“Welfare needs to be illegal.”
“Why?”
“You know, ancient proverbial wisdomly truth. Give a man a fish, and he will be fed for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he will be fed for the rest of his life.”
“Ah, so you want to teach a man to-”
“Also no.“
I believe the argument is more “a man who learns to fish is fed for a lifetime, so the very least we can do is stop this program that, through the incentives it creates, is essentially paying people in fish to not learn how to fish”
like I don’t think you understand A: how much conservatives and/or libertarians think government intervention is more harmful than doing absolutely nothing at all and B: how much evidence they have for this position. if you think that Something Must Be Done and the worst thing to do is nothing at all, then of course they look heartless and wicked, but the Let’s Stop Making Things Actively Worse Movement rejects those premises so it’s unfair to cast them in such a way
I’m referring to a two-pronged approach of dismantling any kind of welfare system or safety net because giving people fish is inherently unvirtuous, combined with strong support for anti-intellectualism for plebs, an all-out assault against public fishing schools and fishing colleges, meaning taking away both fish and the opportunity to fish.
Now this problem leads to a sort of vague “eh now business is good and cool, fisheries will surely employ ten million fishermen” where naturally a fishery would rather hire as little fishermen as possible, especially as you just denied them the ability to learn how to fish.
“I’m referring to a two pronged approach of trying to dismantle a system that they think is actively making things worse, combined with attacking another governmental system that is well-known for wasting preposterous amounts of money to no productive end whatsoever and being astonishingly resilient against efforts to make it do useful things. There’s no way they could believe they had a good reason to attack such a system, I must have caught them out!”
I don’t think you get what they actually believe and I don’t think you get how much actual evidence they have for it, because it’s a lot. Most American government interventions actually are making things worse than doing nothing, actually, in real life in the world, and they will never ever go away and they will never ever get better because How Dare You Not Try To Do Something.
I’m going to say “citation extremely needed” because I don’t want to outright say “you are lying, and intentionally so”.
People who want to dismantle welfare and education (again, this a two-pronged approach) have zero interest whatsoever in actually trying something. To imply that their two-pronged approach is not imbecilic, but rather very economy and highly trickle-down, they intentionally cherrypick evidence. It works like this:
A program provides free lunches for children. Most of them are fed. Some of them are not. Now, there’s a headline in this, and a good conclusion: “STUPID DUMB STATE fucks up AGAIN, dismantle this”.
If the program gets dismantled, then naturally no children get free lunches, no lunches are provided, and children go hungry. Since starving children are taught the value of food by this, this is to be considered highly successful.
Note the (in another sense) two-pronged approach: the suffering is considered a success and is a benefit from a deontological standpoint, but otherwise you pretend your approach is utilitarian.
they will never ever get better because How Dare You Not Try To Do Something.
in what fucking universe do people not get yelled at by their own team if they try to institute, say, free universal health care in America?
Taking away people’s fish and the ability to fish is precisely considered doing something.
The attention of the popular is always and exclusively and universally baleful for the unpopular. All programs to help the impoverished, the lower-class – the unpopular – require the attention of the popular to be upon them. All societal imperatives to “help the needy” mean “Punish the have-nots to emotionally reward the haves” because that is the thing that happens every single time every single time every single time without one single solitary exception that the popular interact with the unpopular. Popularity devours any such program or imperative, and any capacity to do useful things is devoured and replaced with not doing useful things but serving the emotions of the popular. Nothing that is useful can survive. Nothing that does what it is supposed to do can survive. It will be outcompeted by the functionless, because the functionless does not waste any aspect of its existence on having function and thus devotes all aspects of its existence to flattering the emotions of the popular. And the popular are all.
People were mocking a Republican who said that we should cancel the school lunch program because it hasn’t produced results, which clearly means he hates children and all negative emotional valence terms are true of him and hate hate contempt hate destroy contempt hate annihilate hate contempt. If we are not allowed to ask if a school lunch program is having results, then that program is functionless and the only thing it might possibly be producing is negative utility. Giving children lunches is not a religious sacrament, it is something we allegedly do because it has a positive outcome. If we are not allowed to ask “Is this thing we did, that is supposed to have a positive outcome, actually having a positive outcome?” because that means you don’t want to give people positive outcomes, then all is lost forever and death is the only escape.
Does it work? Does it function? Does it have fucking functionality? Can you imagine how such a program might not function, or does trying to imagine how it doesn’t work just make you start vomiting your contempt? I can think of a real easy way that it doesn’t function – the interventions it gives are insufficient to actually have a positive outcome, because they are designed around the emotional needs of the popular and not the actual needs of the people it helps, and the administrative overhead massively outweighs any positive utility, as it always has and always will forever and ever and ever and ever and ever. If we are not allowed to ask if it functions, it does not function. If it does not function, then it is another window through which the baleful eye of the popular gazes the unpopular into nothingness. If so, it should be closed, and it never ever will and death is the only escape.
People might be able to teach themselves to fish, when the popular are not holding them down and shrieking into their mouths about how only the popular can help them. The libertarian wing of the GOP is the only remaining part of them that has not been devoured by popularity. Trump doesn’t want to free the unpopular from the attention of the popular, he wants to hold them down and shriek a slightly different message into their mouths and prevent them from ever doing anything useful because useful things aren’t made specifically to flatter his endlessly hungry emotions. The libertarians are only empowered to do things because he isn’t paying attention to them, because as it has always been in the entirety of human history, useful things can only happen outside the attention of the popular. The only freedom can be found away from the attention of the popular. Useful things can only possibly happen outside the gaze of the popular. And any attempt to escape it results in the endless shrieks that you must oppose the wonderful, pure, noble, virtuous causes that the popular wrap themselves in in order to justify their limitless hunger to annihilate utility.
>If we are not allowed to ask if a school lunch program is having results, then that program is functionless and the only thing it might possibly be producing is negative utility.
So, is it that you don’t comprehend or that you don’t accept that “children being fed” is the result of this program? I don’t understand how you’re looking at a the criticism a republican received for saying “this program intended to give a meal to American children in their developing years is not providing results and we should probably get rid of it” and seeing him as unfairly maligned for asking The Real Questions.
> does it work
Yes, it feeds children. I was waiting for the part where you might establish in which providing poor children a meal is a popular scapegoat from a real issue, a real negative outcome, but it sounds like you’re being hypothetical about a concrete example
>I can think of a real easy way [this program I presume] doesn’t function
You did not actually provide this real easy way. I don’t know what the following had to do with the former
So, is it that you don’t comprehend or that you don’t accept that “children being fed” is the result of this program? I don’t understand how you’re looking at a the criticism a republican received for saying “this program intended to give a meal to American children in their developing years is not providing results and we should probably get rid of it” and seeing him as unfairly maligned for asking The Real Questions.
“Giving children lunches is not a religious sacrament, it is something we allegedly do because it has a positive outcome. If we are not allowed to ask “Is this thing we did, that is supposed to have a positive outcome, actually having a positive outcome?” because that means you don’t want to give people positive outcomes, then all is lost forever and death is the only escape. “
All is lost forever.
Death is the only escape.
Yes, it feeds children. I was waiting for the part where you might establish in which providing poor children a meal is a popular scapegoat from a real issue, a real negative outcome, but it sounds like you’re being hypothetical about a concrete example
“Giving children lunches is not a religious sacrament, it is something we allegedly do because it has a positive outcome. If we are not allowed to ask “Is this thing we did, that is supposed to have a positive outcome, actually having a positive outcome?” because that means you don’t want to give people positive outcomes, then all is lost forever and death is the only escape. “
All is lost forever.
Death is the only escape.
You did not actually provide this real easy way. I don’t know what the following had to do with the former
You are pretending to be stupid and incomprehending in order to posture at moral and intellectual superiority. This will work because words do not matter and only noises matter, there is no meaning, there is only the endless shrieking song of popularity. You shriek status and status will be shrieked back into you. That will be all that matters and all that is left.
All is lost forever.
Death is the only escape.
…ok, look, I’m fairly sure that you’re letting your general-purpose metaphors drag you away from the logic of the specific issue at hand. Although, to be fair, your interlocutors aren’t doing a stellar job of articulating their side of things. Let me give it a shot –
You say: “Can you imagine how such a [public welfare] program might not function?”
There are a lot of plausible ways that a program might not function, of course, but ultimately they devolve to two:
1. The program performs its task inefficiently. It does in fact provide benefit to its recipients, but too many resources are expended to be worth the good that is done.
2. The program actively harms its recipients, probably by creating some kind of weird perverse incentive structure. (Meager benefits that disappear at a certain level of income or wealth, which basically pay the recipients a pittance in exchange for never working or saving, are a classic example here.)
American conservatives love to talk about welfare programs having issues of the second kind, and most of the standard conservative soundbites on the topic reference that kind of problem. This is more convincing with regard to some programs than others, and it’s really not convincing at all when it comes to school lunches. (If you think otherwise…I would, ah, love to hear your argument.) The benefits are given in kind, and they’re given directly to kids who really shouldn’t have any acquiring-lunch-related incentives to begin with.
These programs do in fact benefit poor kids, in a clear and obvious and
easily-discernible way. They’re eating lunch, which they don’t have to
pay for themselves. It’s real. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. You can
too, if you go to any poor school in a big city.
It’s not like all the money is getting stolen by warlords.
So we’re talking about efficiency.
Could I be convinced that a school lunch program was inefficient, and really ought to be improved? Yes, certainly.
Could I be convinced that a school lunch program was inefficient, and that therefore our first response should be to scrap it? That would be a lot harder.
I would rather feed the country’s poor schoolkids for $X than for $2X (assuming equivalent levels of nutrition etc. etc.), but I would rather spend $2X – even if the extra money were being wasted by the most odious bureaucracy imaginable – than spend $0 on feeding no poor schoolkids at all. At least, this is true at any remotely-plausible funding level.
But American liberals / leftists really really don’t trust American conservatives about this, and they’re right not to trust them, because those conservatives have a long history of trying to “fix” flawed inefficient welfare programs by replacing them with nothing.
And this is the heart of the actual argument. “If we are not allowed to ask if a school lunch program is having
results, then that program is functionless and the only thing it might
possibly be producing is negative utility” – the proper response here is “The program is obviously having results and generating positive utility; just ask any of the recipients. You’re saying the results aren’t good enough, and maybe you’re even right about that, but your inquiries are all designed to conflate suboptimal programs that need to be improved with negative-utility programs that need to be destroyed.”
You say “I don’t think you get…how much actual evidence they have for [welfare programs being negative-utility].”
I confess: I would be very interested in seeing such evidence. Not broad generalizations about the satanic powers of popular people and the apocalyptic consequences of all their works, but, y’know, evidence.
This is going to be a tough sell. The very-standard-issue conservative arguments – the ones explaining how the poor would be Motivated to Do Real Work, if only we didn’t coddle them – are not convincing, at least not in any form that I’ve seen. Certainly the welfare recipients themselves, who are the ones supposedly caught in the baleful Sauron’s-eye, are not clamoring for welfare programs to be dismantled. But maybe you’ve got something I’m not expecting.
And if your complaint is that welfare programs are badly managed and inefficient, well, you’ll get no argument at all from me. I will happily get behind anyone’s call to make the welfare system less stupid and needlessly hurtful. But then you’re in the position of weighing bad welfare programs against no welfare programs, and you’re actually going to have to sell the idea that the latter is a remotely reasonable choice.