The Real Individualists
In contemporary political debates, those of us who tend to be opposed to an increased role for government in solving social problems are often accused of being radical individualists who favor an atomized society, whereas those who favor such interventions are often described as supporting communal obligations. But as DarwinCatholic argues, it ain’t necessarily so:
When we had been married a few years, things came to a crisis point with the care of my paternal grandmother. My grandfather had died several years before, and grandma was in increasingly poor health, not able to get around by herself well. My dad was her only surviving child, and he was in the middle of chemo therapy. Her niece, who had been living with her for several years to provide in-house care, had to move back to Colorado to help one of her own children. So two options lay before us: We could put grandma into a nursing home, an idea which she absolutely hated but which medicare would pay for, or MrsDarwin and I could move in with her to provide full time care — despite having a one-year-old and MrsDarwin being pregnant.
We did the latter. It was a difficult period, though in the end it was much shorter than we expected, because grandma died (in her own house, as she had always wished) not much more than a month after we moved in.
This is, I think, exactly the sort of community and mutual obligation that we all agree our culture needs more of: The older generation helping to rear the young, the young in turn taking care of the old. All too often, people are “too busy” and older relatives are left along, whether in their own homes or in “group homes”.
How does this relate to progressive versus conservative approaches to social services? Well, by offering to pay for nursing home care, medicare essentially sends the message “You can save yourself a lot of trouble” (and believe me, caring for a very elderly relative is not only hard work, but puts serious stresses both on the caretakers directly and on the wider network of family) “by putting your elderly relatives in nursing homes, and we’ll foot the bill.” (Actually, I forget at this moment whether it was medicare or medicaid which was involved. We dealt with the cleaning and lifting and bedpan changing, not the paperwork. But I think the point remains the same.) By removing the cost from what would, in our case, have been the selfish choice (put her in a home and not have to bother, even though there was someone in the family able to provide care in the home), government social programs essentially encourage an individualistic, selfish approach to these matters. Clearly, such funding is needed by some people. There are families in which no one is available to provide the needed care for an elderly relative, and the money is not available to pay for a nursing home out of pocket. Nevertheless, we must admit that in the process of provided the much needed help to those who have no other option, the program also radically reduces the incentive to personally care for the elder generation.
Occasionally, if you work at it, I’ve found that you can get people to acknowledge Darwin’s point here. Yes, Social Security did weaken the bonds of extended family. Yes, welfare has crowded out private charity and mutual aid. But, it will be said, the damage has already been done. Government action may have served to weaken social bonds and feelings of communal responsibility, but now that those bonds have been weakened continued government action is necessary to pick up the slack. I’m not sure that’s actually true, but let’s assume for a moment that it is. Wouldn’t that be an excellent reason to be wary of new government interventions? After all, if a particular government program fails to achieve its intended goal, it may not be possible to return to the status quo ante, as the government action itself may have degraded social norms and habits necessary to the prior system. Given this risk, shouldn’t proposals for new government interventions (whether in healthcare, or energy, or elections) be viewed with an extra jaundiced eye?
It’s just a suggestion.
Trackbacks
Comments are closed.
Perhaps in some quarters, but in the places I look SS and welfare assist in doing exactly what Mr. DarwinCatholic has done. Allowing individuals to be able to care for people in their homes. With their family around.
The thought that its a choice between evil liberal institutional living or that bold pioneer individual spirit of self-sacrifice is hooey.
Infrequently, the institution provides assistance and support for individuals. More often, the community support of “evil government programs” allows for individuals to have freedom in responding to needs.
Not everyone has the means to make these sacrifices alone. Often a care-taking adult needs to be unemployed. And the individual receiving care cannot have too much dementia with too much potential for self-harm.
Mr. Conway captures my thoughts exactly.
My grandmother’s generation did exactly these types of things. Of course, they voted for FDR every time they had the chance; were beneficiaries of many of his programs in critical times; their kids went to college on the GI bill, even though many of them only served a year or two in the U.S; and their husbands were steel workere whose unions provided them the means to support a family on one income and have a little extra (money and human time) for sacrifices of which DC speaks.
Folks should consider what Blackadder says with an open mind, although I’ll be surprised if even one person does so (people just believe what they want to believe, and are almost completely impervious to arguments that are unfamiliar).
The thought that its a choice between evil liberal institutional living or that bold pioneer individual spirit of self-sacrifice is hooey.
Well, that would be hooey, if anyone was suggesting it, but not only does the section Blackadder quoted here not make that claim, but I very explicitly rejected it elsewhere in the post, which you are welcome to read if you’re serious about countering the argument which was actually made.
Most certainly there is no duality such as you outline, but just as certainly the very reason that we want to have a social service network is because we as individuals do not want (perhaps often rightly) to live with the failings of real community and mutual obligation. Though some people may use them to fulfill their communal obligations, government social programs are explicitly design to make sure that we don’t have to rely on the mutual support of family, friends and community in order to achieve a certain minimum level of living. As such, they are designed to substitute for community, not to be community.
SB,
If that is your defense mechanism, then all the power to you.
But it’s like a riff from a one hit wonder. Tiresome.
When youn complain that your position is parodied as radical individualism– that’s because those same arguments were used by those same individualists who opposed the New Deal and all that went with it. I think the Reaganesque nonsense has really polluted the discourse. Maybe we all need to go back to Fr. Ryan and one of the greatest documents ever released by the US bishops– the 1919 “Program of Social Reconstruction”, which argued for a minimum wage, public housing, labor participation in management social insurance for illness, disability, unemployment, and old age– and also more radical reforms like workper ownership of capital, universal living wages, and abolition and control of monopolies.
Far too often in this debate, we buy into the Reaganesque crap that government is somehow an alien entity with its own will that often works against the common good. In fact, if you look at traditional Catholic teaching, the state can be used as a device to pursue the common good. Take social insurance: the state merely acts as a coordinating device to further risk pooling. Now, of course, policies can be badly designed, and if we don’t pay sufficient heed to subsidiarity, we can run into particular problems such as welfare dependency. But this is an argument of appropriate policy design, not a call for a paradigm shift.
In the particular case mentioned, I can see a case for funding both options for elderly care. There is a problem with the home-based solution, however: although virtuous, if it attracts government funding with scant oversight, I can see scope for abuse. So it might not work, or it might need appropriate governance structures. But that does not imply that the playing field should somehow be leveled by scrapping public support for nursing homes.
MM,
“Far too often in this debate, we buy into the Reaganesque crap that government is somehow an alien entity with its own will that often works against the common good.”
This is such a strange and incorrect summary of Reagan’s politics. It was never that the government was an “alien entity”. In fact, he would agree with the traditional Catholic teaching that the state can be used as a device to pursue the common good. It wasn’t that he thought the state had no purpose, but that the state’s powers ought to be limited to ensure the common good.
Why should the Federal powers be limited? Because a government of such a massive nation (a government with powers over many other states) easily becomes inefficient, bureaucratic, prone to cronyism and corruption – as you so often bemoan when it’s not in the hands of your preferred party.
Furthermore, this corruption is more likely to happen when you give the Federal government control over people’s economic lives – politics becomes a power grab; a battle to get the glory from giving the people what they want (generally people want “free” stuff, stuff they don’t have to work for).
These are some of the reasons Reagan disagreed with using the FEDERAL government for social engineering, wealth redistribution, and the administration of education. In essence he agreed with the Founders implementation of Federalism, i.e. state power constrained by the power of other states – a concept which you have absolutely no interest in or reject because of some irrational animus against everything that came out of the enlightenment .
(although I would argue you yourself are more influenced by the principles of the enlightenment than any classically-liberal minded thinker)
MM,
When youn complain that your position is parodied as radical individualism– that’s because those same arguments were used by those same individualists who opposed the New Deal and all that went with it. I think the Reaganesque nonsense has really polluted the discourse.
Principled conservatism with an understanding of what impersonal institutions can do to society was not a strong force in the 30s, so it’s entirely possible that those who opposed the New Deal were simply individualists. However, even if that were the case, from our current vantage point, we can see that they may well have been right — at least to an extent. And if their arguments really were the same as those I put forth in my post linked to above (namely that structured governmental social service programs run the risk of undercutting community) then perhaps (if it’s not too much of an imaginative stretch) it is worth considering the possibility that they weren’t radical individualists, but rather people with a proper value for communal action, but different policy ideas than your own.
Maybe we all need to go back to Fr. Ryan and one of the greatest documents ever released by the US bishops– the 1919 “Program of Social Reconstruction”, which argued for a minimum wage, public housing, labor participation in management social insurance for illness, disability, unemployment, and old age– and also more radical reforms like workper ownership of capital, universal living wages, and abolition and control of monopolies.
Well, it sounds like an interesting read. But looking back from our current vantage point, I think one of the real questions we would have to ask ourselves is: Was Fr. Ryan right, or has our attempt at statist social services served to destroy community and mutual obligation in our society to a degree that would have been absolutely unimaginable in 1919?
Far too often in this debate, we buy into the Reaganesque crap that government is somehow an alien entity with its own will that often works against the common good. In fact, if you look at traditional Catholic teaching, the state can be used as a device to pursue the common good.
I don’t question that very good things can be done via the government and government funds as far as helping the least fortunate in society. However, that does not mean that the welfare state approach which has been taken in many Western democracies in the last 100 years is the best (or most Catholic) way of achieving the common good. And it may well be, I would argue, that the whole approach is deeply flawed because programs run by state/province and national governments (and even more so ones run by vast international organizations) and administered according to established principles of bureaucratic “fairness” are invariably depersonalizing and destructive to real communities.
In the particular case mentioned, I can see a case for funding both options for elderly care. There is a problem with the home-based solution, however: although virtuous, if it attracts government funding with scant oversight, I can see scope for abuse. So it might not work, or it might need appropriate governance structures. But that does not imply that the playing field should somehow be leveled by scrapping public support for nursing homes.
Perhaps I should have responded only to this paragraph, because in a sense it summarizes the whole quandary. I absolutely do not advocate the government providing some sort of funding to families in return for in-home care. (Nor did we need any in our situation. It pushed my commute up to two hours each way, but I was fully able to keep working and thus support the whole house, grandma included, while my wife provided care during the day and we split care duties at night.) But the really interesting thing is your concern about lack of oversight with in home care.
When people individually and in small communities provide help and care to one another, there is a necessary lack of oversight. And because humans are flawed beings with a tendency towards sin, that often results in people not taking as good care of each other as they should. And yet so long as we allow care to remain personal, this risk of poor care (and outright neglect) will remain. To commit the sin of quoting myself (from much later in the above linked post):
But the above reasons why we starting building a centralized, governmental set of social services basically boils down to: sometimes mutual obligation and community action can’t provide enough services to certain people, and so to get around these breakdowns we set up a government system designed to be more fair. In other words, we have a government social services infrastructure because we don’t trust community and mutual obligation to get the job done. And yet, one of the side effects of setting up such a social services structure is that it serves to undercut community and mutual obligation by making them less necessary.
When youn complain that your position is parodied as radical individualism– that’s because those same arguments were used by those same individualists who opposed the New Deal and all that went with it.
A lot of the New Deal policies were frankly awful and the folks who opposed them (whether they were individualists or not) were right to do so. Reagan, though, wasn’t among them. As he noted in his diary when critics claimed he wanted to undo the New Deal, he voted for FDR four times.
As someone who has worked in social services-including government funded programs- for nearly fifteen years, I would like to offer my own perspective. The program I have worked with over the past 8 years provides home based nursing for children with serious, chronic health problems. This program is government funded. My view of government intervention has changed radically over the years as a result of my work. Too much help from government programs has the effect of decreasing family involvement. Family in fact demand that someone else take care of their child. Furthermore, many, many of these parents in the program I work with don’t work and subsist on funding from other government programs.
This is in contrast to my personal experience…although my birth family had very little room, we took in both my maternal grandmother and unmarried maternal aunt when they became seriously ill. They were cared for only by family until they died. They might of had medicare funding for their medical care, but family provided the in home care.
When discussing Catholic social teaching on these issues, I wonder where these workers are in the ranks of social workers like myself…I do not find practicing Catholics in the publically funded programs that I have worked in since I entered social service–I guess they spend their time posting on blogs!
The issue of taking personal responsibility is linked IMO to the decrease in practice of traditional religions. Add other moral teachings in here as well (ie having sex outside of wedlock—most babies appear to be born without married, committed parents). It’s politically incorrect to address the root cause of the social problems–lack of personal responsibility, sloth,licensiousness. Even the socially active clergy seem to miss the point about dealing with root causes–if someone cries out that they don’t have money for their rent or food, take a look at the big screen TV they have in their home or the new clothes they have hanging in the closet( they buy new, wear it and toss it because it’s easier then doing wash!) and factor this in when listening to their story.
“When discussing Catholic social teaching on these issues, I wonder where these workers are in the ranks of social workers like myself…I do not find practicing Catholics in the publically funded programs that I have worked in since I entered social service–I guess they spend their time posting on blogs!”
Look a little closer. They just aren’t conservatives.
Let’s forget the question (for a moment only) of whether the government or ‘individuals’ should provide help to those who need it.
For this can be seen as a part of another question: what to do about the corporations that currently dominate the industries by which ‘help’ is distributed.
What are we going to do about the cost of drugs, of hospitalization, of housing, etc.?
The question is not really if the gov’t should be RESPONSIBLE for making sure everyone has this stuff. The question is how to somehow REGULATE the distribution of these goods. Right now, these are not fairly distributed because certain individuals MAKE MASSIVE PROFIT by LIMITING their distribution.
This is NOT “free market” capitalism. Their are a small number of players in the health care industry, for example. Drugs will always be prohibitively expensive. HMO’s will always have reason to deny coverage in this or that expensive case. Can those with sick family members not attest to the misery of trying to make sure necessary treatments are in fact “covered” by this or that profit-making entity with a vested interest in denying care whenever possible?
In this situation — when massive concentration of capital leads to a massive concentration of power in corporate boards who are ethically obliged to serve their stockholders, not people in need — how do you suppose power can be slightly dissipated?
What is needed is gov’t regulations.
This has NOTHING to do with the gov’t being a big leviathan under which very individual initiatives are crushed.
The truly BIG power concentration — the REAL GOVERNMENT, for God’s sake — is in the concentration of capital.
What “old-fashioned” gov’t regulation can do is actually FREE the market up a bit and break up the stranglehold on goods currently administered. This is the case in the health care industry. In the case of housing, things are different — though, again, the benefits (to the MARKET) of strategic regulation are, at the present moment, rather obvious.
The standard talk about individual initiative struggling against “big” government and stifling bureaucracy is grotesquely misleading. The big bureaucracy is corporate and government combined and woven together. In this case, gov’t regulation is a small TOOL that can be used strategically to break up suffocating leviathanic power concentration, and to create SPACE for individual initiative.
Mr. DarwinCatholic,
Well, this is a post, not about you, but about how your anecdote (commendable and exemplary) is appropriated in this post. Note the headings about “the real individualists.” Mr. Blackadderiv suggests that government intervention “weakened” communal bonds. Well, considering the vast amount of personal data coming out of the Depression, I would suggest it was industrialism, capitalism, and greed that destroyed these communal and familial bonds. That poverty resulted and destroyed families, and that the communities themselves were destroyed first by rapacious capitalism and its failures. Government intervention came later. The social and economic set-up to the Depression had done its damage. The lines of displaced men and families (two separate entities) unmoored from family and communities did not appear because of later FDR programs. That right-wing Orwellian re-write of history is to be opposed. I will argue that FDR programs supported the structure of remaining families, that boosted possibilities for retaining communities instead of the social consequences of entire segments of cities and rural environments subjected to decimating and abject poverty.
Today, illness in extended families disrupts the lives of our very poor. Not infrequently, the evil government programs for subsidized housing, transportation, health care, and disability allow families to care for their loved ones within their homes as breadwinners can continue to go to work for meager
“Yes, welfare has crowded out private charity and mutual aid.” Untrue. Never before has charity been higher. Individuals volunteer post-graduation for years of their lives (but because they are lefty-life arrangements like the JVC Bloglands favorites won’t mention them), and only the wealthy are finding their way into nursing homes easily. Extended networks beyond blood lines (gasp) are the routine for supporting individuals with health needs and the like. Individuals are maintained at home for long periods, with lots of in-home medical and social supports.
And these supports don’t come cheap. I call the source of the fiscal majority of these supports as “the community.” To denigrate this source, others will use the term “the government” which translates in certain minds to “demonic” (unless its a function of killing-a soldier is the only acceptable form of governmental servant).
I weary of the whiny Catholic right wing complaining about every penny pulled from its pockets. I actually am willing to enact their dream: privatized libraries, pay as you go school systems, the end of welfare, out of pocket payments for health care. Full privitization of medical research. Go to a Catholic Worker website and look at the photos of the bread lines of the 1930′s. That is their picture of these communities.
Can’t wait.
The “individualist” label has definitely taken on an ad hominem quality in MM’s discourse. Individualists have made that kind of argument, therefore you are an individualist, and because you are an individualist you are wrong.
So far my prediction is turning out to be correct. People who were already disposed to believe the argument in Blackadder’s post believe the argument; people who are biased against it and who have a lot of emotional attachment to an opposite point of view are snide and dismissive.
I wonder if government programs and social services must always be dehumanizing and impersonal or even that way most of the time.
Well, some people who support the argument (“biasedin favor of it”, in your language) seem to be “snide and dismissive”– and I’m talking about you, SB.
The New Deal programs kept people from starving during the Depression. What was the alternative? The private sector? They were the ones laying people off. Private charity? It was doing its best, but the scale of the problem was overwhelming.
Businesses are in business to make money, and are accountable to shareholders. The US government is (or ought to be) in business to serve the common good, and is accountable to its citizens.
It’s not a zero-sum game, as David and Daniel have pointed out – I’ve never read a convincing case that government help “crowds out” private charity. If it did, all those private soup kitchens and thrift stores (and guilt-inducing charity commercials) would long ago have withered away.
I also don’t think the advent of government help is primarily responsible for the social decay of the last century or more. In fact, I think the New Deal was a response to decay that had already taken place, as a result of industrialization and mass production.
A Conservative notion of social organization works fine when societies are scaled more or less at the village level, with local merchants apprenticing local boys, and local parishes providing for local needs (small-c charity) and so forth.
FDR:
Daniel:
My point is that there aren’t any practicing Catholics in the programs I have worked for–I include in my comment ,the professionals I work with collaboratively. I don’t care what end of the political spectrum they fall under; I’m a hybrid on many issues myself. As a point of discussion, many of the private religious social service programs do not necessisarily require & hire professionals with same faith affiliation either.
Sure, I’m snide and dismissive towards people who are closed-minded and just have a knee-jerk reaction to any unfamiliar argument. I think they need to break free of their biases, and start to show some willingness to say, “Gee, interesting point, I haven’t thought of it in quite that light before.” Even if they still come down on the side of government centralization, it would be a better discussion if people (and I have to include myself here) were at least somewhat capable of considering a different point of view.
So here, for example, one possible reaction to Blackadder’s post would be, “I think the value of giving old people more stuff via government taxation-and-dispensation mechanisms outweighs the incentive for churches and younger people to spend less time and money on a personal basis taking care of elderly people, which means more social atomisation, not less.”
I don’t see any honest and forthright attempt to put forth an actual argument disproving the existence of that incentive. All I see is snide dismissal of that claim, as if it would be too inconvenient for you or anyone else to admit that it might be true.
It’s not just you, MM, or the others here. Everyone tends to have a problem admitting that their preferred policy could ever create any costs. If someone likes a particular policy, what a coincidence, they argue that it is a Pareto improvement that makes everyone better off (and is free as well). If someone dislikes a policy, then by golly, it makes everyone worse off and costs more money. Very few people have the intellectual courage to admit, “My policy does impose such and such cost, but the benefits outweigh that cost.”
Matt:
I’m sure there are studies that disagree, but that does seem to be the predominant view:
So it seems to me, again, that one intellectually honest response would be, “Even if government spending does crowd out private giving to some extent, what I really care about is that more people get more stuff and money somehow, and therefore I’m willing to sacrifice a bit of private giving (and the community involvement it entails).” I think it’s a sign of bias, however, if someone responds, “Well, I just don’t believe in crowding out, no matter what the evidence says. Plus, getting a check from the federal government is a better sign of community health than when individual people muck around in each other’s lives.”
SB – I often begin my arguments with “While I agree that…”
It would be interesting to make that an unbreakable rule, and see how that changes the tone. (Of course, that would probably lead to some wit posting something like, “I advocate incinerating puppies. Your thoughts?”)
Well, I was ready to pounce on the statement “by offering to pay for nursing home care, medicare essentially sends the message…” but you partially redeemed yourself by later declaring you were not sure if it was Medicare or Medicaid. Medicare does not pay for nursing home care (long term care). Medicare is a social insurance program with four parts (A, B, C, and D). All parts except part A are voluntary. Few opt out of all of the voluntary parts just as before we had social insurance, few opted out of any private insurance offering similar benefits as Medicare does, except for rue inability to afford it. So, we basically have the same insurance the affluent universally obtained extended to all of society.
Medicaid is a poverty relief program. It is means tested – one has to be low income to qualify. It is a great myth that before Medicaid, the type of low income seniors now in long term care beds were cared for at home. Medicaid put to end the indefensible “County Poor Farm.” (Let me retract the accusation of ‘indefensible.’ Conservatives who want to defend the former system are welcome to give it a shot.)
Following the principles of subsidarity, it is a joint federal –state program. States have great flexibility in the design of programs. Progressive states have developed initiatives that assist families caring for their own elders by providing home health care aides on an as-needed basis or simply information and experts available for consultation by families. Some states have combined Medicaid funds with private and public non-means tested senior services funds to create programs where low income seniors are not segregated out from others –“meals on wheels”, senior citizen congregate dining, eldertransport (which several of my neighbors require to get to Mass) and a fantastic ‘Jazzercise’ program which the senior center (Iona House) provides pick up and return home after class – all administered by a coalition of neighborhood churches.
And I offer the last point not in disagreement with DarwinCatholic but as evidence that much of the virtues he lauds are better found with the progressive social vision than with the conservative political programme. Described above, we have almost a textbook example of subsidiarity with federal, state, local governments, local community non-profit agencies, churches and private individuals all contributing a part.
On this, let me move to a little more big picture. DarwinCatholic stated “However, that does not mean that the welfare state approach which has been taken in many Western democracies in the last 100 years is the best (or most Catholic) way of achieving the common good.” That is a point to ponder. It probably should be noted that most of the European social welfare programs were designed and implemented not by the social democrats but by the Catholic Action and the Catholic Church supported Christian Democratic parties (at least in the Low Countries, Italy, Austria, Portugal, Spain, and Germany; to some degree in France, and certainly Msgr. Ryan had as much influence over the New Deal as any other one person, maybe with Frances Perkins as his equal). One might argue that the millions of faithful involved in Catholic Action, the Jocist Movement, the Christian Democratic parties, as well as a century of papal and episcopal guidance has all misunderstood authentic Catholic Social Teaching. But, if so, maybe CST is so open to misunderstanding it should be dispensed with all together.
But I also think a fair review of the actions of conservative and progressive advocates in the US put the progressive much more in line with the virtues DarwinCatholic suggests contrary to the canard that progressives are always pushing clumsy, centralized government programs. It has been the conservatives acting against labor unions where employees and management can come to mutual agreements over economic issues rather than have government involvement. Progressives have supported credit unions, non-profit organizations where people pool their savings and make loans to one another rather than be dependent on big banks. Community organizing initiatives, tenant unions and all of the other private, voluntary community based associations at a small local level where people can relate to one another have been actions in the world of the progressive side the political world and often with conservatives has their adversaries.
Matt,
You say: “The New Deal programs kept people from starving during the Depression.”
As a matter of fact, part of the New Deal’s agricultural policies involved slaughtering millions of pigs and cows in order to artificially increase food prices (this, understandably, got some bad press, so after the first year the government simply paid farmers not to grow food in the first place). That’s not keeping people from starving; that’s making the situation worse.
While I agree that the government should help those who are helpless, I disagree with the New Deal’s policy (not just in agriculture but elsewhere) of colluding with businessmen in order to reduce competition and drive up prices. MM will probably disagree, but I hope he will make a reasoned argument rather than just making an argument to (supposed) authority and making hand-waving assertions about the “common good.”
BA – Preventing an increase in the food supply in order to support prices (and thus farmers’ incomes) is not the same thing as causing starvation, because a shortage of food was not the main problem: it was a shortage of money (due to massive unemployment) to buy food.
Wouldn’t it then make more sense to have either 1) subsidized farmers directly, or 2) handed out food to poor people, or both, rather than artificially restricting the supply of food and artificially driving the price upwards? I find it hard to imagine that anyone is going to be able to explain how higher priced food is a better thing for the majority of poor people.
Kurt,
You clearly know more about the details of the programs than I do. (As I say, my folks dealt with the paperwork while we dealt with being there all the time.) I do recall it was a means tested situation, though.
All,
Certainly, mass industrialization (and the internal migrations that involved) had dealt some very serious blows to family and community before there were much of any government social programs. It would be foolish to imagine that the reverse incentives which social programs provide were responsible for all social breakdown.
For one very basic thing, consider this: Multi-generational households were utterly common in the US 100 years ago, and they remain very common in places like India and China where there isn’t much safety net yet. (My Indian co-workers consider it incredibly strange that none of the rest of us have parents living in our homes with us.) However though the affluence which our country has built over the last hundred years, and the programs such as social security which have been put in place to provide a safety net that guarantees that affluence (even social security is affluence compared to how much of the rest of the world lives), we have reached a point where multi-generational households are very, very uncommon except among recent immigrant communities.
Now I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve been formed by the individualism of our culture; I don’t like the idea of having my mother and my in-laws all living in the house with us all the time. But it’s important that we recognize that that preference is the result of our rejecting the tighter bonds of community which used to exist in our society.
Preventing an increase in the food supply in order to support prices (and thus farmers’ incomes) is not the same thing as causing starvation.
Well, if people are unable to afford enough food because the price is higher, and the price is higher because the government is artificially restricting the production of food, then yes, that is the same thing as causing starvation. The AAA didn’t cause massive unemployment, true. But it didn’t help stop starvation in America; if anything it made the situation worse.
You need to talk to the folks at Catholic Relief Services, because they are very in line with FDR’s philosophy. CRS is very calculating before they import food into a country.
Unlike auto or steel production that can be quickly adjusted based on supply and demand, with crops you have a single harvest each year (two with some crops). What happens when the harvest is twice the consumer demand? Commodity prices fall. What happens when they fall below the cost of production? Farmers go bankrupt. What happens the NEXT season after all the farmers have gone bankrupt and lost the farm? No farms, no food.
FDR was right on target. The AAA was a drastic action because of the large oversupply and no other controls in place. Coming in the middle of the depression when banks, seed companies, ABS, etc. were in no position to extend credit to farmers, the situation was extreme.
Since AAA we have longer term policies in place to deal with overproduction, price supports and nutrition programs.
And, thanks be to God, we have groups like CRS who shout HALT! when someone proposes “Gee, we have an oversupply of corn this year, we should ship it all to Tanzania.”
Kurt,
The problem with the scenario you lay out (or one of several problems, actually) is that it assumes all the farms will go bankrupt after one overproducing harvest. If that were the case, then the AAA would have come too late, as the Depression had by that point been going on for four years. A more accurate scenario would be something like this: more production will reduce prices, which will force the least efficient farms out of business, which will reduce production, which will raise prices. All the AAA did was attempt to achieve the same result through less efficient means, and with the added risk that government officials might misjudge the proper amount of production, and keep prices too high.
Here are some reasons to be skeptical about your story:
1. So far as I’m aware, there are no actual cases of what you describe happening. If you look throughout history, you’ll find story after story of woe caused by bad harvests, but few if any accounts of the horrors caused by a bountiful harvest.
2. In the case of the U.S., only a handful of farm products receive subsidies, yet your argument, if correct, would seem to apply to all farm products. (Likewise, the AAA killed a lot of pigs, but they didn’t to my knowledge feel the need to kill any chickens, yet somehow all the chicken farmers managed not to go bankrupt).
3. New Zealand abandoned all farm subsidies several decades ago, yet has somehow managed to stave off famine.
I know my post wasn’t exactly on topic, but I still think it’s revealing that our “Catholic individualists” (sic) haven’t engaged the question of how to regulate the corporate control of necessary goods.
Medicaid, which is assumed to be “dehumanizing,” is NOT a gov’t program that keeps good-hearted individuals from being “personally involved” with people in need. It is a way of paying for the medical care of those who would be otherwise uninsured.
It is an absurd fantasy — almost a cruel mockery — to talk about how a poor, uninsured person who suddenly requires hundreds of thousands of dollars of care for, say, cancer, might find a “personally sympathetic” rich person to pay for their care.
The kind of organized transfer of funds needed to pay for advanced medical care is not possible to organize on a person-to-person basis. There needs to be a way of ensuring that those who cannot afford it nonetheless get the medical care and the medicine and the medical housing, etc., that they need. For a chronic illness, in today’s economy, such things cost, over decades, millions of dollars for a single case.
Only Medicaid is even remotely equipped to make sure certain persons are insured.
—–
I am entirely in sympathy with the idea that charity and care should not be left to the gov’t. Dorothy Day’s refusal of tax exempt status is exemplary. She did not want to be leading a “non-profit,” did not want to play by anyone’s rules, wanted her community to be instituted by face-to-face bonds. That is the essence of charity, and it certainly should be independent of any government.
All of that has absolutely nothing to do with how to ensure, in the current climate, that certain goods that are controlled by concentrations of wealth and power — medicine, housing — be better distributed.
The hand of the law will have to be involved.
Without the intervention of the law, capital gets concentrated, goods get hoarded, and the economy — the distribution of goods — grinds to a halt.
blackadderiv,
I think you need to look closer at history. The year the AAA was enacted, cotton was selling for 4 cents a pound while it cost farmer 10 cents to produce it. Grain elevator were CHARGING farmers to take corn off their hands.
In the coal mining towns before the union arrivied, the company might charge workers more for the needs of life than they paid them, but at least they gave them credit at the company store and in company housing. The farmers were already saddled with as much debt as the banks and producers would give them. Of cousre, one of the long term New Deal programs was the Farm Credit Act, enacted the same year as AAA and still in existance today, providing important stability and credit access for America’s small and family farmers.
I think further evidence of the AAA’s utility was that shortly before enactment, many farmers were taking matters into their own hands and destroying their produce by their own hands.
I think you need to look closer at history. The year the AAA was enacted, cotton was selling for 4 cents a pound while it cost farmer 10 cents to produce it. Grain elevator were CHARGING farmers to take corn off their hands.
I’m not sure how this addresses anything I said (and the stuff about coal mining is totally off topic). I am, however, interested in learning more about this grain elevator example. I presume that there was some sort of financial incentive to use the grain elevator beyond being paid to do so (otherwise no one would ever pay to do so), but I don’t know enough about the details of the business at the time to know how it would have worked. Do you know where I could find out?
G. Alkon:
What medicaid is in theory and how it is implemented and used is another. Also, it is one of the entitlement programs most abused by recipients IMO. My state has unfortunately broadened the eligibility requirements for medicaid, when the state can’t even pay for the services provided under the previous guidelines. The bottom line is that when folks who are able to pay for private insurance and choose not to (one example of those who abuse the system) we have providers getting less income-for office visits etc. The state is usually very slow in paying its bills which exacerbates the problem. BTW if anyone wants more examples of how folks work around the eligibility requirements, let me know….
G. Alkon,
I did read your comment about drug profits, though since you seem to think I called for the abolishment of medicare, I’m entirely unclear as to whether you actually read what I wrote (in which I said we couldn’t abolish medicare because we don’t have the social institutions to take care of ourselves without it anymore.)
As for drug company profits: Yes, they make money. But they don’t make nearly as much money as you seem to think they do. Pull up the annual statements and stock histories of some of the majors some time and take a look. Look up their profit margins, and then imagine that you cut the price of all their drugs by that percentage. Would it make prescription drugs “affordable”? Absolutely not.
The reason drugs are expensive is because companies often invest anywhere from tens of thousands to millions of man hours of work in order to bring each successful new drug to market. All of those people who do that work need to be paid. Perhaps they could be paid less, but they do I’m sure you would agree at least have to be paid a “just wage” — and for pretty highly skilled and trained work at that.
If we want to have the speed of medical progress that we have at this time and place in history, it’s going to cost a lot of money.
On medicaid, echoing little gal, believe there is a massive amount of abuse of that system. I remember a lot of slick brochures and videos coming in the mail when we were caring for grandma from lawyers specializing in restructuring your assets so that you’d look poor enough to get on medicaid. Given the number of people making millions perpetrating the fraud, I would imagine that there must be billions being spent on via medicaid to help perfectly able people who simply don’t see why they should use their money when they can get it from the government instead.
blackadderiv,
My reference to coal miners was that abusive as the system was, they at least had access to credit. Before the New Deal’s Farm Credit Act, farmers were at the mercy of the banks.
You make want to refer to any of the better biographies of Henry Wallace. Whatever his later faults on foriegn policy, he was the one responsinble for AAA and the Farm Credit Act. A more enjoyable and less scholarly work would be Studs Terkel’s “Hard Times”, a collection of oral histories from the Great Depression published in the early ’70s I believe.
MM may think me dismissive, but my original prediction (that no one would be openminded) turns out to have been correct.