Re: Elections 2012:What unites us is greater than what divides us
One part of Disney's version of "The Grasshopper and the Ant" fable that I found striking was the Grasshopper's gratitude at finding something useful to do to provide for himself. It clearly and succinctly points out the very serious moral flaw at the heart of the modern welfare state.
Perhaps a personal anecdote might help illustrate. In early July 1998 we were driving through Iowa on I-80 in the middle of the night, when a deer appeared in the headlights. I didn't want to risk losing control of the car by swerving or slamming on the brakes, and so I tried to steer around it and was mostly successful, striking only a glancing blow on the right front fender.
At first, it appeared to be a successful maneuver, as we were able to keep driving*. However, after several miles, the car began to overheat, and so we got off at the next exit. 2 AM in the middle of nowhere. Thus began a series of encounters with kind strangers who helped us out in our time of need: a passerby saw us in trouble and stopped in a nearby time to arrange an emergency tow. A passing policeman saw us sleeping in the car at the service station and took us to a motel. People would see us walking and stop and say "hey, are you the stranded family? Hop in, we'll give you a ride." After church service, someone came up to us and said "Are you the stranded family? Let me take you to brunch." A huge shout-out to the townspeople of Atlantic, Iowa for all the kindness and assistance.
A key element of this anecdote was that we were clearly identified as people in need. Contrast that to today's Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, which tries to disguise the participants' need. Why? "to protect them from embarrassment" is the stated reason. A cynic might retort "to allow them to remain comfortable if they remain in the program indefinitely."
The central take-away for me, from the Disney version of the fable and my own experience, is that there was a reciprocal relationship between the giver and the recipient. While never explicitly stated, it was understood that we would "pay it forward" by helping other people in their time of need (which we have done, and when asked "how can we repay you" we told them flat out "while you can't repay us but you can help others when they need it." We've lived in small towns where people were better served with no public assistance than people are today.
The modern welfare state is morally corrupt because it wrongly focuses attention on two areas while ignoring that which is most important. First, it focuses solely on the short-term material needs of the recipients, while subtly corrupting their ability to grow as human beings by making a difference to others. It also appears to be designed more to assuage a sense of guilt in the well-off than it does to provide a meaningful hand up (we have 48 different job training programs run by different agencies of the federal government; yet a recent GAO study says that the programs are designed to meet the needs of the people running them, not for the people participating in them [citation needed].
Finally, the worst part is that it breaks the link, interrupts the cycle, however you want to describe it, of generosity and gratitude and mutual reciprocity, and replaces it with confiscation and resentment and envy. Once we had a civil society, we are now devolving into mutually-exclusive armed camps, and the flawed structure of the modern welfare state is a major reason why. Neither conservative nor progressive has presented a viable answer.
*I have to chuckle whenever I recall this story...everyone else was asleep, and of course the impact woke them. My son's first question was "is the deer okay?" It turned out that our ceramic radiator was cracked, and 4th of July weekend made it hard to get a replacement for several days, hence our becoming the stranded family.
(except Margaret Thatcher of course)
