Beneath the mindless political ideology, the childish Democrat vs Republican point-scoring, and the insincere promises that makes up Washington’s political theater these days there lurk some real, fundamental national and even cultural philosophical questions worth pondering.
One of these is the question of how much responsibility a culture owes to people who don’t take responsibility for themselves. In a primitive tribal culture living with little or no surplus, the answer is clear. The culture when possible takes care of those who can’t take care of themselves – children, orphans, the old and the sick. Everyone else is expected to contribute to the pot, and if they don’t then they don’t eat.
Now in our culture we actually have two kinds of people; (1) those who through no fault of their own are unable to take care of their needs, and (2) those who, though their own life choices, have chosen paths that don’t give them enough to take care of their needs. There is no question but that a culture like ours should support the first class – those who were perhaps born impaired, or through accident or illness not due to their own fault or habits have left them unable to help themselves.
But what about the second class of “poor”? Those who made conscious choices that put them into these circumstances? People who dropped out of school and now don’t have employable skills? People who are just lazy? People who blew their minds or crippled their bodies with alcohol or drugs? People who chose to overeat all their lives, or chose to be couch potatoes and now have expensive health problems? People who chose to spend every penny they made, rather than save some of it for their old age? Do we who didn’t make such bad choices have an obligation to support those who did?
Years ago I was involved in an organization which gave self-help workshops. Among those who came to the workshops were “hippy” types who lived in a commune. These people were forever arguing that there ought to be a sliding scale of fees for the workshops, and that those who lived in the commune and chose not to make much money ought to get a fee reduction (recovered, of course, by charging those of us with real 9 to 5 jobs more). This never seemed right to me. These people were arguing for a free ride simply because they chose not to do the hard work of keeping a regular paying job.
Now the fundamental problem is this: if we don’t offer assistance to people who made bad choices they are going to suffer the natural consequences of their bad choices – consequences that are sometimes hard for us to watch (think homeless people and starving in the streets). But if we do save them from the natural consequences of their own bad decisions we create a moral hazard – why should people be more prudent if the society will always save them from their bad decisions?
This is the fundamental dilemma that we ought to be thinking about as we create social policy in our nation. Personally, I think the ultimate touchstone for such decisions is the long-term survival of the culture, civilization, or nation. If our social policy doesn’t help us survive, than it is dysfunctional. In that light, social policy which doesn’t encourage hard work and prudent decision-making, with real and painful consequences for poor life choices, is probably not in the long-term interests of our nation.
Edward Gibbon argued in his monumental Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that it was the loss of such civic virtue among the Romans that led to the eventual dissolution of their mighty empire. I think that argument might apply just as well to our current American empire, which was founded by hard-working people who looked out for themselves, but has evolved in recent decades toward what seems to me a much more permissive – not to say unrealistic -- approach toward bad life choices.
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