What Went Wrong: The Safety Net
nobody has a clue
As we leave behind the century of the educated class and the administrative state, we need to understand What Went Wrong.
I’ve written about how Finance went wrong. Now it’s time to talk about the Safety Net.
One of those things is the way that we as a society deal with poverty and hardship. After all, the whole point of human society and community is that we all do better if we are backed up by others, so if we fall there is someone or something there to stop our fall and help us get back on our feet: a safety net.
Today, we all simply accept, without even thinking about it, that government is there to provide a safety net with a network of programs to support those in need. To me, there are a number of negative aspects of the current system:
It allows most of us to ignore other people’s problems and disconnect from helping others.
It politicizes poverty, with politicians buying the support of the poor with handouts.
It hurts the family by rewarding mothers to avoid the toil of marriage and relationship and take the government handout instead.
It damages children by depriving them of a father.
Given the universal fact of government as today's first responder to poverty, it's hard to step aside and think of a world in which government has little or nothing to do with the care of the poor. Indeed, was there ever a time when “the poor” was not a thing?
In fact, of course, the idea of “the poor” only applies to urban life. In the country everyone has a name, because community is small enough that everyone knows everyone.
So what happened to people without food, or without a dwelling, or without work back in the day?
If we start a millennium ago, in The Year 1000, a serf could go to his Lord and place his head between his Lord's hand and beg to be a slave: “head for food” they called it.
Then came enclosures, the conversion of the open field system to private property, and “improvement.” But there was fallout, as people were forced off the land. What happened to them? We know, of course, that many became homeless, vagrants and beggars, wandering the land, often forming into robber bands like Robin Hood and his Merry Men.
Around 1600 poor relief in England was codified into Poor Laws, taxed and administered at the parish level. Prior to this, and prior to the Tudor dissolution of the monaateries, poor relief had been conducted on a voluntary basis by monasteries. Also around 1600, the idea of transporting the “waste population” to North America became a thing. In 1834 a new Poor Law nationalized the care of the poor into the now famous workhouses.
In the US in early times care of the poor included:
the contract system, auction of the poor, the poorhouse, and relief in the home, or “outdoor relief.”
You can see that institutional care of the poor was always a unimaginitive effort to “do something” about people that had fallen throught the cracks without really imagining the notion of poverty and the relation of society to the poor and understanding really what “the problem” was.
But there was, in fact, an effective and appropriate way to take care of the poor. For back in the day everyone either had servants in the home or worked as a servant in a home. Typically such servants were single, subect to discipline by their masters, and forbidden to have “followers.”
In the 20th century the huge wealth thrown up by the industrial revolution provided the funds to seriously address the question of poverty. The approach was to create bureaucracies to manage and funnel money to the poor.
If we take the typical start to such programs as the years immediately after World War II in England and in the United States we note that the typical Brit or American today neither has servants nor works as a servant. Such servants as there are typically are new immigrants from a Third World country without a developed government welfare system.
However, the new welfare system hasn’t “solved” poverty any more than the old Poor Laws and contract systems of old. And there are still people that live on the street, typically drug addicts, as in the olden time.
If you ask me, we have never had a clue what to do about the poor, and nobody has a clue what to do today.