To be clear, there is nothing remotely ‘progressive’ about defending the current state of welfare – and incapacity benefits, in particular. As if it needs to be said, people whose disabilities prevent them from working deserve the best possible quality of life. Arguably, the system ought to be far more generous than it already is to those in genuine need.
The trouble is, as finally seems to be dawning on the political class, the soaring number of claimants bears little relationship with the state of the nation’s health. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, about four million 16- to 64-year-olds – that is, one in 10 of the working-age population – now claim some sort of disability benefit, compared with 2.8million in 2019. As explained in the Financial Times, recent rises in disability claims are almost entirely an artefact of the system itself. Policies and incentives are the main driver of rising and falling claims. Allowing claims for mental-health issues, enshrined in the 2014 Care Act, has had arguably the largest impact. Currently, 44 per cent of all claimants cite poor mental health as their primary condition.
Unfortunately we have arrived at a situation where if you can survive comfortably on benefits, working and paying tax for the government to throw away on useless immigrants looks like a mugs game.
If you want more of something, subsidize it; if you want less of something, tax it.
Ronald Reagan
Historians consider the introduction of payment for voting (for taking part in the deliberations – which all male citizens were entitled to do) in Ancient Athens to be a progressive measure (those who opposed the measure are called “reactionaries”), and the subsidized grain supply in Rome introduced by the younger Gracchus to be a progressive measure, and making the supply “free” (i.e. paid for taxpaying farmers in the Provinces) by the law pushed by Clodius, to be a progressive measure.
In both Britain and the United States “progressive” has meant Bigger Government, get more people dependent on the state, since at least the 19th century. When, for example, Disraeli passed a law in 1875 insisting that local government take on about 40 functions – whether or not local taxpayers wished to pay for them in taxation, this was considered a progressive measure. As was Joseph Chamberlain’s Radical programme of 1865.
The pushing of state education and state welfare in Ireland way back in the 1830s was considered progressive, as were the statist antics of Frederick the Great of Prussia in the 1700s.
So it is hard to see why Kevin Myers (good man though he is) does not consider an ever increasing number of people depended on the state to be progressive – surely that is exactly what it is.
The objective of progressive politics is not a secret – it is for most people to be dependent on a “basic income” provided by the state, and to live in accommodation provided by the state and “partner corporations”, the World Economic Forum (and other such organisations) are open about this.
What this income would be spent on would also be decided by “experts” (public and private – not that there is a real distinction any more, indeed the purpose of the Corporate State is to blur the distinction to the point of nothingness) – and the, electronic, money would expire at a certain point – in order to prevent saving.
This is very much an international progressive movement – and such things as then Chancellor Sunak’s scheme during the Covid lockdowns was a dress rehearsal to see how this would work, and iron out problems.
People who support the above are progressives, and people who wish to roll back government benefits are reactionaries.
In the United States the Federal Government has been handing out “Food Stamps” (like the law of Clodius, a progressive Populari, in Ancient Rome) for the poor since 1961. This was, and is, considered progressive – and the more people who become dependent on government aid there are, the more progressive the situation is. See the progressive Marxists Cloward and Piven on this point.
It is reactionaries such as Aristotle (4th century BC) who declared that government handing out money or goods to the poor was like pouring liquid into a container with no bottom on it. Indeed that it was corrupting and would lead to an increase in dependency over time – especially over generations.
Will it work?
Will pushing more and more people in dependency on the state produce a good society?
Of course NOT – it will produce terrible horror, especially for the poor (such as myself) as everything falls apart – the “International Community” vision of the future (guaranteed basic income and all) is utterly insane.
But I said it was progressive, which it is. This is what progressive has meant in politics for a very long time. And most certainly NOT just in the English speaking world.
As I pointed out – the statist policies of Frederick the Great were considered progressive back in the 1700s.
In the United States the most progressive Founding Father was Thomas Paine – precisely because he wished to create various government benefits and services (his mathematics for how to pay for the was utterly wrong – but that is not the point, the point is that he was proposing progressive measures) and the most reactionary founding father was Roger Sherman – who was the most insistent that money should be physical gold and silver and that government spending should be strictly limited (the point of paper, or now credit, money is to increase government or “partner corporation” spending).
I hope we can all agree that Mr Paine was a progressive and Mr Sherman (Roger Sherman) was a reactionary.
Progressive means more and more people, over the years and generations, dependent on the government.
A place like Appenzell Innerrhoden is not progressive – it is reactionary, conservative.
The Ancient Greek poet Hesiod was not a progressive poet – he was a reactionary poet.
As far as I know, the first reactionary piece of writing is the First Book of Samuel, Chapter Eight – traditionally held to the opinions of the prophet (and Judge) Samuel – from more than a thousand years B.C. (so more than three thousand years ago now).
The people had been calling for a King (i.e. to create a monarchy – as the Jews, at this time, had no monarchy) to “fight our battles for us” and provide other services.
Samuel replies that the King will take their property (their silver, their land, and so on) and will even conscript their sons and daughters for his service.
But the people do not listen to his warnings, they are lost in their progressivism.
The people of Appenzell-Innerrhoden, who have voted against each new Swiss Constitution (each new one has been worse than the last – expanding government and centralizing power in progressive fashion) would have agreed with Samuel.
In China progressive political philosophy was called “Legalist” (meaning state tyranny – a sort of Thomas Hobbes view of “law” and “justice” as simply the expression of state power) – as opposed to the reactionary view of the Taoists, with the Confucians taking a compromise position between the two.
Their opponents accused the Taoists of not really wanting a government at all, of being what we might call “Tory Anarchists” – a bit like the Shire of Tolkien, where there is (formally speaking) a government (both a Thrain and a Mayor), but it does not do anything – families running their own affairs, and keeping contractual agreements partly out of sense of justice, but also because they fear loss of good reputation (very harmful in business).
If only it was still acceptable to call people with mental health issues ‘nutters’ and obese people ‘fatties’ then perhaps not so many would be willing to indulge themselves.
@Plamus
If you want more of something, subsidize it; if you want less of something, tax it.
Or, if you want the people to decide how much or how little they want, then do neither and leave it the hell alone.
It doesn’t win politicians elections or get government departments bigger budgets, but usually the answer to “what should the government do about this problem” is “nothing at all.”
Not unfair on the parts of their (our) opponents.
I misremember whether it was Chuang Tzu or Lieh Tzu, who was showing a friend around a town: along the lines of: – “Him? He is our baker, he makes the bread for the town. He is our tailor, he makes our clothes. Over there, our blacksmith, our stonemason and our miller, who make our tools, our building materials and our wheat.”
“And those, with the fancy clothes?”
“Oh, those are our government bureacrats, and they make nothing whatsoever of worth for the community”
(massive poetic licence taken, as I don’t recall the exact wording)
Paul: I agree with you both about the Shire (which I wrote about in “Law and Institutions in the Shire” at https://www.troynovant.com/Kentauros/Tolkien-JRR/Law-Institutions-Shire.html) and about the Taoists in China. Shippey’s discussion of Saruman’s rhetorical style is very much to the point, and Saruman’s régime in the Shire is very clearly a socialist one, run by “gatherers” and “sharers.” For China, though, in addition to the Legalists there were the Moists (not a synonym for “damp” but Mo-ists, named for their founder), who reportedly held that if anyone was hungry it was wrong to have music or ceremonies. China seems to have come up with our Western ideologies millennia ago and settled on entirely the wrong ones.