If the editors of The Atlantic ever saw Lost,
they might remember a scene when Sawyer the con-man explains his dad'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 the saint are separated from humanity only in name. The difference between the thief and most of us is really a matter of degree. In church they call this the 80/20 rule: 20% of them do all the work, and 80% of them sit on their asses.
This, in essence, is the argument about welfare. 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 even be against the idea of welfare,
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.
The left's refusal to admit 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 extravagance 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 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 speed. 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 proves that unless you want to end up on the street, you have to be a little skeptical with how you spend cash. It's the reason we hire people called managers. The
implication in the 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 feeding our families. The fact
that we treat people at work this way but refuse to treat meth-heads the
same is more than a failure of equality. It's a failure of ethics and intelligence. It says that we can only question the people we build
things with, and never supervise the people who only take things from us.
The issue goes much deeper than business and right into biology. 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 need with the least expenditure of effort. In everything we call this principle efficiency. If it was any other way -- say for instance that any being in the world decided to behave as though efficiency were irrelevant, its reserves would drain and its energy would fail, and as it continued expending recklessly it would eventually die. That's why every living thing is guided by the opposite principle. Acquire, conserve, continue to live. Economics, in cash or calories, is the foundation of all survival.
Human beings are ultimately founded upon this law of efficiency; and
although many of us are capable of rising above it, for important causes for short periods of time, we realize its handiwork 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's important isn't 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 skepticism 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're people. And forgetting that
humans are humans, they've eventually ceased to be humane -- not even toward
the "downcast" they were ostensibly trying to help, but toward the
majority which is actually responsible for helping.
Your father,
-J
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