Silver Spoons are Few and Far Between

Life is Hard

The New Zealand government has trumpeted another decline in beneficiary numbers.  This is good news.

Social Development Minister Anne Tolley said today the 309,145 people on benefit at the end of the December 2014 quarter was 12,700 fewer than last year.  “This is the lowest December quarter since 2008 and the third consecutive quarter with such record lows,” Tolley says.  Numbers on the Jobseeker Support benefit had fallen by more than 5500 since last year and had declined consistently since 2010, even as the overall working age population increased. [Stuff]

There is a peculiar world-view which takes great heart from permanently increasing beneficiary numbers–and the emergence of a class of perpetually unemployed.  It celebrates this as evidence of the success of government welfare programmes and of the central importance of the government in everyones’ lives.  It is offered as a hallmark of an advanced, civilised society . . . until the “house that Jack built” runs out of citizens’ money and the cards tumble down.  Politicians love to be doing “good things” with your money to justify their existence and ratchet up their ratings on the meter of self-importance.  The unintended consequences, however, are inevitable and very painful.

But for the most part people see reducing welfare rolls as very positive–for all concerned.  But not all.
  In the light of New Zealand’s decreasing unemployment beneficiaries, the left’s Labour spokeswoman, Carmel Sepuloni has claimed that there is no positive correlation between employment numbers and beneficiary numbers.  People coming off state welfare are not going into employment, she claims.

But Sepuloni questioned whether sole parents were just going off the benefit and not accessing financial support from anywhere.  She said recent sanctions had led to more hardship, with an increase in special needs grants and other help.  “You see increasing numbers of people who are out on the street begging, so you have to wonder whether or not they are just not complying with Work and Income NZ and, again, not accessing any financial support from employment or from the state.”

And the problem is . . . ?  Work and Income now have compliance standards in order to access unemployment benefits.  Doubtless some of these are unnecessarily bureaucratic, but not all.  At the very least, however, compliance standards for welfare have undermined the dangerous idea that welfare is an automatic and perpetual right.  They have underscored the principle that welfare requires taking responsibility for performance.

The plain reality is that most–if not all–jobs have an intrinsic “nuisance” factor.  Employees are required to do stupid, even mindless things.  The more inefficient and badly run a business is, the more this will likely be the case.  Moreover, most jobs have aggravation factors that come from the boss being grumpy from time to time, or suffering offence from the behaviour of work colleagues, or having to navigate the arcane peculiarities of the public transport system, and so forth.  Therefore, having to put up with some bureaucratic inefficiencies from the welfare agencies in and of itself is not a bad thing.  It is a real-life training programme for getting and holding down a real-life job.

But some people drop out and end up not getting any financial support from anyone, says Sepuloni.  So . . . , maybe they did not really need it in the first place.  Maybe they are being supported by an extended family.  Maybe they have started odd-jobbing.  Necessity is the mother of invention, and extended family bonds and loyalties are often far stronger than politicians think.  What Sepuloni is arguing, however, whether she is aware of it or not, is that people she thinks are on the street begging, having gone off an unemployment welfare benefit, are there because of a lifestyle choice–a foolish one, maybe–but a choice nonetheless.  Help remains available and voluntary social agencies are there to help them access it. 

It seems to us that this is a far, far better approach than what Sepuloni is implicitly promoting: namely, that welfare should be handed out without conditions or qualifications, no questions asked.  Socialists are always generous with other people’s money.  After all it is “free money”, is it not?

We would respect politicians such as Sepuloni a whole lot more if she and her colleagues voluntarily tithed their parliamentary salaries and supported a charity to provide aid to street beggars.  We expect at that point some politicians would become a whole lot more picky and choosy as to who benefited from their generosity. 

Deserving Poor

The Salvation Army Has Got It Right

Christians talk about helping the deserving poor.  It is true that such a qualification as “deserving” can cover up an awful lot of unkindness, coldness and uncharitable hardness of heart.  You can always find some reason or other as to why someone is not deserving of help.

Nevertheless, when not employed as a pretext for hardness of heart, the concept is helpful.  There are plenty people who believe they are owed charity by everyone else.  It is their right to get support from other people. Their job, if they think of themselves as having one, is to extract money from other people to sustain them. Deserving poor people are not like that.  They do not particularly appreciate being dependant upon others.  They strive as best they can to better the circumstances of themselves and their families so that they are not a burden upon others.  In other words, the deserving poor are those who are doing the best they can to be self-supporting.

It goes without saying that state welfare is built upon concept that welfare provision is a duty of everyone else, and a right of the recipient.  It proceeds on the idea that society “owes” me and that I have a human right to their support.
  The present government has realised the long term devastation such ideas wreak and has introduced the radical principle that state welfare is not automatic.  It requires duties to be done and obligations to be met.  The obligations are centred around activities and opportunities to take responsibility to get off welfare.  These are steps in the right direction.  However, it is true that if there were not “rights based” welfare in New Zealand, almost all the poor would be deserving poor.  The welfare bludger would be rare indeed.

Stuff ran a piece on a welfare bludger and a Christian charity that refused to help because she failed to belong to the category of the deserving poor. 

An Invercargill couple say their six young kids will go without on Christmas day and it’s the Salvation Army’s fault.  However, the Salvation Army says the parents are to blame for their family’s predicament because they have relied on handouts rather than trying to help themselves.

Full marks to the Salvation Army on this one.  Here is the mother’s sob story:

Shelly Edwards and Leo Hewett said their six children aged 3-10 will get no presents and have a diet of chicken and bread on Christmas day because the Salvation Army failed to help them in their time of need.  “How can we tell the kids there’s nothing for Christmas?” Shelly asked from their south Invercargill state house yesterday.  Shelly said she was on the invalid’s benefit and received a working for families benefit, while her partner was unemployed and seeking employment at the meatworks.Their weekly income was $631 but just $15 was left over after paying for their rent, bills, food and petrol.

The Salvation Army had helped them out last year with a Christmas hamper.  This year, however, when she approached the Salvation Army again she was told that she would not be eligible because she had failed to turn up to a budget advice meeting.   It turns out that she had been receiving help from the Salvation Army over a two year period, and when she had received more than three food parcels in one year, she fell into the category of being required to get budgeting advice if further assistance was to be forthcoming.

However, Shelly had not engaged with the budget advisory service so was not put on the adopt-a-family scheme, [Salvation Army staffer] King said. 

The Salvation Army’s aim was for its clients to get to the point where they could look after themselves and be self sufficient.  “If we keep handing out we are enabling them to stay in the situation they are in. We aren’t actually helping them at all in the long run.”  Shelly and her partner had six children and they were responsible for them, King said.  “I have been in touch with her budget advisor and she assures me they do have money. Like everyone Shelly has known Christmas is coming.”

According to Edwards, they are receiving $631 per week in welfare benefits.  One blogger, reviewing their circumstances, reckons that their estimate is way too low.  In fact they will be receiving more like $805 per week.

Incidentally I think their estimate of their income is low. I make it:

• Invalids Benefit (couple rate) $217.75
• JobSeeker (couple rate) $174.21
• Family Tax Credits (for six kids) $414.00

So that is a total of $805.96 a week net, not $631. On top of that it is highly likely they get the accommodation supplement or a statehouse subsidized rent.  It would be nice if media did not just take for granted what people say they earn, but independently check their entitlements as I have done.

And on a more sinister note, he adds:

UPDATE: Assuming there are not two Shelley Edwards in Invercargill, it would seem the mother has convictions for fraud and dishonesty, and breaching home detention. The Judge commented:

You are a thoroughly dishonest woman

We are confident that this approach by the Salvation Army will be resulting in far more generosity by the people of Invercargill (where this incident took place).  The Sallies run a programme of matching businesses and donors with needy families.  When people realise that their support and help goes to the deserving poor, not the bludging poor, generosity abounds more and more.  And that’s the way it should be. 

Nothing kills the wellspring of charity faster than a bludger playing the system. 

Footnote

According to the Left, people like Shelly Edwards do not exist.  In Lefty World, no-one ever bludges, no-one ever plays the system.  In Lefty World sin also does not exist; it is merely a propaganda construct of the Right. 

Vulcan Blessings

Moving Off Welfare Into Work

We have more good news from the trenches.  The battle against being enslaved to welfare has not only been joined, but–for the moment–is being won in New Zealand.  The present government has been quietly opening up a number of  fronts in the war against welfare benefits as a human right.  The common theme in this battle is to reject the notion of welfare as a lifestyle choice. 

As in the United States under the Clinton administration, the driver is not ideological (at least, not overtly so).  Rather it is part of the wider effort to get government spending under control and bring the fiscal situation back into surplus–then, eventually, into government debt reduction.  Therefore, welfare needs to be discriminatory–delivered to those who really need it, not to those who would prefer it as their chosen lifestyle.  This, from the NZ Herald:

Numbers on sole parent support have plunged by 8600, or 10 per cent, in the year to March.  It is the biggest drop in a single year since the benefit – previously known as the domestic purposes benefit, or DPB – was created in 1974.  Sole parent support is now being paid to 75,844 sole parents, fewer than in any year in the DPB’s history since 1988.

Respondents in the United States have testified that the President’s “you have to get a job” refrain was psychologically powerful in moving them off welfare into work.  Public expectation is a powerful incentive.  It can either work for you or against you.  In decades and times when the “public expectation” is that you are a victim owed help, welfare rolls expand.  When “official” policy and expectation is that you are obligated to get a job, the reverse happens.  But it helps to have other stars aligned.  A growing demand for labour and unfilled job positions help significantly.

In New Zealand we have both a government committed to reducing or removing welfare benefits when the emergency or temporary need has passed, coupled with a growing job market.  The impact in twelve months has been remarkable.  For time immemorial the Left has asserted there are no “bludgers” on welfare roles.  Everyone on welfare deserves to be there–and stay there–by definition.  This has been a theological fixation.  Now, the Left has been strangely–but not surprisingly–silent.  The only criticism remaining would be for the Left to argue that work is worse than welfare, a hardship or affliction, if you will, which would be guaranteed to arouse wrath amongst the electorate like nothing else.  So silence, in this case, is understandable, the better part of valour.

We want to underscore how powerful the setting of official expectations, as manifest via welfare rules, is.

A single parents’ group says “a complete change of mindset” has helped reduce the number of people on the sole parent benefit to the lowest level in more than 20 years. . . .Auckland Single Parents Trust founder Julie Whitehouse said tighter rules, which require sole parents to look for part-time work when their youngest child turns 5 and fulltime work when that child turns 14, had completely changed attitudes.  “It’s amazing,” she said. “It’s so good that I can’t even get them to volunteer time. The whole mindset has changed.”

Asked how many of her 580 members now had jobs, she said: “The shift is incredible, I’m almost tempted to say 100 per cent – it really is big. All the attitudes changed. Everybody knew that when your child is 5 you have to go to work.”

We are also aware that the government has helped create a culture of job-seeking at the welfare agencies, by requiring that beneficiaries attend courses to prepare them for work and to help them apply appropriately for jobs.  This has fostered a culture of job-seeking.  “Everyone”  is engaged in it, so it becomes a “cool” activity.  This is the carrot.  The stick is that if a beneficiary does not participate, his or her benefit is reduced.

Work is not a curse.  It is a privilege and an honour.  True, work was cursed as a result of the Fall, but the Scriptures make clear this curse made the whole enterprise more difficult, not intrinsically evil.  The same applied to childbearing.  Work itself is no more a curse than the bearing of children.  Having said that, it is not surprising that Unbelief has at times actually declared both to be intrinsically evil and harmful and degrading.  But these are the Devil’s lies.  As always with him, the actual opposite is the truth.

The wider ramifications of people moving off beneficiary rolls into paid employment will be considerable.  May it live long, and prosper.

Escapees From the Welfare Trap

Progress and Accomplishment

The New Zealand government is engaged in a programmed campaign to get people off public welfare and back to work.  Opposition parties play the guilt-and-pity card constantly in the Parliament these days.  By their lights, untold suffering has fallen upon legions of victims as a result of these benighted policies.

For our part, as grass roots level, we are seeing lots of positive fruit.  Even something as simple as an official expectation of returning to work and getting off welfare is paying dividends. “You have to get a job” is a revolutionary, and liberating message at the local welfare office. Stuff carries a case study to illustrate the quiet revolution that has begun and continues to gather momentum.  In this particular case it was self-motivation that made the difference.  But the wider social and government expectations would no doubt have strengthened the resolve.

Daughter’s words motivate mum to get off benefits

HARRY PEARL

Last updated 05:00 26/10/2013

A 9-year-old’s comment about how “cool” it was to be on a benefit has changed a Huntly woman’s life.  Until six months ago, Judy Wilson was one of about 80,000 sole parents in New Zealand receiving a benefit.  She was devoted to raising her six children but, in her own words, she was also drinking, smoking, and not doing “anything”.  And she had been for close to 20 years. 

Six children being paid for by the taxpayer.  Solo-parenthood as a lifestyle choice.  These not-untypical-cases have been consigned to the very back of the closet by the welfarists.
  Such things do not exist, they claim.  They are urban legends.  To highlight such cases is not only misdirection and deceitful, it also represents the destructive, debilitating stereotyping called “Beneficiary Bashing”.   But for Wilson, out of the mouth of her child came the truth.

“It was my nine-year-old that said, ‘It’s cool being on the benefit because you’ve been on it for so long, eh, mum. I’m going to go on the benefit too’.”  Wilson, 43, said she was “shocked” to think her circumstances would have such influence on her daughter, and the comments jolted her into action.  She started a six-week course at WINZ in order to pick up new skills and followed it up with another, more specific course, in caregiver training for about eight weeks. Since July, she’s been working at Kimihia Home and Hospital in Huntly. 

This case is helpful because it underscores the lifestyle attitudes and changes resulting from moving off the benefit into work.  Factors such as self-respect and self-discipline, coupled with the meaning to one’s life that comes from working have all been part of the mix.

It’s a significant shift from the routines that dominated her life since 21, the age she first applied for the domestic purpose benefit (DPB).  “I’m more active, because you’re committed to work and you’ve got to work for money. This job puts food on the table. I’m not laying back and waiting for the next benefit [payment].”

As of September, there were 7050 people seeking sole parent support in the Waikato Region. The vast majority have been receiving assistance for more than one year and many of them will do so long term.   According to a June 12 valuation from the Ministry of Social Development, sole parents spend an average of 15.8 years on the benefit over their lifetime, at a cost of $234,000.  People who get on a benefit as youths spend an average 18.9 years, costing $239,000.

At a glance, it’s been a similar story for Wilson. She had her first child at 20 and moved from Auckland back to her hometown Huntly, alone. Her partner and father of her children stayed in Auckland, where Wilson had spent most of her teenage years. She moved in with her nan, who needed care, and over the next 20 years gave birth to Tia Huia, Raiatea and Rangi Taiki, Marama and Wati o te aroha.  The children visited their father for holidays and he paid child support, but raising the children – who are now aged between 2 and 23 – fell overwhelmingly to Wilson. 

Without the investment in one’s own labour, and finding that money would come flooding in without cost or effort, had destructive side-effects–alcohol being one.  
Although there were intermittent periods of work, each time she was pregnant she returned to the DPB.

“I was a family woman and I wanted to be with my children,” she said. “I wanted to be involved in their education. That’s why I wanted to be freed up.”  But being free also encouraged bad habits. “I found myself drinking so much on the benefit. Since I’ve been working, I haven’t been drinking because you don’t have time. My whole way of thinking and speaking has changed.”

Wilson’s commitment to her children, even whilst on the benefit, has been laudable.  But to this has been added a vital ingredient.  Her commitment is now deeper and more tangible.  No longer does she rely upon the government‘s commitment to her children.  She is both providing for them on her own account, and being a better mum as a result.  Good on her. 

However, Wilson is adamant it was her own desire to do something with her life that motivated her – not a push from WINZ. She said she had “no goals” when she grew up and knew only that she wanted to be a mum. Now, she’s realised she can balance both.  “I always thought my place was at home, looking after the children, making sure they’re fed and clean. But you can do all that as well as work.” 

And there will be another aspect which the article does  not mention: we have no doubt her mana amongst her community, neighbours, and extended family will have risen tangibly.

Letter From the US (About Europe)

Europe Tries Welfare Reform

Even Scandinavians want to cut back on benefits to encourage growth.

By Michael Tanner

National Review Online

October 16, 2013 12:00 AM 

 

If Congress — once it reopens the government and gets back to its usual business of redistributing taxpayers’ money — has any interest in reforming our burgeoning welfare state, they might look, of all places, to Europe, where serious reforms are underway.

Leading the way is Great Britain. While in the United States the federal government funds 126 separate anti-poverty programs, 72 of which provide cash or in-kind benefits to individuals, Britain is consolidating its six major welfare programs (the jobseeker’s allowance, the income-support allowance, the employment-support allowance, the child tax credit, the working tax credit, and housing benefits) into a single grant.

While someone receiving the seven most common U.S. benefits (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Medicaid, food stamps, WIC, housing assistance, utilities assistance, and free commodities) rakes in more than $35,600 in benefits in the ten most generous states, Britain has now capped the new consolidated grant at no more than £500 per week (about $40,000 a year) for a family, and just £350 (about $29,000 a year) for single individuals. It is estimated that as many as 40,000 households — about 1.6 percent of those receiving benefits — will have their total benefits reduced as a result of the benefit cap.

The idea, according to welfare secretary Ian Duncan Smith, is that “benefits should be a safety net — but not something that gives claimants an income out of reach of many hard-working families.”

At the same time, by moving away from a patchwork of different programs to a single universal credit, Britain will shift welfare payments to put a greater emphasis on children. It is estimated that the consolidation means some 2.8 million British households, mostly couples without children, will eventually receive lower benefits (although current recipients are being held harmless during the transition), while some 3.1 million households will actually get more money.

Moreover, the benefits will now be paid in a monthly lump sum, rather than weekly or biweekly, and paid directly to the recipient rather than to intermediaries like landlords. The poor will be treated like adults, with responsibility for their own finances, rather than childlike wards of the state.

And there will be a greater overall emphasis on moving recipients from welfare to work. “We want to help people find a job and move away from benefits,” Duncan Smith explained.

Meanwhile in the Netherlands, King Willem-Alexander’s speech to parliament in September, written for him by the government of Prime Minister Mark Rutte, warned that “the classic welfare state of the second half of the 20th century . . . brought forth arrangements that are unsustainable in their current form.”

The Rutte government plans to reform the welfare state with the understanding that “people must take responsibility for their own future and create their own social and financial safety nets, with less help from the national government.”

Even the so-called “Nordic model,” long touted by advocates of the welfare state, is undergoing profound changes. Sweden long ago enacted significant reforms to its safety net, including the partial privatization of its social-security system. This August, Finland announced plans to increase the effective retirement age, cut payments to students, and reform maternity leave. And in Denmark, the government has said that the time has come to embrace the “modernization of the welfare state,” adding that the system “needs to prioritize things in a new way and create the best possible conditions for people to get a job.” In fact, the Danish government has already slashed the length of unemployment benefits from four years to just two.

Perhaps the last holdout, Norway, long buoyed by oil revenue, elected a new center-right government this fall on a platform that called for, among other things, cutting taxes, reducing bureaucracy, and reforming the welfare system to better encourage entrepreneurship. The new government has plenty of public support for its plans: A recent survey by Fafo, a Norwegian research foundation, reported 51 percent of Norwegians supported reducing welfare benefits in order to secure economic growth.

While the government shutdown is ostensibly about Obamacare and debt, the real underlying question is the future of U.S. government spending, which is a question of the welfare state. Those on the right often say that if we don’t change direction, we’ll end up like Europe.

Meanwhile, Europe seems to finally be learning its lesson. Will we?

— Michael Tanner is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the author of Leviathan on the Right: How Big-Government Conservatism Brought Down the Republican Revolution.
 

Another Jigsaw Piece

Doctors to Help Reduce Welfare Beneficiary Numbers

Social expectation is powerful.  What people expect of us, along with society in general, is powerful–for good or ill. 

New Zealand is embarking upon a programme of changing social expectations of welfare beneficiaries.  The fruit of old nostrums lies rotten on the ground.  It’s time for something different.  The government is trying to set a social expectation that its not acceptable to remain on a perpetual benefit unless circumstances are particularly pressing.  Lifestyle beneficiaries are to feel the heat of social expectations upon them. 

Sickness beneficiaries, whose numbers have exploded over the past twenty years, are required to go to doctors periodically to get medical approbation for remaining on a sickness benefit.  Now doctors are required to diagnose what is required medically and physically to get the beneficiary back to work–which will be a very different conversation to those of previous years.
  This, from Stuff:

Doctors are being encouraged to question unemployed patients on their career goals as part of sweeping welfare reforms, which critics fear will penalise the disabled. But advocates say getting patients off the benefit is part of a GP’s job, and work-focused conversations need to start in the doctor’s clinic.

The biggest changes to the welfare system in more than two decades came into play last month, with seven main benefit categories cut to three. The previous sickness and invalid benefits, collected by about 140,000 people last year, have been replaced with either Jobseeker Support or Supported Living payments.

The working assumption of all state beneficiary welfare programmes prior to the present sea-change has been that no-one likes to be on a benefit, that all really, actually, truly would prefer to be working.  Therefore, to imply to beneficiaries in any way that being on welfare is less than ideal would only serve to rub salt in the wound and be a form of “beneficiary bashing”.  No longer.  Doctors are now required to play a more holistic role–they must embrace the assumption that work is more beneficial than idleness and ensure that their diagnoses and prescriptions and recommendations reflect that reality.  Most doctors are welcoming the change. 

But health and disability panel member Ben Gray, a GP and senior lecturer at Otago University’s Wellington School of Medicine, said there was no doubt that the physical and mental health benefits of working were huge. “On one level, finding them a job is not our job. But our ability to manage some of the problems that are the barriers to why they can’t get jobs are our core business. If someone can’t get a job because they are stoned all the time, then I should be talking to them about what we can do about their addiction.”  International research has shown consequences from being out of work include poorer mental and physical health, increased rates of mortality, and risk of cardiovascular disease, lung cancer and respiratory infections.

No doubt there is plenty of work to do to navigate such a sea-change successfully.  There will be lots of tweaking needed to navigating and sailing skills.  But it is a beginning.  And a welcome one. 

Societal expectations, based upon common sense nostrums are powerful.  When doctors start telling beneficiaries that one of the most powerful things they can do to their well being and long term health is to get a job it will doubtless have an effect.  Social expectations from opinion leaders always do.  One more jigsaw piece in place.

Acting With Intent

Rolling Back the Curse of  Unemployment

In New Zealand we have begun a welfare “shakedown”.  The approach is not Big Bang; rather the strategy has been to change a number of “at the margins” structures.  Taken together, however, they amount to a significant move in the right direction.

The core problem with state welfare is that it rapidly creates a psychological and material dependency.  Crudely put, getting paid for doing nothing makes more sense–it has greater marginal utility–than getting paid for blood, sweat, and tears (that is, work).  Why work when you can get paid for doing nothing?  People who enter that matrix are not dumb.  They are making a smart, rational choice from the perspective of economic utility. 

Of course most folk have a sense that the morality of the deal is not quite on the square.
  From the perspective of economic rationality, being on welfare is the best option.  From the perspective of conscience and morals, not so good.  Conscience on this matter ends up being suppressed the longer one is on welfare–a process which takes a number of forms.  One is to forge a doctrine of entitlement.  “It’s society’s fault that I do not have a job (skills, education, etc)”.  Shifting the blame to the community creates a grievance for which the one harmed needs to be restituted.  Welfare then gets framed as a payment which is owed.  This is deadly poison, creating an enormous barrier to usefulness in the workplace.  Folk tell themselves they would happily work if there were worthy jobs available.  Society has an obligation to provide the job to which one really is entitled.  Further, attitudes evincing a demanding truculence hardly serve to market oneself successfully to prospective employers.

Another form of repression of conscience is to put the blame for being on welfare and not in work squarely upon oneself.  “The reason I don’t have a job is that I am useless.”  One does not have to be a genius to work out where that leads: depression is an enervating affliction which immobilizes and imprisons.  It, too, salves the conscience with another deadly poison. 

To these barriers another is quickly added: not working becomes a habituated lifestyle.  The habits that make a good employee (punctuality, reliability, regularity, enthusiasm, energetic application) are quickly lost, if they were ever gained.  Another significant barrier to getting off welfare dependency arises.

Economists and sociologists tell us that when the Clinton administration in the United States was forced to run budget surpluses by Congress, the president had to become to become a champion of  finding work.  The Clintonian Doctrine became, “You have to get a job.”  It is reported that this simple moral imperative was extremely powerful in changing expectations and activity.  New Zealand has now embarked on a similar course.  We expect that if allowed to run, it will likewise be extremely compelling and very useful to getting people off welfare rolls into employment.

The NZ Herald has published a report on what impact the reforms (and these, we believe, are genuine reforms, rather than mere changes being packaged as “reforms”) are beginning to have.

. . . every sole parent interviewed in Papakura in the past three weeks already feels under pressure to look for work. That pressure will increase from today for those with no children under 14 who will come under “intensive case management” with a personal case manager to help them find work.

Papakura – which has the highest welfare dependency rate in Auckland – was already one of 24 Work and Income sites in a trial of intensive case management of 10,000 beneficiaries since last October. Work and Income says 3516 of them have already found work.  In the past year up to the end of May, Papakura’s benefit tally fell by 8 per cent.

The requirement to find a job is making people adjust their lifestyles and plans accordingly.  Without the pressure of expectations and demands from the welfare authorities, it is unlikely such changes will ever be made.  Consider the following example:

Sharon, a sole parent whose youngest son has just turned 14, has a 25-hours-a-week school-term job as a teacher aide but gets a benefit in the holidays and is being pressured to find fulltime work. She is reluctant to take on more hours on weekdays.  “My youngest is now a teenager. He’s at that impressionable age where he could go astray,” she says.  “But from July 15 if they say I’m not earning enough, my suggestion would be that I’ll find a job in the weekend. He would have to go to my niece’s place. It’s different in the weekend because there’s family that’s available, his dad sees him at the weekends.”

And another example:

Danielle Devcich, who has been on a benefit with her 6-year-old son since her relationship broke up in January, started a six-month computing course three weeks ago after Work and Income threatened to cut her benefit a second time for not attending a seminar. Enrolling in the course saved her benefit.  “It has been all right for me because I had always planned on not being on the benefit forever. It rushed me along a little bit, I suppose.”

Purposeful planning and adjustments and new arrangements–all critical steps to finding and staying in a job.  The demand, “you have to find a job” is having a powerful effect.  But there are lots of constructive supports as well to help people get out of the trench of unemployment, over the parapet and into work.

Mary Smith, who runs Papakura’s St Vincent de Paul foodbank, sees people redoubling efforts to find work. “The other day I had a lady in who was panicking because in July things are going to change and she’s trying to get a job,” she says.

Papakura Budget Service manager Denise Smith says staff at the local Work and Income office are “very proactive. The place is buzzing when you go in because they are running all these seminars. The changes have motivated a lot of people. They are learning to budget because that is something they have to do. We are seeing a lot of people becoming more independent.”

There are no silver bullets to this problem.  There is only change at the margins.  But the encouraging thing about this reform is  that the approach appears to be more comprehensive and integrated, so that the left hand really is pulling in the same direction as the right. 

Unemployment is a terrible curse.  We always were made to labour.  It is part of what constitutes human dignity.  We were made to work, for we are made in God’s image–and God is always working.  The way back to employment can be painful, requiring a great deal of application and effort.  But at its foundation must be a moral imperative that work is not optional.  It is a requirement.  When the authorities start to say it, and show that they mean it, and comprehensively demonstrate their intent, the impact is immediately palpable. 

  

Calvin’s Daily Devotional

Daily Devotional

July 17

Thine Is My Heart: Devotional Readings from the Writings of John Calvin

by John Calvin (compiled by John H. Kromminga)
Republished from the OPC Website

Bible Text:
If I have lifted up my hand against the fatherless, when I saw my help in the gate: Then let mine arm fall from my shoulder blade, and mine arm be broken from the bone. —Job 31:21, 22

Devotional:
Let us bear well in mind that if the poor pass before us, and we see their need, and keep our purses shut, so as not to help them, it is a sure sign that we are like wild beasts, and that there is not one spark of pity in us.

We ourselves shall some day feel the same lack of mercy when God sends us afflictions; and although we shall be miserable, no man will be moved by it, but men shall look on us with disdain, and we shall be pushed aside and left utterly destitute. For it is the measure and wages which God is accustomed to give to all who are hardhearted toward their neighbors; according as it is said, that he who is merciless shall have judgment without mercy.

God thinks it is not enough that we should merely abstain from evildoing and from hurting our neighbors, and from taking away other men’s substance and goods. It is true that it is already a kind of virtue if we can protest that we have clean hands, and are not given to thievery, deceit, and extortion.

But yet for all that let us not think that we are completely acquitted. For if God has given us means to help such as have need, and we do not do it, we are blameworthy. And why? Because we have taken away God’s goods and put them to another use than he intended.

God gives us his goods to the intent that we should relieve our poor brothers with them. Now if on the contrary we are so straightlaced that not a penny goes out of our purses, nor a morsel of bread from our tables, what shall become of us? Is this not defrauding them whom God has ordained to have part of our substance, and robbing God in the thing that he has put into our hands?

So let us learn to be more merciful. And although no man can give us a definite assignment, as if to say, “You should give so much,” yet let every man exert himself, and consider his own ability, knowing well that when we have done all that can do, yet we are not discharged. —Sermons

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John Calvin was the premier theologian of the Reformation, but also a pious and godly Christian pastor who endeavored throughout his life to point men and women to Christ. We are grateful to Reformation Heritage Books for permission to use John Calvin’s Thine Is My Heart as our daily devotional for 2013 on the OPC Web site. You can currently obtain a printed copy of that book from Reformation Heritage Books.

Progress

Fairness Ethic Has Its Good Points

The New Zealand government is starting to crack down on some beneficiaries who have their cake and want to eat it too.  The hapless left describes this as “beneficiary bashing”.  But the measures are showing up as well supported by the electorate.  This is because New Zealanders don’t like “unfairness”.  It’s a cultural value which has ill-served the nation of often, but at times it proves helpful. 

The first group being targeted by the government is student loan beneficiaries who refuse (or wilfully neglect) to repay their loans.  The worst offenders are those who have gone overseas for extended periods and have declined to repay their loans.  They have effectively skipped town.  The government announced recently that the worst offenders–the hardened recidivists–risk arrest when they return (even temporarily) to New Zealand.  This means they are effectively exiled from their home country. 

It is reported that this has prompted a flurry of activity on the part of some of the overseas negligent payers to start to make appropriate “arrangements” and commence repayments.  It is also reported that a majority of the electorate in New Zealand supports the move.

A hardline Government policy to recoup student loan debt by arresting serious defaulters at the border has proved popular in a Herald-DigiPoll survey.  The policy of arresting the most non-compliant borrowers was introduced in Budget 2013 as part of greater efforts to claw back money from overseas-based ex-students, who were responsible for most of the $500 million in default.

Asked whether they agreed with a Government proposal to arrest the worst defaulters on student loans at the border when they tried to re-enter the country, 56.8 per cent of respondents agreed and 39.6 per cent disagreed.  Tertiary Education Minister Steven Joyce said the poll was in line with expectations. He said the policy was designed to target borrowers who were repeatedly asked to repay their loans but refused to do so.

The second group being targeted is those with outstanding arrest warrants.  There are on average about 15,000 people with outstanding warrants.  About half of these are also social welfare beneficiaries.  The government is moving to reduce or cancel beneficiary payments to those folk.  Clear the warrant, or face reduced or cancelled financial handouts.  This from a government press release:

People who fail to clear outstanding arrest warrants could see their benefits stopped as the next stage of welfare reforms comes into effect this month.  “Taxpayers overwhelmingly say they don’t want to fund people to actively avoid the Police and this Government agrees,” says Social Development Minister Paula Bennett.  From July 15, beneficiaries with outstanding warrants will have their benefits stopped if they fail to come forward and clear their warrant within 38 days.  Those with children will have their benefit reduced by no more than half.

Once again the general public believes this is “fair”.  If people are going to accept welfare payments they need to be law-abiding, like the vast majority of everyone else in the country.

All good stuff.   

Means of Grace

Breaking Down Paganism

Tertullian on church charitable capacities at the beginning of the Third Century, AD.

“There is no buying or selling of any sort of things of God.  Though we have our treasure chest, it is not made up of purchase money, as of a religion that has its price.  On the month day, if he likes, each puts in a small donation; but only if it be his pleasure, and only if he is able; for there is no compulsion; all is voluntary.  These gifts are, as it were, piety’s deposit fund.  For they are not taken thence and spent on feasts, and drinking bouts, and eating houses [as was the case in pagan religious meetings and temples], but to support and bury poor people, to supply the wants of boys and girls of destitute means and parents, and of old persons confined now to the house; such, too, as have suffered shipwreck; and if there happen to be any in the mines, or banished to the islands, or shut up in prisons for nothing but their fidelity to the cause of God’s Church, they become the nurslings of their confession.”  [Tertullian, Apology, Chapter 39.  Cited in Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World’s Largest Religion (New York: Harper One, 2011), p. 113.]

Beneficiary Enlightenment

Good Things Coming Out of Bad

In New Zealand we have a perpetuating state beneficiary problem.  The “welfare state” commenced in the early 1930’s and has now grown to a gargantuan monster.  We have people that are preceded by three generations of lifetime welfare beneficiary dependence having never worked in paid employment all their lives.  This latest generation are continuing to walk in the footsteps of their fathers and mothers, living off the benefit. 

The government has introduced a “back-to-work” policy that requires welfare beneficiaries actively to look for work, make applications for jobs, proceed to interviews and so forth.  If they do not, they will face cuts in their benefits.  The reflexive response from the Left, which believes there is never any shortage of other people’s money, decries this as “beneficiary bashing”. 

We are sure that the new programme will have all the normal lacunae and weaknesses.
  Bureaucratic rules always do damage at the edges to some people with circumstances out of the ordinary.  We are also aware that beneficiaries will exercise great skill and inventiveness in gaming the system in their favour (such as getting mates to “advertise” pseudo-positions, just so that applications can be made, interviews “attended” and rejection letters or notices to be sent; meanwhile the beneficiary in question meets the criteria for full welfare funding.) 

But every so often we see some benefits accruing and some progress being made.  For a certain class of beneficiaries the requirement to look for a job and an official expectation that they will get one, coupled with the threat of having welfare payments cut has been sufficient to push them into paid employment.  Six months on they are enthusiastic about their jobs, glad to have broken free, bearing a new demeanour of self-respect, and vowing they never want to “go back”.  Work is usually civilising.  It is usually meaningful activity.  It can and should be liberating. It is a profoundly human activity.

The other day we came across a younger person whose attitude was quite startling.  She was overweight, tattooed and pierced.  She was probably a young mother, in her early twenties.  She was in some consternation because she had lost access to a car to get her to and from work.  She said, “I don’t want to be fired.  ‘They’ have said that if we do a good job, it may lead to other, more permanent work.”  She was working shifts at the Census Helpline, from 3pm to 11pm.  Her eagerness to succeed, to keep her job, and move on to the next one was palpable and contagious. 

We were bold enough to assure her that she was no doubt doing well, and that her service was really important. She then went on to tell us about the language and grief she had experienced from callers to the Helpline.  Despite this she clearly did not want to quit.

Her attitude would have made our parents proud–they who constantly lectured us about the importance of hard work, and who walked the talk every day of their lives.  Having lived and struggled through the Depression, work was a sacred privilege.

The upshot is that some good things can come out of government initiatives that are intrinsically flawed, provided the intent is ethical and the execution is as sensible and practical as possible. 

Beneficiary Bashing, or Not . . .

 Some Debates are Just Plain Tiresome

The furore over “beneficiary bashing” is making its seasonal reappearance.  We have grown somewhat bored with the whole thing.  Same old, same old.  Whenever a government moves to put terms and conditions around state payments to some the furore reappears.  It’s boring because there is absolutely no way to resolve the issue and move forward.

The reason for the issue’s intractability is state welfare benefits are universally regarded as a human right.  The type of right in question can only be regarded as a demand right–although most people use the term “right” crudely without that nuance.   A demand right functions as follows: I have a need (for food, clothing, heating, recreation, etc.) and my need constitutes a right to demand of others that my needs be met.  The enforcer of the demand is the State.

Virtually everyone in New Zealand believes that demand rights are intrinsic to justice itself.
  A just society is one which meets the “legitimate” need-demands of its citizens.  Endless debates revolve around the minutiae of the issue: namely, which demand rights are legitimate and which are not.  Is a free education in a government school a legitimate (demand) right such that every parent has a right to require others pay for their child’s education, enforceable through the state’s taxation mechanism?  Since 1870 New Zealand has answered affirmatively. 

Is free health care in a government hospital a legitimate (demand) right for every citizen enforceable through the taxation and redistribution system?  New Zealand has answered affirmatively since 1935.  Is it a legitimate demand right that everyone can stop working at a specified age and require others to support them financially–a demand also enforced through the tax system?  New Zealand believes so.  To almost every citizen in this country these things are beyond dispute and question. 

But the basis of these shared convictions is rarely, if ever discussed.  They are virtually asserted to be self-evident. 

The endless debates, then, are not about demand rights per se.  These are universally acknowledged.  The debates are between ideologues and the pragmatists.  The ideologues will not rest until demand rights have created a perfect egalitarian utopia where everyone has exactly the same life terms and conditions, actionable and enforceable through the taxation system.  For the ideologues, every human need constitutes an injustice which society is obligated to remove.  Every human desire constitutes in principle a demand and obligation upon society as a whole.  Every human need represents a demand right in principle. 

The pragmatists take the view that demand rights have to be restricted to the affordable.  The pragmatists would theoretically acknowledge demand rights but would argue that society can only do what it can afford to do.  That is, there are actual limits to how much demanding is enforceable and tolerable.  Too much demand destroys incentive. 

The incessant argument between ideologues and pragmatists is over whether justice must trump practicalities or whether practicalities must temper the application of justice.  There is no conclusion to this debate.  Hence its incessant, go-nowhere characteristic. 

For the Christian there is no such thing as a demand right.  Not only do demand rights enforceable through the tax system not exist in the Kingdom of God, they themselves represent nothing more than theft and envy.  One cannot successfully construct a doctrine of rights upon a foundation of lawbreaking.  In the Scriptures, the thief does not have a demand right to my property.  It matter not at all whether the thief would walk into my house and expropriate my assets, or whether he would get the state to enforce his demand.  Both constitute theft. 

By the same token Christians have an ethical obligation before God to be charitable to others in need.  The word charitable comes from the Greek, and it refers to the extending of grace or mercy.  Grace and mercy can never be compelled: to be grace and mercy they must be freely given.  Thus, the Christian commonwealth refuses to recognise demand rights, giving them no credence whatsoever.  But it champions grace, and mercy, and compassion to the needy: family to family, neighbour to neighbour, community to community–with no other compulsion than the convictions of heart and conscience.

The social welfare state is an attempt to replicate the Kingdom of God and the Christian commonwealth by another means: the means of law and compulsion.  Its fruits are bitterness, anger, resentment, and coldness of heart.  It’s also why we have tiresome harangues about beneficiary bashing and claims of injustice.  A pox on the entire house!     

It’s a Very, Very Hard Road–But Right

Dead Beat Men Hanging Around Like Flies

We have been very gratified at one particular note struck in political discourse over recent days by the Minister of Social Development, Paula Bennett.  She is on a mission (not yet achieved) to move people off beneficiary rolls into work.  The opposition has not denied the intent, but has argued that it will fail miserably because there are just not enough jobs “out there”.  It is inhuman, the opposition alleges, to move people off welfare on to work when there are no jobs to which one can go. 

As the debate progressed, qualifications crept into the opposition’s case.  It was not that jobs do not exist (any glance at a job-seeking website puts the immediate lie to that allegation) but that not enough “decent” jobs exist.  We all know that there are lots of low-skill, low-paying jobs around, but to move people out of welfare on to those jobs is demeaning to them.  They need honourable jobs, worthy jobs that are high paying and deemed socially desirable. 

Bennett’s retort has been right to the point.
  She says that she believes every job is honourable.  There is no such thing as a dishonourable job such as working at MacDonalds or cleaning toilets.  That is a fundamentally Christian position.  Every (biblically) lawful job, every lawful calling is holy, just, and good–it is honouring to God Himself.  We applaud Bennett for taking this position. 

The debate has revealed the underbelly of the welfarists.  Fundamentally they are elitists who think that the only really worthy human activities are ones which they would like to do or which they regard as worthy.  Anything less is demeaning and harmful to human beings. Better keep them on welfare benefits doing nothing in the meantime. What offensive rubbish.

Here is an exchange that illustrates the point, as recorded in Hansard:

Hone Harawira: When the Minister talks about young mums going out to look for jobs, does she think young mums should be allowed to go to the front of the queue of the 150,000 people who are already unemployed, or does she think that the young mums should be made to wait until the 150,000 get jobs first, and can she please tell us where the jobs are for the 150,000 who are already unemployed, so that young mums can then get in line for the next jobs?
Hon PAULA BENNETT: The member could look in his own patch, actually. I have a newspaper article here about the forestry industry that is saying they cannot get enough workers because of the drug taking that is going on, and some of those workers are not stepping up and do not actually want the jobs. I was in Kawakawa just a few weeks ago, when I heard about someone who had 19 jobs and could not fill them. Two young women had gone into a job in hospitality in his own patch. Within 3 days their boyfriends came along and told them they did not want to see them working, because they did not want to see them getting ahead of themselves. We are going to back those young women. We are going to back them into work and try to get them off benefits. That member may not think that they are worth it, but we do. (Hat Tip: KiwiBlog)

Right on.

But whether Bennett is succeeds or not is another question entirely.  We acknowledge  that as part of the government’s welfare reforms they are targeting young solo mums.  But caring for children and getting into work is a very, very difficult road–albeit, the right one.  It requires lots of support from family, relatives and friends to make sure that the children are well looked after.  Assuming that “daycare” will do the trick is naive.  The government needs to be giving another message out as well–exhorting extended families to stand up and help bear the load.  If the extended family is shot to pieces, go to Bible believing churches and ask for help in raising the kids. 

Moreover, Bennett needs to be saying something in addition to young (and older) solo mothers: your road ahead is likely to be very, very hard.  It is going to get worse before it gets better.  But it is the right thing to do–right for you, right for your children, provided you do it in the right way.  You need to do this not because it is easy, but because it is right.  You will have at least two jobs: raising your children and earning an income.  Both are equally important.  When you come home at the end of the day exhausted from work, your other job begins.  Don’t neglect it.  Don’t neglect your children–make sure you are a real mother for them.  You will end up working harder than you ever have in your life.  It’s not easy, but it’s right. 

But Bennett needs to add that solo-mums have a third vital responsibility: your children will need honourable men in their lives. It’s vitally important. But don’t let any man near you and your children’s home who does not have a steady job, who is ever drunk, or who ever takes drugs, or who parties.  That needs to be said loudly and publicly.  Don’t let men near you or your house until they prove themselves completely worthy, and offer to marry you and swear to be faithful to you forever in a marriage covenant before you have sex.  Never use sex as a way to entice men: you will reap bitter, bitter consequences if you do. 

The reality is that when a working solo-mum starts to get ahead she will attract dead-beat males like dirty flies. 

Deceptive, Misleading and Depraved

National Cognitive Dissonance

Ah, the hypocrisy of it all.  Festooned on page three of  the NZ Herald this morning is the latest beneficiary cause celebre  being played up by left wing politicians.  A mother of two, on the Domestic Purposes Benefit, is threatening to become a prostitute so she can afford tertiary training.  The welfare payment benefit she receives is not enough to cover the extra costs of tuition.  The headline screams: “Mum: Prostitution to Pay for Studies.”

Why, we ask, is this up front and centre in the news?  Why would two left wing politicians take this amoral woman up as a cause celebre for beneficiaries, parading her before the media, flying her to Wellington to parade her at press conferences?  It smacks of high-order hypocrisy.
  About six years ago the government of New Zealand declared, in its benighted wisdom, that prostitution was a perfectly moral profession, deserving all kinds of state licensing and protection.  Except that it is not–and the actions of both the NZ Herald in highlighting the case and the leftie politicians, Labour MP Jacinda Ardern and Green MP Jan Logie betray that prostitution is actually both degraded and evil and is not an acceptable occupation and they know it. And they know that the rest of New Zealand knows it as well. 

Would the pollies be up in arms, and the NZ Herald hyper-ventilating if the woman in question was going to take a part-time job at McDonalds to help pay her tuition costs?  Of course not.  It is prostitution which makes this an opportunity for political theatre and selling newspapers to proclaim how niggardly our Domestic Purposes Benefit is.  Why?  Because most people recoil from prostitution in disgust.  Rightfully so.  How could we allow this poor woman be “forced” into such desperate degradation.

We are thankful that the national disgust with prostitution is the case.  However, what Ardern and Logie and the NZ Herald unwittingly demonstrate is that the law “normalising” prostitution as a legitimate and ethical calling is itself unjust, unethical, and evil.  Likewise, the pollies who voted for it (under the guise of care and protection of prostitutes of course) did an evil thing, regardless of their intentions and motives.

The law of God, we are told in Holy Writ, is inscribed upon every human heart.  You have to work really hard to erase its witness to our sense of right and wrong.  It is one of the things that keeps even an amoral and unethical society functioning, holding back that terrible integration into the void.  Most people abhor prostitution, regardless of what the law says.  When a society or culture becomes so pervasively evil that it works really hard to erase the testimony of God’s Law to the conscience, things begin to fly apart.  Such a progressive degeneracy usually takes three or four generations.  We are well on the way.

In the meantime, we find ironical encouragement in the protestations of Mesdames Ardern and Logie and the NZ Herald over the would-be prostitute.  It tells us something unexpected about NZ society, for which we are thankful.  It also tells us that Adern and Logie are up to their ears in self-serving, self-righteous hypocrisy and breathtaking chutzpah.  But then again no surprises there.

Selling Our Souls Down the River

State Control of Stools and Urine

The electronic communication zone is running hot over some inane comments by some “researchers in public health”.  These illuminati were interviewed on national radio and had the temerity to utter the following inanity:

Obesity, she said, was “not a problem with individual choice and self-discipline, which we’ve proved successfully doesn’t work”.  Instead it’s the fault of “big institutions and the market”.

Most of the criticism rightly points out that for 99 percent of the obese population their condition is caused by three things–what they ingest, how much, and what is not done to burn the calories off.  It is a completely self-inflicted condition.  Quite right.
  Naturally, the “researchers in public health”  have alternative predictable solutions: more rules, regulations, restriction, and government controls over what you eat.  In the end, the government will have to ration our food and ban lots of nasty things.  We will end up clinging to Mother’s skirts in a perpetual, malingering second childhood. 

Naturally enough this sort of nannying (incidentally, both researchers are females) is offensive.  At this point in history most New Zealanders resent a government telling them how to act, what to think, and above all, what to eat.  Sadly almost no-one amongst the objectors is prepared to acknowledge that the fight was lost almost eighty years ago. 

When our forebears, in their myopic wisdom, decided that government had a duty to provide state funded health-care, and voted for politicians who would give them their lusts,  it was all over, rover.  For, as a perceptive sage pointed out, if you cede to government the duty and responsibility to take care of your health, you have implicitly given over total control of  your physical being.  A government that is responsible for your healthcare, is responsible for your health, period; such a government will inevitably extend its reach to control what you eat and what is allowed to come out the rear end–and how often. 

It will all be done under the cloak of cost containment, of course.  We have got to control what people eat, because if we don’t the rampant costs of treating the obesity epidemic will squash us all flat.  It’s a matter of survival of our species as we know it.  Toss in a dose of guilt and another generous helping of pious pity and who can resist–with principled consistency, that is?

Most of those railing against the two nannies who “research” public health do so with a fair dose of inconsistent hypocrisy.  We do not doubt that these objectors would at the same time argue for the reasonableness of a publicly funded health system per se.  Getting rid of the entire nannying edifice would be as offensive to them as the stupid observations of our elite health researchers.

We repeat: if you are going to look to government to fund your doctors’ visits, health procedures, subsidize your medicine, and provide you with hospitals you have already, in principle, ceded to the state control over your body.  Such a Leviathan will eventually move to control the food you ingest, the air that you breathe, the hours you must sleep, the length and temperature of your showers, and the “quality” of your stools and urine.

Whilst we remain gratified that there are still people in this country who will stand up to intrusive government controls, another part of us want to say, “Stop your whining.  You sold your souls to the Devil a long, long time ago.  Now Old Nick has come to collect.”   

UK Labour Critiques Welfare

Intriguing Developments

When conservative political parties turn mushy and move to the centre to make themselves more electable, left wing parties sometimes force themselves to face up to reality.  Ironically this can mean they adopt traditionally right wing ideas.

Something like this may be happening in the UK right now.  Labour, out-mushed by the Conservative-Liberal coalition, is starting to rethink social welfare.  The idea that the state should fund life-style benefit dependency in perpetuity is coming under Labour critique.  Leading the charge is the shadow work and pensions secretary, Liam Byrne.  The Guardian reckons that Byrne is leading a significant redrawing of Labour’s position on welfare.

Three things are in Byrne’s sights:

the spiralling housing benefit budget, benefits for long-term unemployment, and the lack of proper incentives to reward responsible long-term savers as three key flaws in the current welfare state.

He is looking at term limits for unemployment benefits.   He wants to return to the original welfare state concept which was help for those temporarily out of work.

How much traction it will have within UK Labour is not clear.  Probably not much.  Attempting to return to the original principles of welfare is not going to cut it.  Those principles went the way of the dodo decades ago.  Now, welfarism is underpinned by an ideology of human rights.  If the UK were to have a thorough debate over that fatally flawed idea we would be more positive about the prospects of change. 

But, it’s a start.  We shall see. Eventually the UK welfare state will run out of other people’s money.  Then a more serious conversation will begin.  Probably not in our lifetime.

>The Coming Race

>An Offensive Mirror

We are simple souls, and so find ourselves “conflicted” (to use pop psych jargon) over the public vituperate musings about one Macsyna King.  How we love a mob.  All heat and no light.  A dirty bomb.

Macsyna is coming out of the closet via a book, written by Ian Wishart.  The mob has called for the book to be banned, via boycott, successfully pressuring booksellers not to carry it.  She was the mother of murdered (or manslaughtered) infant twins, Chris and Cru Kahui.  The court acquitted her current boyfriend (and father of the twins) of responsibility for their deaths.  No-one else has been charged.  The defence argued that Macsyna was their killer.
If the court evidence is to be believed, King has been both wretched and depraved.

>Let’s Not Play that Game

>Hand Wringing Charades

Social “Development” Minister, Paula Bennett has made an impassioned appeal for our help.  Writing an op-ed piece in the Sunday Star Times, entitled “Help Me Save Our Kids”, she asks for ideas on how to stop our notorious national trait of child abuse. 

She is clearly at the end of her tether.  We are familiar with the syndrome.  Well-meaning, enthusiastic Minister gets appointed to the Social “Development” portfolio.  Promises to stamp out child abuse.  Acknowledges that insufficient progress has been made by dilatory previous administration.  Experiences uplift in public support, since everyone is both angry and guilty at the way children are abused and killed in New Zealand.  Calls for Ministry to come up with creative new solutions to the problem.  New measures put in place.  Increased budgets, taxpayer’s funds allocated.  Everyone experiences a “feel-good” fillip.  Child abuse continues unabated.  Minister becomes frustrated and annoyed.
In desperation, goes to the public and asks for more ideas.  Throws out a few radical ideas–acknowledges that they would require much more intrusive state intervention in peoples’ lives–but challenges everyone to make the trade off. 

Let’s not pussyfoot around here – we know which babies are most at risk, we know which adults are most likely to put them at risk. Often those adults are on Work and Income’s books. This isn’t a race issue or a class issue, it’s just the reality we live in.

So, how about this for a radical idea – how about we take over the money management for at-risk teen parents and make sure their money’s spent on their children, paying the rent and power bills?

How about we make it an obligation of receiving the benefit that they take their children for Wellchild checks? How about we make every effort to support those parents and make sure those babies are well cared for? Should we track every baby from birth? Should there be mandatory reporting of child abuse?

Or is that too much state intervention for your liking? You tell me. Isn’t it time we started debating how we collectively protect our children?

Well, actually the whole thing is a bit deceptive and misleading.  Minister Bennett wants to debate only within a certain narrow frame of reference.  When the state faces intractable social problems the only options allowed on the table for debate and discussion are how much more state intervention and what forms it ought to take. 

Since that is the case, we respectfully decline to engage.  We know what the outcome will be from the get-go.  The inevitable “solutions” will be more public money to protect “our” children with new twists to old government programmes, followed by continuing comprehensive failure.  Whereupon the whole charade will be repeated in another couple of years.  There is no point or nor can there be a positive outcome to such a biased, one-eyed national discussion. 

They say that necessity or desperation is the mother of invention.  Clearly, the Minister is not yet desperate because the only inventions she will have any regard for are those which tweak the already failed policy directions of the past forty years.  Neither she, nor the country we suspect, is ready for a real debate where nothing is off the table. 

So, let’s just conclude by asking a few questions and leave it at that:

1. Why the presumption to speak of “our” children?  Why would you persist in describing the children of abusive parents “our” children?  Is the intent to make us all responsible for those children in some way, shape, or form?  We would appreciate you not using such language until you make a successful case for it–not an emotive outburst, but a well argued legal, constitutional, ideological, principled case. 

2. Would you please explain why, on the one hand, your government (along with predecessor administrations) has relentlessly driven marriage and the nuclear family into virtual non-existence in law and policy, championing civil unions, no-fault divorce, blended “families”, whanau first ideology, and recognition of homosexuality as a human right–and subsidising and incentivizing all these permutations of living arrangements with copious dollops of the public’s money–whilst, on the other, professing outrage and frustration when random live-in adults fail to regard random appendage-children living in the same house as “their” children?

3. Do you believe that the state is to function as the uber-parent in our society?

4. Would you regard a proposal to re-introduce the death penalty for adults who abuse and kill children legitimate for discussion or debate–or would this be a solution which is off the table? 

5.  Do you think there might be a connection–a linkage–between a society which practises abortion on demand and high rates of child abuse?  Even the teeniest, longest-bow connection?  If not, would you please explain very clearly why your government believes it is perfectly lawful, moral, good, and righteous to kill an infant in his mother’s womb, but somehow terribly wrong and evil to do the same thing one second after the baby has emerged from that same womb.  If society cannot champion the protection and sanctity of a child in the womb, how can it credibly do so after birth?  If an adult’s “rights” trump the rights and liberties of the child in the womb, how come they cease to do so after birth?  No doubt those who abuse children and kill them believe those children are an impediment to their adult rights to a certain quality of life.  A state which recognises a woman’s right to kill her unborn child in defence of her right to a certain quality of life can hardly remove that right in any credible or believable sense once the child is born. 

Can any government of the day be regarded as credible when it expresses moral outrage over a dozen or so murdered children per year in this country, when that same government sanctions and facilitates the murder of twenty-thousand children annually in this country on the grounds that the yet-to-be-born child’s life can legitimately be sacrificed on the alter of the adult mother’s right to a self-determined quality of life? 

No Minister, we will not play your game.  At least not until you have the gumption and the courage to include these issues as part of the public debate.  In the meantime, we don’t find your game of charades edifying at all. 

>Cry the Beloved Country

>A Roman Circus on a Grand Scale

Left-wing media in both the UK and the US are on the verge of starting to look into the future of the West and are seeing Europe. Almost overnight the grand soft-despotic experiment of Europe, formerly so envied by the chattering progressive elites in both the UK and the US, seems tarnished and vulnerable. Will the euro survive? Will Europe survive? These are now open questions–and for the moment, the balance seems to weigh upon the negative.

We are not so sure about the immediate. But we are certain that if Europe does not repent and return to Christ and to Europe’s Christian foundations, what we are witnessing at present will be a mere harbinger of what is to come–whether the fall and dismemberment and repentance of Europe be one year or fifteen years or fifty years hence. And a continental-wide return to Christ will not occur without a thorough repudiation of the soft-despotic welfare state and the terrible idolatry of the humanist Enlightenment upon which it has been built. The choices are few and they are increasingly stark.

Consider the following analysis in the pro-welfarist, soft-despotic championing New York Times.

Across Western Europe, the lifestyle superpower, the assumptions and gains of a lifetime are suddenly in doubt. The deficit crisis that threatens the euro has also undermined the sustainability of the European standard of social welfare, built by left-leaning governments since the end of World War II. Europeans have boasted about their social model, with its generous vacations and early retirements, its national health care systems and extensive welfare benefits, contrasting it with the comparative harshness of American capitalism.

Europeans have benefited from low military spending, protected by NATO and the American nuclear umbrella. They have also translated higher taxes into a cradle-to-grave safety net. “The Europe that protects” is a slogan of the European Union.

But all over Europe governments with big budgets, falling tax revenues and aging populations are experiencing rising deficits, with more bad news ahead. With low growth, low birthrates and longer life expectancies, Europe can no longer afford its comfortable lifestyle, at least not without a period of austerity and significant changes. The countries are trying to reassure investors by cutting salaries, raising legal retirement ages, increasing work hours and reducing health benefits and pensions.

For decades, European governments have robbed Peter to pay Paul. Now, Peter has disappeared, and no-one is left to keep paying Paul. For a while, this was papered over by the European Community which basically put off the day of reckoning for a brief time. Richer, more frugal northern countries–well, actually, Germany–poured billions of euros into imprudent, partying Club-Med profligate countries–all for the sake of the European ideal. Now every nation, Germany included, looks like it is going down the tubes. Europe has become too boated not to fail.

But, hoping against hope, the elite Eurocrats cling on to the idea that Europe can be rescued. All it will take, apparently, is a bit of austerity, a mere trimming of the sails of the grand European ship of state. But welfarism must remain in place. Must. Europe cannot survive without welfarism.  Consider these profoundly revealing words from Joschka Fischer:

More broadly, many across Europe say the Continent will have to adapt to fiscal and demographic change, because social peace depends on it. “Europe won’t work without that,” said Joschka Fischer, the former German foreign minister, referring to the state’s protective role. “In Europe we have nationalism and racism in a politicized manner, and those parties would have exploited grievances if not for our welfare state,” he said. “It ’s a matter of national security, of our democracy.”

Read those words again. The failing Roman Empire clung to power through the artifice of the Emperor distributing bread to the mobs in Rome, so they would not riot. Only by paying them off, according to Fischer, has Europe been able to hold back the nationalist and racist mobs that would otherwise be baying for blood. Without welfarism, there would be no social peace.

In the end, Rome could not sustain itself. It ran out of provinces to steal from and wealth to pillage and nations to conquer in order to feed its welfare habit. Europe will eventually go the same way–only more quickly, and hopefully with less bloodshed–because soft-despotism is, well, soft. It is a paper tiger. How will those nationalists and racists react when they have to ante up and start paying their own way? What will the unionists do? We think we know.  As someone said, “We see our future, and it is a riot.”

France will ultimately have to follow Sweden and Germany in raising the pension age, Fischer argues. “This will have to be harmonized, Europeanized, or it won’t work. You can’t have a pension at 67 here and 55 in Greece,” Mr. Fischer said. The problems are even more acute in the “new democracies” of the euro zone (Greece, Portugal and Spain) that embraced European democratic ideals and that Europe embraced for political reasons in the postwar era, perhaps before their economies were ready. They have built lavish state systems on the back of the euro, but now must change.”

Lavish state systems, funded by Germans. It must change if Europe is to survive–but we know it will likely not. The PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain) entered the Euro-zone for what they could extract from it, not because of being committed to some great idealistic non-national empire. If they are made to stop extracting, the domestic outstretched hands are likely to prove too demanding. Leaving the euro and defaulting is far more likely. And we know what happens when the French entitled classes are thwarted. Germans lecturing Frenchmen about austerity will likely go down like a cup of cold vomit.

The only unknown is how long Germans will tolerate being pillaged, before they, too, riot. The current crop of politicians believe that Europe is more important to the German people than Germany is. They have willed themselves blind. Kate Connolly, writing from Berlin, describes the building volcano of frustration in Germany over being

a country that for years, to make up for its warmongering past, shouldered the burdens of the European project. For decades it funded the largest share of Europe’s bulging budgets and grand schemes, putting its own interests second. But now it is tired, indebted and running out of cash, and wants other members to show that they are as dedicated to the project before it continues to allow them access to its ATM.

And every thoughtful American will be looking at what is unfolding now in Europe and will be seeing a pre-release trailer of the future of their own nation. Ditto for every thoughtful Australian and New Zealander.

On the other hand, never underestimate the power of idolatry to enslave the human heart.  As Fischer reveals above, Europe is enslaved to soft-despotism as long as it hands out bread at the circus.  We reckon German voters will capitulate and go along because their government long ago became their god.  And their government, in its turn, worships the gods of Europe and the euro–the universal new Man.  

Far more likely, then, is the long slow lingering decline of all failed socialist regimes.  Within a generation we predict that there will be bread lines and empty shop shelves throughout Europe.  The false religion of Europe has led its people to look to the state and intone, “Give us this day our daily bread.”  The Living God most often destroys such terrible idolatries by making devotees experience the vacuity of their faith.

Because the people of Europe have turned away from the Lord to whom they were covenanted in holy troth, because long ago they stopped looking to Him for their sustenance, instead placing their faith in human government, making government their god, it will likely end up that they will be made to hunger greatly–literally.

>Know Thyself

>Mirror, Mirror on the Wall

Theodore Dalrymple
(First published in CityJournal, 7th May, 2010)

Rather than pointing fingers, Greek citizens should look in the mirror.

In normal circumstances, people in Britain would have viewed the riots in Athens with a certain disdainful amusement: those excitable Mediterraneans at it again! What else can you expect, really? But thanks to Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Britain is now the Greece of the North Sea; he has turned the healthiest public finances in Europe into the sickest, with a budget deficit as large as Greece’s (and soon to be much larger) and a public debt that will before long exceed 100 percent of GDP. So when we look at what is happening in Athens, we have the eerie sensation that this might be London a few weeks or months hence. We have seen our future, and it riots.

In fact, Greece is only a particularly acute or virulent case of the sickness that afflicts much of the Western world. Greece’s overall debt is higher, no doubt, and its deficit larger, than those of other countries, but the difference is one of degree, not of kind. Like most of the rest of us, the Greeks have been living beyond their means.

When the crowd tried to storm the Greek parliament, shouting, “Thieves! Thieves!,” its anger was misdirected. It was a classic case of what Freudians call projection: the attribution to others of one’s own faults. It is true that the Greek politicians are much to blame for the current situation, and no doubt many of them are thieves; but their real crime was not stealing, but offering a substantial proportion of the Greek population a standard of living that was economically unjustified, maintained for a time by borrowing, and in the long run unsustainable, in return for votes. The crime of that substantial proportion of the Greek population was to accept the bribe that the politicians offered; they were only too prepared to live well at someone else’s expense. The thieves were not principally the politicians, but the demonstrators.

Such popular dishonesty is by no means confined to Greece. In varying degrees, most countries in the West have displayed it, Britain above all. It is perhaps an inherent problem wherever the universal franchise is unaccompanied by widespread virtues such as honesty, self-control, providence, prudence, and self-respect. Greece is therefore a cradle not only of democracy, but of democratic corruption.

The Greek demonstrators did not understand, or did not want to understand, that if there were justice in the world, many people, including themselves, would be worse rather than better off, and that a reduction in their salaries and perquisites was not only economically necessary but just. They had never really earned their wages in the first place; politicians borrowed the money and then dispensed largesse, like monarchs throwing coins to the multitudes.

It is an obvious but often forgotten lesson of economics: what cannot continue will not continue.