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user-inactivated  ·  3767 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: An ideological memoir with minimal decorations

1. While I can’t make a specific case with regard to a guaranteed minimum income, the more general case of my assertion is not that difficult to support. Since 1965 (when Johnson’s Great Society programs began) the poverty rate hasn’t shown any marked improvement overall, and has actually gotten worse for the age 18 to 64 demographic. Over the same period, the population also increased by 61%, so the total number of poor persons has increased quite substantially, even according to the government’s own figures.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States (see first two graphs)

Welfare spending is a harder subject to find reliable statistics on, but the government’s numbers certainly do not show a downward trend when measured as a percentage of GDP (and the GDP itself is a suspiciously high figure considering the things that pass for goods and services these days).

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/welfare_spending

What was originally envisioned as a set of policies to alleviate hunger now provides, among other things, housing subsidies, daycare, healthcare, educational subsidies, transportation subsidies, subsidized utilities and free cell phones. Whether one approves of these programs or not, one can hardly deny that they constitute an overall expansion of the welfare state.

Anecdotally, with the exception of a few small gentrification projects in inner city areas, I am personally unaware of any instances in which slums have miraculously morphed into middle class neighborhoods during my lifetime. I have, on the other hand, lived in two neighborhoods where the opposite transformation has taken place. While anecdotal evidence is not conclusive, I doubt that you can find a single instance in which a poor neighborhood became a middle class one through the agency of welfare spending.

A minimum income might have some advantages as a replacement for other forms of welfare, but I doubt it would accomplish anything magical.

2. The phrase “paternalistic coercion” is an astonishing one. To me, life has been a struggle between two essentially conflicting concepts from the enlightenment – equality and freedom. In my youth, I favored equality; now, I favor freedom. “Paternalistic coercion” is the repudiation of both. The error that rank-and-file Marxists make is that of believing a central committee will somehow express the collective will of the people. The error implicit in “paternalistic coercion” is that of believing a body of planners who consider the public an inferior caste of bipeds will continue to treat them with paternal concern. In the middle ages, at least the nobility usually understood that every able-bodied person under their thumb increased their power. Now, when great swaths of the population do little more for the state than cast an ill-understood and increasingly irrelevant vote from time to time, those who govern them are unlikely to have much scruple about their treatment.

There are definitions of socialism that simply call for the governmental ownership of the means of production and distribution – not even making a pretence about equality. Functionally, however, this is simply totalitarianism with a trendy name.