Everywhere you look in the right-wing commentariat, you see the recurring theme of the “underclass” as parasites. Its most recent appearance was the meme of the productive, tax-paying 53% vs. the tax-consuming 47%. And of course there’s the perennial favorite mythical quote attributed to Alexander Tytler, trotted out by many who should know better, about the majority discovering they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. (If you really believe the majority control the government, or that the government serves the interests of the majority, you should avoid using sharp tools without supervision.)
But mainly there’s an endless supply of resentment against “welfare queens,” and friend-of-a-friend stories about the luxurious tastes of those using food stamps at the checkout line, whose cumulative effect is to reassure the middle class that their real enemies are to be found by looking down, and not up.
If your resentment is directed downward against the “underclass” and recipients of welfare-for-the-poor, it’s most definitely misdirected.
First, let’s look at the little picture, and consider the net effects of state policy on the actual recipients of welfare. Consider how state policies on behalf of land owners and real estate investors, like the enforcement of absentee title to vacant and unimproved land, drives up rents and closes off access to cheap living space. Consider how licensing schemes and “anti-jitney” laws, zoning laws against operating businesses out of one’s home or out of pushcarts, and regulations that impose needless capital outlays and entry barriers or overhead costs, close off opportunities for self-employment. And consider how zoning restrictions on mixed-use development and other government promotions of sprawl and the car culture increase the basic cost of subsistence. You think the money spent on welfare for the poor equals that drain on the resources of the underclass?
Next, look at the big picture. Consider the total rents extracted from society as a whole by the dominant economic classes: The inflation of land rent and mortgages by the above-mentioned absentee titles to unimproved land; the usurious interest rates resulting from legal tender laws and restraints on competition in the supply of credit; the enormous markups over actual production cost that result from copyrights, patents and trademarks; the oligopoly markup (once estimated by the Nader Group at around 20% of retail price in industries dominated by a handful of firms) in industries cartelized by government regulations and entry barriers …
Now consider, out of this vast ocean of rents extracted by state-connected parasites, the miniscule fraction that trickles back to the most destitute of the destitute, in the form of welfare and food stamps, in just barely large enough quantities to prevent homelessness and starvation from reaching high enough levels to destabilize the political system and threaten the ruling classes’ ability to extract rents from all of us. The state-allied landlords, capitalists and rentiers rob us all with a front-end loader, and then the state — THEIR state — uses a teaspoon to relieve those hardest hit.
Every time in history the state has provided a dole to the poorest of the poor — the distribution of free grain and oil to the proletariat of Rome, the Poor Laws in England, AFDC and TANF since the 1960s — it has occurred against a background of large-scale robbery of the poor by the rich. The Roman proletariat received a dole to prevent bloody revolt after the common lands of the Republic had been engrossed by the nobility and turned into slave-farms. The Poor Laws of England were passed after the landed classes enclosed much of the Open Fields for sheep pasture. The urban American blacks who received AFDC in the 1960s were southern sharecroppers, or their children, who had been tractored off their land (or land that should have been theirs, if they had received the land that was rightfully theirs after Emancipation) after WWII.
As Frances Fox Piven and Andrew Cloward argued in “Regulating the Poor,” the state — which is largely controlled by and mainly serves the interest of the propertied classes — only steps in to provide welfare to the poor when it’s necessary to prevent social destabilization. When it does so, it usually provides the bare minimum necessary. And in the process, it uses the power conferred by distributing the public assistance to enforce a maximum in social discipline on the recipients (as anyone who’s dealt with the humiliation of a human services office, or a visit from a case-worker, can testify).
So don’t resent the folks who get welfare and food stamps. Your real enemies — the ones the state really serves — are above, not below.
I was once offered a job selling home health care. I would have been responsible for convincing doctors to prescribe this company's home health care nurses to Medicaid recipients. Also, the same company tried to influence Drs. to prescribe those powered wheelchairs to the same patient class. The nurse would attempt rehab and then recommend the chair. Then the doctor would prescribe it. For every one that I was able to get prescribed, I would receive $400. This is why you see so many seemingly able bodied people in those wheel chairs. There are corporate interests behind all of it. From the manufacturers of the chairs, the "home healthcare" companies that peddle them to docs and the doctors themselves. -lots of money being made. Should we blame the recipient or should we blame the power brokers that crafted the scenario to their advantage? All are at fault IMO.
Off of the top of my head, just one. I have a relative that has been on disability for years. He would do free lance auto repair work from home and was always scared when a car came up the drive, that they'd snap a picture of him being able bodied. My father loathes it. Openly mocked the situation to us kids so we would never find it appealing or in any way "clever."
My next door neighbor has a severely autistic teenager, they mostly get by on welfare. She works odd housecleaning jobs and hustles some antiques on the side. They live pretty close to the bone. I guess she could lock the kid in the basement and hold a 9-5, pretty sure there is no one who would baby sit the kid for an amount of money that would make holding the kind of job she is qualified for worth while.
This is an example of why welfare should exist.
You could totally hate on this lady if that is what you wanted to do. She gets drunk and fights with her boyfriends a few times a month, part of her discretionary income goes to drugs (not a druggy but I think she likes to get lose once and awhile). Her side incomes are undeclared and probably would reduce her benefits if they were known. She definitely isn't living a life of luxury, they stretch their food budget wisely buy used clothes and stuff. Her son is a teenager and eats like a horse, he is pissy like a teenager even if he doesn't talk and can't do many things for himself. Generally I think she is a good mom but like most people her shit is complicated.
Still, I have no problem with tax dollars going to help a family with a legitimately disabled individual to support. That's all I meant. Of course there are complications and nuance to every story. Humans will be humans. To hold a welfare recipient to an impossible standard is foolish. I'd use some of that money to buy beer. You best believe it.
