Dear Hannah,
If the editors of The Atlantic had
ever seen Lost,
they might remember a scene when Sawyer the lovable con-man explains his
father's philosophy of stealing. It runs in short that no matter who
you are or what you do for a living, you're either taking or giving too much,
but you're never getting what you deserve. The whole world is alternating
between stealing or being stolen from. The professional thief (and maybe
even the saint) might argue that he's separated from the rest of
humanity only in name. A saner man might argue back that the thief is
separated from humanity more particularly by degree.
When it comes down to it, the
argument over welfare queens and welfare in general is a very similar issue.
The Atlantic argues that the
welfare queen is a myth, and that the people getting welfare are overwhelmingly
people who need it. And on the other hand we have much of the taxpaying
public; who may not necessarily even be against the idea of welfare in general,
but are interested in knowing whether the people who get it actually deserve
it. The left, forgetting that the taxpayer is ultimately the best judge
of whether he's getting fleeced, says how dare we question whether anyone
down on his luck deserves it. The right, with a bayonet in its face,
asks whether luck, in many cases, has anything to do with it at all.
And the left's refusal to admit the
existence of an unfair welfare expenditure is really the heart of
the issue, as if there was never anyone who got taxpayer funding who didn't
deserve it. The truth is that even without the extravagant fraudulence of
the welfare queen we know it happens frequently. Anyone who knows
anything about hiring in Washington State knows that many people only schedule
interviews so they can keep collecting unemployment. Anyone who's had any
experience in the grocery business has seen people buying lobsters and ribeyes
on food stamps. And anyone who's worked with the homeless in downtown
Seattle knows that even the obvious speed freaks get government checks -- which
are immediately expended on meth instead of on rent. Whether these are
the majority of instances is beside the point. The point is that whoever
is running things is more concerned about the feelings of the
"unfortunate" than they are about the property of the virtuous.
A little reflection might prove that
a healthy amount of skepticism is required in any pecuniary endeavor; which is
the primary reason that we hire people called managers. The
implication in any hiring of a manager is that the people beneath him can't be
trusted to do the job without supervision and rewards and the threat of
punishment; and that even our allies, the people we greet every day as we enter
the office, could possibly ruin our chance at making a living. The fact
that we treat people we work with this way but refuse to treat meth-heads the
same is something beyond a failure of equality. It is a failure of
intelligence. It says that we can only question the people we build
things with, and never supervise the people who only take things away.
And even deeper than morality, this
attitude proves the left's ultimate failure to perceive their biological
reality. Whether you believe we evolved from goo or were created by God,
our existence as biological beings is predicated upon an attempt to get as much
of what we want or we need with the least expenditure of effort. In
everything we call this principle efficiency. If it was any
other way, if any being in the world for a year decided to behave as though
efficiency were irrelevant, its reserves would drain and its energy would fail,
and as it continued expending recklessly without any concern for accruing, it
would eventually expire in a bout of malnutrition and exhaustion. That is
why everything living is guided by the opposite principle. Acquire;
conserve; continue to live.
Human beings (whatever we think of
our spiritual nature) are ultimately founded upon this law of efficiency; and
although many of us are capable of rising above it out of an appreciation for
natural law or some kind of a social instinct, we realize its calling us in
everything we do. Why buy the cow, when you can get the milk for free?
runs into watercooler chats, which runs into people arguing about whether
Christians have to pay a tithe. All of it, from the way we deal with
women to the way we deal with bosses to the way we deal with gods and
governments, is influenced by our need for personal efficiency; and if we were
to say the influence was wrong, we would be equally wrong as if we said it was
always right. What is important is not that we kill ourselves in fits of
altruism and say that self-interest is wrong. What's important is that
we're aware of the temptations of self-interest, and that nobody at any point is exempt from the temptation of getting something for nothing.
This is the foundation of good business and good government. And if we
have welfare, it ought also to be the foundation of a sensible welfare program.
In other words, the people at The
Atlantic have simply forgotten that they are people. And forgetting that
humans are humans, they have eventually ceased to be humane -- not even toward
the downcast minority they were ostensibly trying to help, but toward the
majority which is actually responsible for helping.
Your father,
-J
No comments:
Post a Comment