Earlier this month, the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press released a new report measuring the values and basic beliefs of the American people. There are a lot of fascinating findings in the report, but there’s one in particular I want to focus on. The Pew survey found that just 40 percent of Republicans agree that “It is the responsibility of the government to take care of people who can’t take care of themselves.” In 1987, during Ronald Reagan’s second term, fully 62 percent expressed this view. For independents, the figure has dropped from 70 percent in 1987 to 59 percent today.
Taken literally, this question means a solid majority of Republicans (60 percent) – as well as 41 percent of independents — don’t believe government should care for people who are suffering from dementia, Down syndrome, crippling disease, or debilitating war wounds. It would mean government has no role to play in unemployment insurance or medical coverage to low-income children. Government has no affirmative duty to care for those who are defenseless, vulnerable, handicapped, and have hit hard times through no fault of their own.
As a friend put it to me, if he were asked the question he would be inclined to think that it offered a careless way to put a point that he agrees with: that we have a responsibility to care for the needy among us and that government can be one very important means of meeting that responsibility. To say it is the responsibility of government to care for those who can’t take care of themselves, however, definitely rubs him the wrong way, though upon even modest reflection he would say he agrees with the idea being conveyed as opposed to its libertarian opposite.
I would add that if the question was disaggregated and Republicans were asked whether they believed government had a role in helping, say, wounded veterans or those suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, there’s no question that the numbers would be hugely supportive. The survey question is probably a measure of people’s general attitudes toward government as opposed to particular government programs.
The question is probably still influenced as well by the public’s (proper) view that the federal government’s effort to aid the poor, especially in the form of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), did genuine harm to the underclass. (AFDC was eventually replaced by the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF program.)
In addition, my hunch is that we’re seeing the effects of the progressive overreach. When government combines unprecedented intrusiveness with incompetence, it leads to a deep distrust of our public institutions, including government itself. The view of the public, with all the proper caveats in place, is that government should do relatively few things well. In many respects, we have inverted this, with government doing far too many things poorly. The effect of this has been the near-complete discrediting of government itself.
In thinking through the large, complicated topic of the role and purpose of the state, then, a caution is in order. Skepticism toward government is often warranted and legitimate; contempt and outright hostility are not. It was Burke who averred that God instituted government as a means to human improvement. Government is not simply a necessary evil; so long as it acts within its proper boundaries and in a responsible fashion, it has a positive and constructive role to play in human affairs.
The end of government, we’re told in Federalist #51, is justice. Justice is defined as the quality of being impartial and fair and bestowing equal treatment. But it also means caring for the defenseless, the disadvantaged, and the oppressed. This is a public as well as a private concern. A society ought to be judged on whether the weak and disadvantaged are cared for or exploited. And a just society is incompatible with one where government doesn’t care for people who can’t care for themselves.
Conservatives should be in the business of restoring confidence in the legitimacy of government by reminding people of its prescribed, limited and proper role in human society. And among those responsibilities is to care for those who can’t care for themselves. That understanding of the proper and humane use of the state has largely been lost; and it is the duty of responsible political leaders to reclaim it.
This is, of course, a difficult issue. My thinking is that the more government cares for the needy, the less people have to take care of their own. This leads to a more callous and cavalier social persona that I think we've all noticed. n nSo who should care for the needy? Families, communities, religious institutions? That works out OK where these groups have the resources, but what happens when they don't? This is why you're called a racist if you don't believe in the government "safety net" – it is typically the minority community that lacks these resources. And while we know that there are plenty of poor White communities, they don't really count … do they? n nAmartya Sen, the Nobel Prize winning economist, goes even farther – suggesting that government is responsible to protect people from any natural disaster. That's why, all of a sudden, Hurricane Katrina was Bush's problem. n nBut to me the math is quite simple: If you can't have a responsible, self-reliant people, you won't have a responsible self-reliant government.
In the united states in the 21st century there are no communities that lack the resources to care for their members. None. n nRead about what poor Jews did to take care of their own at the beginning of the 20th century. n nThe poverty that is most debilitating is the poverty of values.
The government has no business in the charity business. Period! If the government was run by angels I would say differently…but because the government is so corrupt that any involvement with the poor and downtrodden always makes some bureaucrat rich. Charities were once very effective until the government took over and now those that really need help rarely get the assistance they most urgently need. An example of a once efficient charity was the Catholic Charities Appeal where over ninety-cents of every dollar went to help those in need. With the government running similar programs there is so much waste, fraud, and abuse that those in need are lucky to get a penny for every dollar that the government steals from the people.
See The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama's War on the Republic in amazon. Read Aranoff's review and the comments.
Even if one were to agree with your view, the implication is that this is a proper activity of the Federal government. Why, even assuming government altruism were moral, should this not be constrained to the state (or even local) governments? n
I like to point out to conservatives that the "Right to Life" produces people that are unable to care for themselves (progressives agree and are in favor of abortion as a result). As a consequence, conservatives need to take responsibility for those unable to care for themselves, such as developmentally disabled people who might have been aborted. n nI think the republican party would be wise to take caring for the needy away from the democrats: If we can't help the developmentally disabled, why are we helping the developmentally abled so much?
Contempt and outright hostility are frequently warranted and legitimate. But the missing word here is "federal". Is it the over-arching national government's responsibility to root out poverty in its corners? It is not their responsibility if only because they have proven inable to discharge it with trillions and decades. I would submit that our Consitutional system explicitly excludes social spending as it recognizes the sovereignty of constituent governments. By design the Congress is forbidden to indulge "compassion" in distributive actions. Forgetting that is most of what has brought us to where we sit; in a field of craters created by burst bubbles.
If you hadn't beat me to it, I would have posted on the author's failure to address the question of what level of government is appropriate for social programs. n nI believe it's legitimate for the citizenry to choose to carry out charity through government programs – but it's not required. If they do so choose, they would be wise to control such programs as locally as possible (principle of subsidiarity). This keeps to a minimum the problem of government social programs that combine "unprecedented intrusiveness with incompetence." My preference would be to use government programs only as a back-up plan when private charity is inefficient or inadequate – and then at the lowest workable level. n nI also object to the second sentence here: n"Justice is defined as the quality of being impartial and fair and bestowing equal treatment. But it also means caring for the defenseless, the disadvantaged, and the oppressed." n nIn my opinion, his definition of "justice" is correct, but the correct word for "caring for the defenseless, the disadvantaged, and the oppressed" is "charity" – his statement is further confused in that the ending or alleviation of oppression is a matter of justice, while caring for the oppressed without ending their oppression IS charity. n nI believe it is possible to have justice without charity, and also possible to have charity without justice.
Mr. Wehner might be surprised to know that more than a few base conservatives now echo the views of Ayn Rand: The poor and disadvantaged should depend on private charity. n nBack in the 1970s (when I first became a conservative), conservatives had no difficulty explaining what distinguished them from libertarians and from Ayn Rand's Objectivists. (The National Review had expelled the Objectivists from the conservative movement.) Today, a whole lot of conservatives have moved much closer to the libertarian-Objectivist position.
Its like this social government cure all has never been tried?? n nHow is that "state take care of everyone" working out in Europe….. basically you have a massive amount of slaves of the state… which riot when they dont "get theirs"….. yeah thats real compassion …
Contempt and outright hostility is quite warranted as a response to a rogue gov’t that has vastly overstepped its boundaries. Apparently the author would have poo poo’d the revolutionary war which was quite hostile to the gov’t of the British. Apparently the author thinks that we should all just lay down and let the gov’t roll over us like a giant steamroller when we have repeatedly made calls, signed petitions, sent letters and had demonstrations and the gov’t just ignores us. I guess he is ok with that. I am not. Local charities and churches should be the ones to take care of those in need. Period. If fraud is eliminated, if the giant federal bureacracy was eliminated, and only the people who really need charity are taken into account, there should be plenty of money to take care of them. Income taxes need to be eliminated and a fair tax installed instead which ALL would pay and this is only fair. It is not fair that 51% of the country works to take care of 49% of the country that doesn’t. Also, if income taxes were eliminated, it would free up more money to give to charities. Right now, people feel that they have already given at the office and rightly so. Stealing money from a person’t hard earned paycheck and giving it to someone who didn’t work is not compassion. It is theft. The gov’t is no different than a mugger. That the recipient really needs the money does not jusfity its theft. Who gets to decide who needs the money more – the worker or the recipient. The gov’t. What right does the gov’t have to decide need which is so subjective. The whole thing is ridiculous and should be done away with completely
The thinking that you are "entitled" to a portion of someone else's hard earned paycheck and that you have the "right" to a portion of that person's paycheck as a "benefit" because you are a citizen is utterly reprehensible. The money taken out of that person's paycheck is not charity by any stretch of the imagination. It is taken by force, at the point of a gun if need be. And just because the recipient "needs' the money, does not justify its theft. The government has now become the middleman in the theft process. No longer do these recipients need to mug someone walking down the street. No. The gov't does the mugging and then turns around and gives this money to the person who did not earn it. Income tax needs to be eliminated and replaced with a fair tax so that all have skin in the game of running this country. If the huge gov't bureacracy is dismantled it will free up vast sums of money that can be put to better use. If income taxes are eliminated it will free up more money for private charity. There will be less fraud and abuse of charity at the local level. And compassioin is a two way street. How much compassion do these welfare recipients have for the worker that provided the money? None. That is how much i feel for them. All they see is some impersonalized gov't check and they don't see the sacrifices made by the person that worked for that money. And need is subjective. Who can say with certainty that the person who earned the money doesn't need it just as much or more as the recipient of the entitlement? And contempt and hostility is a quite appropriate response to a rogue gov't that is doing things it has no business doing and does not listen to the people and forces things like Obamacare down our throats. I suppose the author would have frowned on the Revolutionary war because it was too hostile? Please
>>> “It is the responsibility of the government to take care of people who can’t take care of themselves.” n nThat's because we now understand that 90% of the boo-hoo-hoo class is just exagerrated fraud looking for a handout. SS "disability" skyrocketing during the recession. Nope, no fraud there. Everyone on foodstamps. Welfare recipients getting free cell phone accounts. And on and on and on.
There is a difference between those who are incapable of taking care of themselves, and those who are disadvantaged. n nThe Government should take care of those who are incapable of taking care of themselves. However, for the disadvantaged, the Government should support policies that provide them an equal opportunity. n nIn both of these respects, I think the Government has been quite successful. But extending these concepts to provide for the disadvantaged is impossible. Everyone can make an argument supporting why they are in some way disadvantaged. Many groups have, and many new groups continue to spring into life. Trying to support everyone will end up in supporting no one. n
A guy fights say in Afghanistan and comes back wounded seriously, mentally ill and with no means. Damn right it's the government's responsibility to provide for him and to provide for others on like cases. The extent of that responsibility will get measured by any number of criteria, some of which are evident from my plain spoken example: extent of disability, cause of it, lack of other means, indiviidual capacity for self help and others. But to say in a case like this that his care and well being aren't THE responsibility of government is to fetishize what charity can do.
Taking care of the military is part of our national bill for defense and the military absolutely should be taken care of. Totally agree. But they are the only exception in my book. Once you start making more exceptions you go down the slippery slope where we have arrived at this point in time
It's not really even an "exception" as military service makes a man or a woman EMPLOYED by the nation. It needn't be seen as an "exception" in that the benefits of having been a soldier and having been severely wounded can be made to be (if not conceptually or actually so already) contractual benefits for service rendered. n nDefense spending, as well, is specified in the Constitution obviously and is of kinds of spending by our nation (and any nation really) most legitimate by kind (though some might quibble–not me–with the amount of it). It's almost certainly the least abstract of concepts in the Constitution as well. As well, I've never heard any making a veteran's benefits out to be "entitlement benefits"–such would largely strike me as odd. n n(As well, the image [if not actual deed] of caring for veterans is good [or necessary] politics, and almost certainly good [and necessary] policy as well. Heaven forbid Republicans simply adhered to any uncertain moral and ideological principle while it was bad politics!)
"… Conservatives should be in the business of restoring confidence in the legitimacy of government by reminding people of its prescribed, limited and proper role in human society. And among those responsibilities is to care for those who can’t care for themselves…" n—————————— n“ The government of the United States is a definite government, confined to specified objects. It is not like state governments, whose powers are more general. Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.” n—James Madison, Father of the Constitution
The problem with your position, besides violating our long lost federalist principle of a limited central government of strictly enumerated powers (an instrument of charity being absent from that list), is that a remote, centralized government is incapable of distinguishing between people who can't take care of themselves and those who simply won't. Government "charity", if it is to be considered at all should be administered at the local level where the wheat can be separated from the chaff. The exception of course is the care of wounded vets who should have a lifetime ticket to a worry free existence. They've proven themselves worthy.
Why can't government act more as a different kind of middleman, less as the middleman role of tax-taker? Government can act as a directory for charitable organizations (and could perhaps offer minute "immediate fallout assitance" in the case of financial or other catastrophe, until contact with such organizations was established), instead of as a primary "charitable organization" itself. Government does, after all, have the least claim to actually being charitable of those who would actually spend money in the sphere of need–and I don't know how great a claim government has to actually being effective in this sphere. n nStill, I largely agree with the spirit of the piece (and almost totally with the idea of what governement and its end can and should be), although I don't like some of the minor arguments presented (such as the wounded veterans example, for reasons in reply to another addressed). It should probably (as a matter of politics and policy) simply be CEDED that government should take care of many of the catastrophe-afflicted and disability-afflicted (though, of course, a libertarian can't simply do that–and, of course, lazy statements won't ever be good statements of principle).
That being CEDED, an actual debate of policy could be had, as to what kind and what degree of help such would receive, and from what levels of government (as others have noted), local, state, federal; and, most importantly of all, just as to who these afflicted and devastated beings are. Conservatives should ever be on guard, because having the ability to give out benefits (and to do so unattached to the cost of such an action) is a kind of power, and a self-perpetuating one at that. n n(As to another idea I had, what if the government made contracts of a sort with charitable organizations, so that these organizations would be required [after entering into contract] to assist any individual that fell into certain parameters (such as a certain disability, age, geographical location, etc.] and requested the organization's assistance. This would largely leave private contributions and private care, as well as liberties–not to mention, non-assenting private organizations–as primary sources of aid, and would also largely reduce the number of governmental organizations and programs for any particular needing group.)
What about kids? What about the severely handicapped? What about people set back through no fault of their own. What about 1,001 like examples? Hayek and Rawls both agreed on the need for a meaningful social safety net. Here depending on how the factors come out, the state has some measure of helping responsibility, not all though.
As i said above, what about if all the billions spent on pencil pushing bureaucrats was eliminated? What if the income tax was eliminated? Don't you think that would free up billions of dollars for other thngs that are really useful like local charities? It doesn't matter whether it is the person's fault or not. You are still stealing money from someone's paycheck and that is wrong. By this logic then, it is ok for a mugger to mug you as long as they really need the money and it isn't their fault that they really need the money. No it's not ok! If people didn't have to pay so much in taxes for the huge gov't bureaucracy that we have, they would be able to give more to charity. That is certainly true in my case. I see LOTS of charities i would love to give to but i can't afford to after paying income taxes, real estate taxes, sales taxes etc.
It's amazing that people give the amount that they do give right now even with all these taxes. We just simply cannot afford any longer to pay for this giant gov't and all these entitlement recipients. Do you now that entitlements take up about 70% of the national budget? We are 15 TRILLION dollars in debt and that doesn't even count all the public pensions that the gov't is on the hook for. Where are we supposed to get this money from? The system is eventually going to collapse unless we take drastic steps to fix it and it may already be too late. And when it collapses, there will be a river of blood running in the streets. We just simply HAVE to get this idea of systemitized transfer of wealth from producers to non porducers as being acceptable or charitable out of our heads.
Whether the receipients are children or it's not their fault has no bearing. Once you eliminate all th fraud and abuse and people who really should not be on assistance,i am CERTAIN that the pool of people who really do need help is quite small and they could easily be taken care of at the local level where charity belongs. And people who say that Jesus would have wanted us to have a public safety net are quite wrong. One of the Ten Commandments is Thou Shalt Not Steal and forcefully taking the fruit of one's labor is stealing and the recipients are the sinners.