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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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The law that no government can repeal And that would be the law of unintended consequences.
The urge to alleviate the woes of the world can cause people to do great things. However when that urge is coupled to the power of a state, it is a dangerous mixture which can have the opposite effect to the one intended.
The think-tank Civitas has made no friends in Whitehall with its latest release titled Blair government causes child poverty and the UK Treasury is clearly incandescent at the suggestion that big government is actually the problem rarther than the solution.
But then the truth often hurts.
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Child poverty was always only a catch phrase,what they meant was poor families,of whatever nature,to whom the money goes,the government does not have a clue if the children are the beneficiaries of this money. There is no breakdown of how the money is spent.
The purpose of all government programs is to create a constituency which can be controlled, and counted on for votes, by the political faction which champions their cause. The perfect government program is that which creates a ward of the state—someone who is infantalized and maintained in a permanent state of dependence.
If this syndrome can be developed into an inter-generational heritage, as poverty programs always do by paying women to have more kids they can’t support without that government check, and penalizing them for having a wage earner in the house, then the sponsors of the program can call endlessly for more and more money for more and more benefits, while anyone who questions the cost or efficacy of the scheme can be bludgeoned with the “compassion” club until they are thoroughly discredited.
Anyone who thinks the point of poverty programs is to lift people out of poverty is a fool. The unintended consequences are meaningless in the sense that they are only unintended if one credits the rhetoric used to promote the program as having some connection to reality. It doesn’t.
The discussion that is needed in the public arena is not another round of charges and countercharges about whether poverty programs “work”. There is no way for hard-hearted non-statists to ever win that argument over the oh-so-compassionate progressive surrounded by all the little kiddies who would starve without their checks every month.
Instead, the conversation must be about the desirability of creating a permanent underclass whose existence is as slaves to the whims of every politician and beaurocrat who can design more and more byzantine administrative rules for the captives to pretzel their lives into in order to get the stipend which, like a methadone program, assuages their cravings for subsistence, but nevers allows them to break free of the addiction.
This situation is not “unintended”. It is exactly what the proponents of these programs want and need.
The sooner they are made to come out from behind the shield of “Oh, at least they meant well, even if it doesn’t work perfectly”, the sooner the debate can engage reality instead of rhetorical fantasies.
What makes you think it’s unintended? The left has little use for the married family – whether as an embodiment of “women’s oppression” or as an impediment to the cradle-to-grave state. While they might not necessarily want to make children poor, they certainly don’t want to favour married couples.
Actually when you consider that its The Treasury making the statement you might wonder what has happened to any ‘official spokesperson’ from the Department for Work and Pensions, the bureaucrat hive responsible for Child Benefit. Maybe they don’t want to be drawn into another Q&A over the latest scandal regarding their minister, David Blunkett.
I think Blunkett may have to do a Mandelson, ie be forced to resign from the Cabinet twice. Next stop Europe.
Is this the most corrupt government in modern times? How do the buggers get away with it?
Am I expecting too much?
When some statist inspired think tank comes up with figures showing the desperate need for more of our cash to be given to goverment, will we get the “left of centre” or “looney left” think tank. Then again “right of centre” means it is obviously produced by evil capitalists to rob the so called poor.
Julian – you are half right, the do gooders desperatly need to keep people poor and on a leash, how else will they guarentee a vote come elections (as these are the least likely to vote explains why ZanuLabour are desperate to use whatever gimmicks they can), and it allows them to feel moral and superior by supposedly helping.
“Instead, the conversation must be about the desirability of creating a permanent underclass whose existence is as slaves to the whims of every politician and beaurocrat who can design more and more byzantine administrative rules for the captives to pretzel their lives into in order to get the stipend which, like a methadone program, assuages their cravings for subsistence, but nevers allows them to break free of the addiction.”
I think the underclass is analogous to the Roman mob,our political elites have produced an underclass which is totally divorced from social and political endeavour.This underclass has to be placated,just as the Roman Mob had to be placated,the choice is once more “Bread or Circuses”.
Politicians are not creating slaves or buying votes,they are keeping quiet a large group of people who could,if they ever go politically motivated trash most of our major cities.
“Politicians are not creating slaves or buying votes,they are keeping quiet a large group of people who could,if they ever go politically motivated trash most of our major cities. “
I think this is correct.
The underclass was not created by the politicians. They always existed and always will exist. Politicians try, on the one hand to keep them quiet, and on the other – to exploit them by buying their votes.
A complicated mess.
What was remarkable was the immediate reaction from The Treasury denouncing the report as nonsense.
For a start, isn’t the Treasury meant to be manned by politically neutral civil servants? Surely, they should have said that they only implement the current system and the question of whether or not it is a good idea should be addressed to their political masters.
Secondly, they can hardly have time to examine the report and to separate cause from effect. Their denunciation simply denied it and (in Gordon Brown style) didn’t bother to address the argument made – they simply selectively restated their view of the world.
I think Verytired’s comment is an excellent analysis but for the idea that the underclass are slaves. They are indeed in a kind of trap but as they don’t produce anything they cannot be called slaves. It is the producer class that are slaves as they don’t own all the fruits of their labour.
Bernie, (and veryretired) if not slaves, are you suggesting the politicians and bureaucrats are keeping this “permanent underclass” as ‘pets’? I can’t see any other parallel for a non-productive slave. If this is so, it seems to me this is about the most demeaning thing imaginable. To have one’s labor stolen to expand another person’s wealth is bad enough. To have one’s dignity stolen to stroke someone else’s emotional needs is beyond words.
We should be cautious making these assertions. But if they are true, then this is a consummate evil and should be attacked as such.
There was a documentary made a few decades ago by a film-maker named Weisman. He made a series of studies where he took his camera into a location, set up, turned on the camera, and just recorded what was happening, without any of the staging and script writing common to the usual product.
Anyway, in the one I’m thinking of, he focuses on a welfare office in New York, and just records the clients one at a time as they come up to the counter.
The spectacle of these utterly bewildered people, clutching fistfuls of papers that delineated their entire lives, pleading and arguing with, and screaming and threatening at the faceless clerks behind the counter, awoke in me a realization that there is no more disastrous and demeaning position in life than that of “ward of the state”.
I call it slavery because to serve someone else’s purposes in all things, without any power to make independent decisions or choose a course of action, is to become the property of the rule maker, to be disposed of as they please.
If you have another word for it, go right ahead and use it. The miserable existence of these infantalized, and pitiable, beings will go on apace, whatever it’s called.