I just can’t help myself. I am always amused (long since ceased being affronted) when the great and powerful worry themselves about the bludging ways and moral turpitude (always just around the corner if you are not careful) of those who committ the crime of not having enough money to live decently.

In the real world of policy choices and actual policy prescriptions what we see is a combination of unbelievably prescriptive and intrusive policies directed at all those who are not in the labour market, who have committed the unfortunate economic solecism of not having a rich wife/husband/parent, together with labour market policies designed to increase the risks considerably of being an employee who gets in the way of a manager having a bad hair day. We also have neverending twaddle about ‘family values’ together with the amazing proposition that a woman minding her own children (if she is poor of course)is a rent seeking bludger, while if she minds someone else’s (never mind about hers while she is doing so-we are dealing with axioms here), she is a productive, fit and proper person, although of course still poor.

I happen to think that those of us who are in work, who actually pay our taxes (unlike many who seem to have millionaire lifestyles and zero taxable income), should be given the opportunity to debate and discuss amongst ourselves what we really think about the terms and conditions upon which we think people should receive support.

This might be usefully prosecuted by reminding every wage and salary earner that their chances of being tipped into the class of ‘undeserving poor’ has been exponentially increased by labour market policies which are designed to shift every existential risk of a market economy, as much as possible, onto their own shoulders. However I won’t hold my breath, because all we will get from Saunders and his ilk is more blather about flexibility, and the rewards of self insurance against risk. This schtik is good until the next recession mes amies, even in the US. After that, watch out-the US has a history of wild insurgency not limited to the kultur kampf waged by the right against gays and godless liberal feminists.

Reference to Hobbes is unfortunate, and beside the point in my opinion. He was seeking a justification for the ’sovereign’ meaning the absolute monarch’s right to absolute obedience, on the basis of a rudimentary contract theory that made the political reactionaries of the time shudder. I know we have reached right back to the late 18th century for our economic theories, and the 19th century for much of our social policy, but I really think we should eschew a completely post modernist pastiche approach to 21st century governance issues, and leave the 17th century well alone as a place for finding justifications for the exercise of political power. I like conservative tripe to be a little more, shall we say, contemporary, and I worry about the rest of the baggage that goes with C17th theories of right and might.

Explained at greater length on Don’s new thread:
http://www.clubtroppo.com.au/2006/09/10/selling-out/#comment-46265

We could do without it if we cared enough to ensure that there always were jobs for the unemployed. I would be interested to see how the following system would go. People who are unemployed have some reasonable period full time job searching on the dole to get work – say three months (though they’d have support services and could spend some of that time on heavily subsidised retraining if they wished.)

After that period they would be required to ‘earn’ their dole with a job paying 90% of the basic wage (or possibly retraining subject perhaps to satisfactory progress). That would give them around three days of work and two days of job search. They would have no incentives to remain on the dole if they could find work (as they could get higher pay that way). It would be expensive to create that work, and I’m happy if someone can show why I’m wrong but I think it would be a much better system.

Has anyone calculated how much the current tax levels would have to increase to cover, say, k$10pa paid to every person between the ages of 21 to 65, earning less than k$30? (assuming you drop the k$6.5 tax free threshold which seems reasonable if you’re getting the first k$10 for nothing). Is it even remotely possible politically?

Thanks for sharing your story with us Gummo. Take it easy man. I’m glad that my taxes contribute to keeping TBP going – especially compared to the other uses that the rodent find for it.

http://www.samuelbrittan.co.uk/text88_p.html

But the substantive point – after the whiney personal bits – of my previous comment was this – the status quo is actually quite punitive of those who forego wage income in order to strike out for themselves, create new enterprises and thereby, maybe, more employment opportunities. The personal costs – social and economic – of going bung are so big that in the long run, it’s nowhere near being a fair bet – are way too high compared to the potential gains from winning. It’s lik ewalking a tightrope with nothing between you and terra firma but a sprinkling of sawdust and a few random piles of elephant poo.

Well yes, but as far as the status quo prevails, Gummo and I are still on the same side. Remember, Jackson had a moral argument as well – that the unemployed have a right to unconditional welfare as long as the current system is in place.

Are you really? Jason seems to be agreeing with Murray and Gerard Jackson, who both argue not only for a guaranteed minimum income but also for abolition of minimum wages as part of the same package (for reasons very lucidly explained by Jackson in the extract Jason quotes). There is, at least so the argument goes, an unbreakable logical link between the two halves of the plan (otherwise labour markets won’t clear and discouraged/sub-optimal job-seekers won’t be able to get employment). Do you agree with Jason on both halves, or just the nice generous touchy feely bit where you get to surf all day at taxpayers’ expense?

As a soi-dissant tax-eating DSP malingerer – one of Andrew’s “able-bodied people taking welfare without doing anything in return”, I’m with Jason (and Mark) on this one. But then I would be wouldn’t I?

If, as Andrew Norton says, conservatives have “have worked out that the legitimacy of the welfare state depends partly on staying within accepted community norms” – norms which naughty little provocateurs like yours truly happily flout, which doesn’t help the case for welfare any, it’s clear that that conservative welfare policy isn’t about providing welfare at all – it’s about satisfying that fabulous creature the taxpayer that as little welfare is being paid as possible. It’s an old, worn-out hand-me-down from the era of the Victorian workhouse and we’d be well shut of it.

How did I get onto the DSP? After several years of serious chronic depression, I visited my GP – I was dolebludging at the time – and he suggested I’d qualify. I still do.

Here’s what used to happens to this chronic depressive on an average work day. You wake up too early in the morning, mad as a cut snake because you haven’t had enough sleep. You walk to the station – when the train comes in you stay well away from the edge of the platform, in case your impulse control isn’t completely up to it today. You get off the train and think about staying at the station and catching the next train home. Walk to work, thinking all the time, I could turn around before I get there and go home again, before anyone catches me on my way to work and it’s too late.

About eight hours later you go back to the station, and repeat the avoiding the edge of the platform thing again and take yourself home. Where all you want to do is get into a dark room and stay there. Sorry, but if anyone thinks I’m going to put myself through several months, even years, of that again, simply to comply with social norms, they’ve got a lot of scree between their ears.

What is this social norm anyway? It’s not that you should work – that can be done in a lot of ways and a lot of settings. It’s that you should have a job – i.e. that rather than bludging off the poor taxpayer you should go out and find someone – anyone – who’ll pay you a wage – however low – to work for them. Tough titties if that’s so bad for your sanity that the daily trip to the office is actually a threat to your life.

What are those other ways of working? One, obviously, is to start up your own business. Just don’t try it in the IT sector. The ugly stats, from memory, are that one in ten small businesses go broke and one in ten IT projects is a dud. So before you take on self-employment – other than the spurious sub-contracted labour kind – it might be a good idea to ask yourself – would I take all my life savings and put them on a ten-to-one shot in the Melbourne Cup? (If you’re looking at getting into the IT biz, make it a 100 to one shot.) Don’t fancy it? Funny about that.

Where was I going with that again? Oh yeah – we’re supposed to be living in a new entrepreneurial culture. Well, one of the features of entrepreneurship – the genuine kind – is that it’s risky. You can do your dough as easily as you can do your dough at the races or the Crown Casino. And that leaves you where precisely? Broke and depending on Centrelink for your income (been there done that). But if you knew that no matter how many times your brilliant new venture was going to come unstuck, you could rely on covering your living expenses while you gave it another shot, you might be inclined to take that next shot instead of saying to yourself “Sod this for a game of capitalism.”

And in the new entrepreneurial culture, isn’t a welfare system that assumes that the only way out of unemployment is to work for wages a bit old-hat anyway? That’s enough from me – I’m way over the LP three para limit. Otherwise I’d mention that this established approach to unemployment and welfare policy is very much a cultural thing and not in the least an economic one.

http://larvatusprodeo.net/2006/09/09/abolish-centrelink/

A lot of people from Gen X, like me, who graduated in the early 90s with Arts degrees or whatever, ended up on the dole for a period of time. Middle class educated twenty something or not, the labour market was very difficult to enter in the early 90s in the context of the recession – and a lot of the casual or contract entry points that exist now didn’t exist to the same degree then (it wasn’t til 1994 that full time employment fell below 50% of jobs). So we’ve been on the receiving end of mutual obligation and pointless form filling and mindlessly useless and ill directed training schemes. Working Nation was about the only one that had any real value, and it was expensive. I wish in these debates more people would try to put themselves in the position of the unemployed themselves, rather than seeing them in simply abstract terms.

It’s because I’ve been there and done that, and a lot of my friends have too, that I feel strongly about a guarenteed minimum wage – along with my libertarian instincts.

Yes, exactly, you can just see it as a co-payment.

“… but that really isn’t at the heart of the issue… But this same insurer has demanded of you other restrictions which created this moral hazard in the first place (by regulations which reduce labour market opportunities)”

Well if anything is not the heart of the issue, that isn’t. Are you really saying that you would be all for conditional benefits if there weren’t minimum wages or employment porotection laws? I doubt it. They are separate issues and should be kept separate. But I’m afraid that, having been smitten by this ‘elegant’ argument, you can’t let it go.Perhaps I’m being picky, but – needless to say – Saunders didn’t actually use the the word patriarch. (Why do you keep forcing me to defend this evil creature?) He said parents, and I think you’re seeing an authoritarian dimension that doesn’t need to play a role here. As Andrew said, a family is in part an insurance scheme, as is a community. Alternatively, reciprocity can be expressed just as well in an insurance framework as in a family one. In an insurance scheme everybody is expected to pay premiums.

It is very reassuring to know that the endless efforts of the past 30 years to expunge forever the spectre of stagflation created by the psychological economy of Keysianism together with the corrosive effects of the ‘culture of entitlement’ that full employemnt produced, has been banished forever. Hurray! Now we can have the society/nation as family/enterprise, right back to, oh I don’t know, say the 1850’s perhaps?

Problem is Danno, do you think it’ll keep going, right the way through to the keeper, forever onwards and upwards, to the truly blissful state where all the costs of its reproduction will be paid for by the unruly labour unit him/or herself? Oh well, in the meantime, we can try the little beauty of utilising the human resource that developing countries produce in huge, and cost free numbers (to us) for a little while yet. Isn’t rational economics womderful, a great example of ethical value adding to the daily grind of ensuring that the great unwashed continue to grind away in the service of nation/family!

The citizens are children of two kinds: the mature, successfully disciplined, and self-reliant ones (read: wealthy businesses and individuals), whom the government should not meddle with; and the whining, undisciplined, dependent ones who must never be coddled.

The trouble with the government-as-parent idea is that in a liberal democratic society the ‘parents’ are elected by the ‘children’. And because there is a diversity of views within the community about what kinds of behaviours are acceptable and what kinds are not, ‘good children’ constantly run the risk that a new parent will decide that they are bad. One day it’s single mums and dope smokers, the next day it’s fast food chains and mining companies.
 
Many classical liberals would agree with Saunders that moral values and cultural issues are important. But most would argue that these issues are the province of civil society not politicians and bureaucrats.

Andrew – Do you think the ‘nation as family’ metaphor is inescapable?