Brain Barder responds to my posting about Being, Not Producing – and poses some Questions:

Don’t you find something just a tiny bit disturbing about the prevailing ethos of all our main political parties according to which those who for whatever reason can’t or won’t hold down a job must be forced to work, employing the sanction of poverty-level social security ‘benefits’ for those who resist? Are we all no better than cattle to be milked for the enjoyment of mega-rich senior managers and other tycoons?

Can we really not tolerate the idea that some people are incapacitated for work by their psychological or physical defects, their low IQs and illiteracy, their inability to obey authority and convention, their poor health, their deep-seated aversion to compulsion, routine or subordination, indeed in some cases their sheer innate laziness?

Can’t we in this wealthy society afford collectively to keep this small minority alive and even in a degree of comfort? Is there really much point in trying to drive people like this into jobs when there are two-and-a-half million unemployed, most of whom would give their right arms for jobs if only they could find them?

Doesn’t the philosophy summed up as "Work makes us free" have a chilling connotation, even in English?

Questions, questions. I don’t know the answers, but they all seem worth asking.

Hmm.

Let’s answer them seriatim (a neat little word which I always like to use if I can).

Don’t you find something just a tiny bit disturbing about the prevailing ethos of all our main political parties according to which those who for whatever reason can’t or won’t hold down a job must be forced to work, employing the sanction of poverty-level social security ‘benefits’ for those who resist?

As far as I know no-one in this country is ‘forced to work’. But everyone’s bodily functions require fuel (ie food). So either that fuel is earned or it is given, by friends/family or someone else.

People who choose to live off other people’s generosity without contributing anything in return are, in effect, beggars. Societies of all shapes and sizes down the ages have taken a dim view of beggars and mendicants.

Most parents start to lean on their offspring to start to make a contribution of some material sort once they leave school – that’s just the right and fair thing to do. So if we all tend to take an unsympathetic approach to idleness among people we know best, should we be more generous with people we do not know at all? On the face of it, not.

Are we all no better than cattle to be milked for the enjoyment of mega-rich senior managers and other tycoons?

I think that your characterisation here is fatuous. People who do work all make a contribution, and the market rewards that contribution.

You seem to espouse a lumpen Marxist ‘surplus value’ idea that all work = exploitation. To which I say, piffle – whatever problems the market throws up, it is better than all the alternatives – and it does make everyone better off, including beggars.

Can we really not tolerate the idea that some people are incapacitated for work by their psychological or physical defects, their low IQs and illiteracy, their inability to obey authority and convention, their poor health, their deep-seated aversion to compulsion, routine or subordination, indeed in some cases their sheer innate laziness?

Maybe we can ‘tolerate’ it. But we also need to keep a keen eye open for what causes these things, which you (like me) seem to regard as unattractive or regrettable qualities.

Once people get caught in a low-income plight, the state can make it very difficult to escape. This is what your beloved Labour Party left us:

Gordon Brown made life more bearable for many people on benefits, but he also made it harder to escape from them. Get a job tomorrow earning between £10,000 and £30,000 a year and you’ll take home only 30p out of every extra pound you earn after the first £10,000. Twenty pence will go in income tax, 11p in national insurance, and 39p in lost tax credits.

Add in the loss of other allowances (housing benefit, council tax benefit) and you may find it simply doesn’t pay to work harder.

Our poverty trap is deeper than that of most other European countries. That is a strange legacy for a government that wanted to make work pay…

And this:

… Almost a fifth of 16 to 24-year-olds were not in education, employment or training in 1997. The number was identical in 2006.

These people stayed put in the Welsh valleys, in Liverpool, in Glasgow, while Eastern Europeans travelled a thousand miles to pick up work on construction sites in London. Immigration reduced the opportunities available to white British men whose poor education made them less attractive candidates, while the benefits system undermined their motivation.

So whereas there may well be individuals who can not cope and need help, it is (I believe) undeniable that the fact that we have created a welfare monster on this scale (which in turn emerges from a frequently dysfunctional state-run education system) has to be down to the consequences of sustained bad policies.

Can’t we in this wealthy society afford collectively to keep this small minority alive and even in a degree of comfort?

But it is not a small minority! All common sense suggests that if you give people something comfortable for nothing, the marginal impact will be that more people inch towards this easiest option, reducing the pool of ‘givers’ and piling on the burden for those Givers who remain.

Is there really much point in trying to drive people like this into jobs when there are two-and-a-half million unemployed, most of whom would give their right arms for jobs if only they could find them?

The problem as we have seen above is that millions of poor but highly motivated Poles travelled across Europe for these UK jobs, since poor but highly unmotivated Brits up the road did not take them. Therefore what?

Doesn’t the philosophy summed up as "Work makes us free" have a chilling connotation, even in English?

No. Hell no.

How can you even begin to think this?

Contributing to society through one’s energy and creativity is a core part of being human. Work need not be paid employment.

There is nothing stopping all those unemployed people getting some self-respect by organising themselves and picking up litter or helping out elderly people. You sound just like grim old Commie Govan Mbeki:

I later went to visit veteran communist leader Govan Mbeki (father of the now fallen Thabo, then recently released from Robben Island) at his little house. This recalls that memorable encounter.

I described to G Mbeki my visit to Red Location – surely the ANC as the local power should be doing more to motivate the people living there to clean things up a bit and try to improve their lot.

"It’s not the job of the people to do the job of the government", retorted Mbeki, tetchily.

Which of course may be true. Yet what a bleak practical philosophy that attitude brings with it: a willingness to let people rot – if not to encourage them to rot to pep up their sporadic militancy – until the state fixes things.

Above all, the corollary of your position is that Being Compelled to Reward People Who Do Not Work means that Work Makes You Unfree – the worker is in fact the slave of the non-worker.

Not much freedom in that for the people toiling to keep the whole sorry show on the road?

It doesn’t matter, anyway. The ‘European Social Model’ model of unlimited ‘solidarity’ paid for by borrowing far into the future is dying on its/our feet.

We’ll get back, the hard way, to a better balanced way of doing things.

In some ways it may be less Fair. But it will be a lot more Honest.