Quickies: An Alternate Interpretation

     This poignant Ben Stein article about fatherlessness is worth your time to read and digest in its entirety. However, I have a specific snippet in mind that struck me with unusual force:

     What happened? Blacks used to live lives not that different from whites in terms of law and order and family and then it all fell apart starting in the early sixties.

     Was it drugs? Maybe. Drugs are poison to morals. Maybe it was the welfare system that paid women to be pregnant and unmarried. In many states in America, a single mother with three children and no husband gets paid as much in welfare as a starting computer programmer or teacher. You usually get what you pay for. [Emphasis added by FWP]

     In its most common applications, “You get what you pay for” is an observation that quality often correlates extremely strongly with price: that the item that costs twice as much will provide so much more satisfaction and durability than its cheaper competitor that over time it will prove to be the better bargain. Going for the lowest price, apart from all other considerations, often constitutes a self-wounding error.

     That’s not what Stein is saying in the above. Rather, he’s reminding us that when a price is offered for some good, service, or behavior, that item, regardless of its intrinsic properties, becomes marketable – saleable. Damon Knight’s satirical 1963 short story “The Big Pat Boom” provides a humorous lesson about that effect.

     Since 1935, the United States has paid women to have illegitimate children. That wasn’t the intent of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), but it was the effect. Indeed, the inducement was so strong that it shattered a great many existing families, driving the father out of the home in the quest for increased AFDC payments.

     Children, especially boys, who grow up in an environment devoid of a father are especially prone to violent and otherwise antisocial behavior. Today, more than 70% of black children grow up in such homes. Given the relativistic non-standards for behavior that prevail, is it any wonder that young black men are the perpetrators of so much violent crime?

     However, I must note that roughly 30% of white children grow up fatherless, as well. That figure produces roughly twice as many fatherless white children as fatherless black children, allowing for differences in fertility rates. However, public statistics don’t yet show a comparable increase in violent crimes perpetrated by young white men. So there’s probably more going on here than the economic incentives can account for.

Quickies: Showing Rather Than Telling The Baleful Influence Of Welfare

     Tyler Durden has produced an extremely instructive article that depicts, with the aid of some simple graphics, the work-punishing effect of American welfarism. The article is so good that it defies excerpting. Please read it all.

     Only one approach to welfare has managed to avoid the “welfare cliff” dramatized in the article: what social scientists call “indoor relief” and was exemplified by the Victorian Era “workhouse.” In such system, the beneficiary receives no cash; rather, his physical sustenance is maintained and he is put to monotonous work of little value. He’s protected from starvation or death by exposure, but he’s also given a powerful incentive to find other work. If he has children, they too reside in the workhouse. They’re compelled to attend school or work at equally monotonous, unfulfilling chores eight to ten hours per day, such that they cannot run riot through the community.

     While it is true that such a system can be abused, just as our prisons can be, it is the only way to sustain a dependent that averts the “welfare cliff.” Its superiority to “outdoor relief” – the cash-handout variety of welfare system currently in force in the U.S. and all other Western countries – has been well documented. But our “bleeding hearts” want none of it...mainly because it doesn’t provide government jobs for them and their children.

     Storytellers learn early to “Show, Don’t Tell!” It’s the key to a really involving piece of fiction. Durden has applied the maxim to welfare, and in doing so has dramatized its fatal fault better than any muckraker or yellow journalist.

Quickies: A Multicausal Malady

     This article has drawn considerable interest from the uncritical fans of armed, uniformed bureaucrats police:

     A sharp spike in the murder rates of Democrat-controlled cities across America is one of the consequences of the increased tension between police and black Americans; tension that has been stirred up by both the liberal media and by Democrat-aligned radical political activist group Black Lives Matter.

     As Baltimore announced it is embedding federal agents with its homicide unit after one of the highest murder rates in years, the Washington Post took note of the sharp increases in other cities like New Orleans and Atlanta:

     Some blame the increase in violence on the “Ferguson Effect” — officers pulling back on tough enforcement because of the intense focus on police-involved shootings like the one that killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., last August.

     In neighborhoods where police have long been viewed with suspicion, people use their cellphones like all-seeing periscopes every time police officers get out of their cars. Officers and the unions that represent them describe a combination of surveillance and skepticism, with body cameras, ACLU recording apps and jeering wherever they go.

     But while the correlation between anti-police activism and increasing murder rates is strong, note that all those Democrat-run cities also have:

• Large black and Hispanic populations;
• Large numbers of welfare dependents;
• Extremely restrictive gun-control ordinances.

     ...which leads me to wonder whether a city that experienced significant anti-police activism but which is overwhelmingly white, or which knows little or no welfarism, or had simultaneously reduced restrictions on the public bearing of arms, would suffer a similar rash of homicides.

     I know, I know: Where there are Democrats in power, there will be large “minority” communities, significant welfare dependence, and rigid anti-gun laws. All the same, it makes you think: Are the Democrats secretly in favor of high murder rates?

     Try it out on your left-leaning friends.

Quickies: A Not-Unintended Consequence

     Charles Hill brings some, ah, meat for the grill:

This turned up over at Interested-Participant, along with the note that “it seems to tell a story:”

... And it turns out that the actual purchaser, in fact, was not living large — not very large, anyway — at our expense; he was buying this stuff with EBT and then turning it over for cash, to the tune of 50 cents on the dollar. This isn’t what you’d call the highest use of taxpayer dollars, but anyone who is shocked — shocked! — to see this sort of thing going on probably isn’t paying attention: the system that can’t be gamed very likely can’t even be built, and I figure there’s nothing to be gained by paying some Federal agent to peer into people’s grocery carts.

     Is there anyone among our Gentle Readers who honestly thinks the sort of thing Charles describes above is an unintended consequence?

     The people who designed the existing welfare bonanza are not stupid. They were able to foresee such machinations. to them, it probably constitutes a stroke in the cause of “social justice:” just one more way of transferring income from those eeeeevil working types to the oh-so-virtuous “poor.”

     But don’t you dare speak or write in favor of eliminating government welfare or scaling it back. For that sin, the Left will call you “everything but white.” Remember: You’re not allowed to have your own opinions. Resolving to keep them to yourself is no guarantee they won’t somehow be winkled out of you.

"Behind The Camera:" Conceptions Of Freedom

I will never cease to be amazed at the power of memory: how it can rise up from nowhere, intrude irresistibly into one's thoughts, and assert itself against all attempts to deflect it.

Some years ago, it was my pleasure to encounter, at Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope writers' forum, a writer named Kerrigan Philip Coles. (His novels appear under the nom de plume "Philip Kerrigan.") We lavished a bit of praise upon one another's short stories; it was what we were both concentrating on at the time. One of his stories surged to mind this morning as I was preparing for the daily ordeal of my commute to work.

Kerrigan's story concerned a young woman whose father has abused and exploited her sexually, not merely for his own pleasure but as a source of profit, in pornographic films. She breaks away from him as an adult, but in the wake of his later, disabling stroke, is called upon to take him under her care. The story concludes in a horrifically brilliant fashion: she uses her helpless father as the object of abuse in a porn film that she composes and directs.

The conclusion is unforgettable: the protagonist luxuriates in being "behind the camera" and "in control of her own life" at long last.

Let that sink in for just a moment.

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One of the recently reported trends I find most disturbing is the sharp diminution of interest among teenaged Americans in acquiring drivers' licenses and cars. I made mention of this to a colleague just yesterday; he replied that his sixteen-year-old son evinced the same disinclination -- that it took paternal pressure to get him behind the wheel for a driving lesson. It's the sort of contrast with the attitudes of young Americans in my age bracket that illuminates what's being done to us, slice by thin slice, by the encroachments of the Omnipotent State.

As a young adult, what being able and equipped to drive meant to me was freedom: a significant increase in my ability to control my own affairs. Indeed, to be unable or unequipped to drive struck me as pitiable, a state well below that which was proper to an American. It didn't occur to me until the rising of the leftist political wave against the personal automobile, some time in the Seventies, how important the auto is as an emblem of personal independence.

There are a few ironies buried in there, of course. Driving isn't a right but a government-licensed privilege. Car ownership is itself regulated by a registration regime that demands periodic (and often quite expensive) renewal. One's car will occasionally fail to cooperate with one's desire to be on the move, requiring expensive propitiation before it will comply. And of course, most of us can only drive where and how the government's roads will allow it.

All the same: To a teen of the Sixties, the first jalopy and the driver's license that allowed him to operate it constituted a giant step toward freedom, the ideal of these United States for which a bloody revolution was fought. That teens and young adults of this age should display such disinterest in acquiring independent mobility speaks volumes about the transformation in the priorities of the young, over the years since my own rite of automotive passage.

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It often seems as if the original American conception of freedom -- the absence of coercion or constraint from all matters that don't involve aggression or fraud -- has given way to a welfarist conception, in which what the individual is supposed to prize most highly is "freedom from want:" i.e., the absence of significant unsatisfied desires for material things. Note that "freedom from want" was one of Franklin D. Roosevelt's quartet, by which he hoped to deflect the attention of those who cried out against his New Deal interventions. The Great Depression had created enough of a constituency for government largesse to gain FDR's "Four Freedoms" gambit a respect it has never deserved.

Clarence Carson, in his masterpiece The American Tradition, made plain just how thoroughly the original conception of freedom has been displaced by the Marxist conception of freedom as "an absence of tension or conflict." That didn't happen all by itself; it was pressed upon us by the Progressive political movement, which began with Jeremy Bentham and Edward Bellamy and continues, unchanged in its premises, to this day. That Marx's fatuous economic notions would give rise to "superabundance" of material goods and an eventual "withering away of the State" has never made good on its promises, no matter where or how it's been tried. The Progressives dangled a shiny bauble before the American people...and a heartbreaking number of them released their grip on their freedom to grab for it.

Hearken to Dr. Carson's peroration:

Effective disagreement means not doing what one does not want to do as well as saying what he wants to say. What is from one angle the welfare state is from another the compulsory state. Let me submit a bill of particulars. Children are forced to go to school. Americans are forced to pay taxes to support foreign aid, forced to support the Peace Corps, forced to make loans to the United Nations, forced to contribute to the building of hospitals, forced to serve in the armed forces. Employers are forced to submit to arbitration with labor leaders. Laborers are forced to accept the majority decision. Employers are forced to pay minimum wages, or go out of business. But it is not even certain that they will be permitted by the courts to go out of business. Railroads are forced to charge established rates and to continue services which may have become uneconomical. Many Americans are forced to pay Social Security. Farmers are forced to operate according to the restrictions voted by a majority of those involved. The list could be extended, but surely the point has been made.

As bad as that is, there's more and worse.

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Part of the Progressive agenda was to conflate freedom with power, in such a fashion as to efface all distinctions between the original conception of freedom as decision-making free from coercion or constraint and the power to dictate the course of events. John Dewey, perhaps the most potent Progressive evangelist of the Twentieth Century, blatantly wrote that liberty -- political freedom -- is "power, effective power to do specific things:"

"Liberty is not just an idea, an abstract principle. It is power, effective power to do specific things. There is no such thing as liberty in general; liberty, so to speak, at large."

Dewey thus discards freedom of choice in favor of control over outcomes. In his conception, you are not free unless you have or can get what you want: a perfect complement to the Marxian and Rooseveltian formulations. As the premier proponent of government-controlled education, he promulgated this conception to tens of thousands of acolytes: persons who would go on to become teachers themselves.

Those currents have swelled into a fearsome tide. That tide has borne up the specious causes of all the gimme-groups in the country. It has injected the Democrat Party with the greater part of the 1928 Socialist Party platform. It has allowed "constitutional lawyer" Barack Hussein Obama to deride the Constitution as insufficient because it effectuates only "negative liberties," and makes no provision for "positive" ones. It's at the heart of United States Senator Elizabeth Warren's supposedly non-presidential campaign for every leftist wish in their very large wish book.

The original conception of freedom might not be wholly lost, but it is gravely imperiled. Remember the woman who supported Obama because "he gonna pay my mortgage." Remember the one who preened about her "Obama phone." And remember the two, on their way to get some "Obama money," who when asked where Obama would get it, shrugged and said "From his stash."

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We return to Kerrigan's story at last. His protagonist, reaved of freedom by her predatory father, sought -- and believed she attained -- "freedom" by reversing their roles: putting him under her control and subjecting him to the very vilenesses he had inflicted on her. That is the nadir of thought, the conflation of untrammeled dictatorial power, the power of life and death and all that lies between them, with personal independence from another's control. That Dad might have deserved no better is utterly irrelevant. The tragedy occurs in the mind of the daughter. By adopting power and seeing it as freedom, she attains revenge but loses all hope of any freedom to come. That very same disease of the mind is steadily becoming epidemic in these United States.

Kerrigan, wherever you are, I hope you're well and happy.

Programs, Motivations, And Popular Acceptance

    "Of all the musts and must-nots of warfare, this one is paramount: you must conceal your motives. Unless he is insignificant in comparison to you, once your opponent knows your motives, he'll be able to defeat you. He'll probably even have a choice of ways to do it.
    "You must move heaven and earth, if necessary, to discover your opponent's motives. His tactics will be determined by them. If his motives change, his tactics will follow. There lies your opportunity, if you can get him to adopt tactics unsuitable to the conflict. Of course, he could try to do the same to you."
    "What's the countermeasure?"
    "Constancy. Refusal to let yourself be diverted. Of course, that can be a trap, too. Motive is partly determined by objectives. If your adversary's situation changes but his objectives remain the same, he could find himself committed to paying an exorbitant price for something that's become worthless."
    "And that's the time to stop playing with his head?"
    His grin was ice-cold. "You have a gift."

[From On Broken Wings]

The piece immediately below emphasizes the power of gradualism to achieve the sort of absolute tyranny to which the Communists and Nazis aspired but which they were unable to cement in place. The parable of "The Wild Pigs of the Okefenokee Swamp" underlines the importance, in pursuing such a strategy, of keeping the intended subjects' eyes fixed upon something positive and desirable while their freedom is being pared away. The combination, and the efficacy it has demonstrated in these United States since the New Deal, compels us to address certain associated questions:

1. Are all "social benefit" programs evilly motivated?
2. If the answer to #1 is no, what accounts for their "unintended consequences?"
3. How can Americans be weaned off the State's teat?

There are no more vital questions in our national discourse.

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In order to obtain and hold power, a man must love it. Thus the effort to get it is not likely to be coupled with goodness, but with the opposite qualities of pride, cunning, and cruelty. -- Leo Tolstoy

It chafes me, but I must reluctantly concede that not all proposed "social programs" are motivated by a desire to use them to advance totalitarian tyranny. At least, that appears to be the case when such programs are first proposed. Indeed, good intentions seem to be the rule rather than the exception.

But good intentions are far less potent than the laws of Nature.

The dynamic of politics is ruthless in selecting for ruthlessness. He who wants power most, and is willing to set aside all moral and ethical constraints to get and keep it, is most likely to hold it. Therefore, no politician should be assumed ab initio to be motivated by good intentions. Exceptions to this pattern are rare.

More, and critically more important, political acumen -- i.e., the body of expertise relevant to obtaining and keeping power -- increases from generation to generation. Each wave of aspirants to power learns from the experiences of the previous ones. In particular, politician Smith learns from the achievements of his predecessors what will win the populace's acceptance, and what price we're willing to pay for it.

Though the New Deal first federalized welfare -- what was then called "relief" -- FDR and his lieutenants were not unaware of what it would buy them. They had the effects of state and local relief programs to study, plus the remarkable success Bismarckian social programs had achieved in persuading the German people to accept essentially totalitarian rule. In every case, the disbursement of a valuable benefit by a government purchased the political allegiance of its beneficiaries for those identified with the program. Here's how Garet Garrett put it in "The Revolution Was:"

THE DOMESTICATION OF THE INDIVIDUAL

This was not a specific problem. It was rather a line of principle to which the solution of every other problem was referred. As was said before, in no problem to be acted upon by the New Deal was it true that one solution and one only was imperative. In every case there was some alternative. But it was as if in every case the question was, "Which course of action will tend more to increase the dependence of the individual upon the Federal government?"—and as if invariably the action resolved upon was that which would appeal rather to the weakness than to the strength of the individual.

And yet the people to be acted upon were deeply imbued with the traditions and maxims of individual resourcefulness—a people who grimly treasured in their anthology of political wisdom the words of Grover Cleveland, who vetoed a Federal loan of only ten thousand dollars for drought relief in Texas, saying: "I do not believe that the power and duty of the general Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering. . . . A prevalent tendency to disregard the limited mission of this power should, I think, be steadfastly resisted, to the end that the lesson should be constantly enforced that though the people support the Government the Government should not support the people....Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our National character."

Which was only one more way of saying a hard truth that was implicit in the American way of thinking, namely, that when people support the government they control government, but when the government supports the people it will control them.

Well, what could be done with a people like that? The answer was propaganda. The unique American tradition of individualism was systematically attacked by propaganda in three ways, as follows:

Firstly, by attack that was direct, save only for the fact that the word individualism was qualified by the uncouth adjective rugged; and rugged individualism was made the symbol of such hateful human qualities as greed, utter selfishness, and ruthless disregard of the sufferings and hardships of one's neighbors;

Secondly, by suggestion that in the modern environment the individual, through no fault or. weakness of his own, had become helpless and was no longer able to cope with the adversities of circumstances. In one of his Fireside Chats, after the first six months, the President said: "Long before Inauguration Day I became convinced that individual effort and local effort and even disjointed Federal effort had failed and of necessity would fail, and, therefore, that a rounded leadership by the Federal Government had become a necessity both of theory and of fact." And,

Thirdly, true to the technic of revolutionary propaganda, which is to offer positive substitute symbols, there was held out to the people in place of all the old symbols of individualism the one great new symbol of security.

After the acts that were necessary to gain economic power the New Deal created no magnificent new agency that had not the effect of making people dependent upon the Federal government for security, income, livelihood, material satisfactions, or welfare.

If Grover Cleveland's understanding of the matter was that clear, you may be absolutely sure that the New Dealers' grasp of it was no less so. As for those who came after them, can you really doubt it?

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Government means politics, and interference by government carries with it always the implication of coercion. We may accept the expanding power of bureaucrats so long as we bask in their friendly smile. But it is a dangerous temptation. Today politics may be our friend, and tomorrow we may be its victims. -- Owen D. Young

Though questions #1 and #2 seem to me to be adequately answered, I have no answer to question #3. Those who see are few; those who cannot or will not see are many. Worse, the latter vote more reliably and more predictably than most others. The State has met their price. They will defend the State, or at least those of its masters they believe to be "on their side," as long as the goodies keep coming, and will assail any contrary voice with the worst epithets they can muster. Freedom? Bah! When has that ever gotten anyone a free cell phone?

The mailed fist of tyranny within the velvet glove of social programs is either invisible or irrelevant to those addicted to State benefits.

If it seems to you, Gentle Reader, being an apostle of freedom and a believer in the right of the individual to do as he damned well pleases, that no sane man would sell his birthright for such compensation, you are to be commended. The reaction confirms your membership in The Remnant: Albert Jay Nock's term for that shrunken segment of the American people who can still see through the veils to discern what is truly and enduringly valuable:

"Ah," the Lord said [to Isaiah], "you do not get the point. There is a Remnant there that you know nothing about. They are obscure, unorganized, inarticulate, each one rubbing along as best he can. They need to be encouraged and braced up because when everything has gone completely to the dogs, they are the ones who will come back and build up a new society; and meanwhile, your preaching will reassure them and keep them hanging on. Your job is to take care of the Remnant, so be off now and set about it."

....In any given society the Remnant are always so largely an unknown quantity. You do not know, and will never know, more than two things about them. You can be sure of those — dead sure, as our phrase is — but you will never be able to make even a respectable guess at anything else. You do not know, and will never know, who the Remnant are, nor what they are doing or will do. Two things you do know, and no more: First, that they exist; second, that they will find you.

It is a terrible thing to know oneself so thinly supplied with confreres. Yet it is our job, as it was Isaiah's, to conserve it, to defend it, and to do what we can to enlarge it. And as Nock learned from his own experiences, it has its rewards as well. High among them is this: you make the right enemies. Enemies to be proud of.

Be not afraid.