason is that, with us, crimes deserving punishment must be proved in a court of law...
...I make bold to suggest that the terms of the debate are all wrong, and that we shall be not be able to solve the welfare conundrum unless we revise them...
...We refrain for many reasons...
...How are we going to stop them...
...Second, any full-time job that does not provide a decent and honorable living is not worth being done except as a favor or a hobby, as training or as punishment, or in defense of the realm...
...What, then, becomes of family values...
...Let us suppose that there are women willing to make babies in order to stay on welfare...
...It was said that slavery had become unprofitable, and that it would have died out anyway, sooner rather than later...
...Efficiency and cost-effectiveness are not standards of right conduct...
...Although you would never realize it from the way we talk or the way we write in our newspapers and magazines and textbooks, justice is also more important to us in economics than is effectiveness, efficiency or expense...
...The foregoing is hardly a summary of a small part of the debate, many of whose arguments go back to Hammurabi of Babylon, Solon of Athens, Solomon of Judea, Jesus of Nazareth, Cato of Rome, and (perhaps most notably) to England's long wrestle with the Poor Laws...
...Workfare will fail to meet the needs of our democratic society until it is guided by these two principles: First, the right of every citizen to make a contribution to the common weal—that is, to have a decent job—is equal to the state's right to hold him or her to obedience to its laws...
...Economists call all labor a "disutility...
...This is nothing for civilized people to be proud of...
...Amending the Amendment is not likely to appeal either to those upholding the Right to Life or to those defending the Right to Choose—which pretty much covers the voting spectrum...
...They are not primary rules for the good economy or the good life...
...Many voters were surprised when it appeared that the distress of millions of families was caused by economic hard times that persisted, not only in the big cities but also in the countryside...
...The vast majority of voters would probably place it ahead of welfare motherhood, and many would list it as a cause of welfare motherhood...
...Or shall we take the children away from their mothers and put them, as some politician (I forgot who) suggested, in orphanages—preferably, no doubt, orphanages run for profit...
...For a few obvious examples, we note that only recently has a 35-hour week come to be considered a full-time job...
...Despite this well-known bit of recent history, we do not rush to emulate it...
...we are all ends in ourselves...
...It was also argued that most slaves were well cared for because they were worth good money, and that slave labor was really more expensive than free labor...
...We can, to be sure, reduce or cut off their benefits, but their children, who certainly did not originate their own births, will be the ones most hurt, as has happened in starvation situations in all cultures and all times...
...AFDC was envisioned as helping both poor widows and deserted mothers through a personal hard time...
...Likewise, what constitutes decent living conditions has changed and continues to change...
...A lighter sentence would have required more prisons or more chain gangs or more pillories, and especially more time to demonstrate to everyone that this particular crime did not pay...
...The Chinese solution was effective because judgment was summary and incontestable...
...Mao Zedong's People's Republic wiped out the plague almost overnight...
Vol. 80 • November 1997 • No. 17
