From hubbard@garnet.berkeley.edu Sat Nov 19 13:02:07 EST 1994 Article: 57672 of alt.society.generation-x Path: io.org!news.cais.com!news.sprintlink.net!redstone.interpath.net!ddsw1!godot.cc.duq.edu!news.duke.edu!news-feed-1.peachnet.edu!gatech!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!spool.mu.edu!agate!garnet.berkeley.edu!hubbard From: hubbard@garnet.berkeley.edu (Q. Hubbard) Newsgroups: alt.society.generation-x Subject: Re: Some thoughts on some stuff... Date: 18 Nov 1994 03:05:32 GMT Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 228 Message-ID: <3ah5ls$snj@agate.berkeley.edu> References: <3adujt$bq@news1.digex.net> <3af1u1$f7n@emoryu1.cc.emory.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: garnet.berkeley.edu Hugh Leslie Frazier wrote: >While I agree with most of [Chris'] assessment of the ills of society, I take >exception to your contention that the GOP wants to "tear down the >constructs of support in our society," because this begs the question of >whether the Great Society programs and there derivatives *really are* >constructs of support. Many conservatives, including myself, believe that >the programs championed by liberal Dems, while well intentioned, >ultimately work to the detriment of the disadvantaged. We believe that >these support programs, in their current form, have become instruments of >social destruction, fostering an pernicious ethic of dependency and >ressentiment. There is certainly some truth to this, which is why lots of us bleeding- heart lefties would like to see the programs in question reamed out and refitted. But discarding a malfunctioning machine rather than fixing it seems to be the aim of most conservatives, which is what keeps us from talking fruitfully about how to do the fixing much of the time. Lee, you're obviously a smart and thoughtful guy, and I'm curious about which are the reasons for your taking this position. (I have a soft spot for non-heartless conservatives, just ask my fiance'...) There's the argument that "we implemented all these programs and look; poverty and crime have only gotten worse". Conservatives conclude that the programs MADE poverty and crime worse, while Us Over Here point to the facts of income-flattening nationwide, the War On Drugs, and other factors that are independent of social programs -- in short, we say "no, these ills would have worsened with or without our programs, and in fact things would be even WORSE without them". It's hard to collect empirical data that aren't apples and oranges, but I can marshall plenty to support my contention and you probably can too. I think this one's worth pursuing, though, if we can get some actual data to talk about. The other most common argument, though, and the one that's gotten *far* more press in the last 14 years, is a simpler one to apprehend. It's the claim that we give an *incentive* to people to become or remain poor, unmotivated, and to have children. This argument is most specifically aimed at mothers ("poor women are having more babies to get more welfare"), and the solution is supposed to be to penalize women for having babies, to tell them if they can't find a job they can't have their children, etc. Now. I want to know. Who, specifically, in the welfare-receiving population, have you heard say they think of welfare as an incentive? Of course it has been said: just as every time a new homeless shelter opens the news crews go around to the parks to find one street person who will say on camera "hell no I'd rather sleep in the park than go to some shelter", and then people feel they can justify the statement "homeless people are that way because they want to be"...in the same way, you are always going to be able to find one girl in a ghetto who will say "damn straight I had the second one so I could get more money". But that one girl carries next to no weight with me, for reasons below. Nor does the on-paper argument, "it doesn't matter what they say, the numbers clearly show this is the case". All the numbers show is two events that have coincided: programs have been put in place, births to mothers in poverty have increased. Other things have happened in a linear progression over this period of time too...space shuttle flights have become more frequent, the cost of telephone service has changed, and so forth. What conservatives are claiming is a link of *motivation* that I contest. I don't know how much time Charles Murray or Bill Bennett have spent in poor neighborhoods actually talking to poor women about their lives, but I have spent quite a bit. And my anecdotal evidence shows that there is absolutely *no* sense in which their claim is true. I mean, come on. Two women in this poor neighborhood each have two kids. One has a husband, he and she both have low-paying jobs but their shifts allow them to care for the kids. The other is single and receives welfare -- roughly the same net amount to spend on her and each of her kids as the other woman, but no chance of a raise or getting more interesting work or anything else that goes with a job. Last time she spent two months job-hunting, the only thing available was $5/hr fast-food work, which would not only cause her to lose the medical care she and her kids now get, but would so sorely eaten up by childcare that her net would be less than it is now -- not enough for rent, food, and utilities. She's also got a steady boyfriend, but if she marries him she loses money, and his income is not enough to compensate. Does anyone *honestly* believe the first woman would rather be in the shoes of the second, or that the second woman thinks she will do BETTER to have another kid? I have talked to these women. The claims that are getting made are just not true. Before anyone utters one more word about incentives, I want to see a list of names, a log of hours they've spent in the neighborhoods I've walked. I submit that they don't have the first idea what they're talking about. (Unfortunately, this fallacy has spread to the "Democrats" currently in office as well, so that "they" is accusatory to both sides.) Obviously there's a serious problem. It's insane for the programs in question to discourage working by removing medical coverage and someone to care for the children. It's nuts to penalize marriage. But at the same time, these programs did not cause the job market situation that makes it impossible for this woman to get a job that will actually feed her children and keep them healthy. That comes from banks redlining the neighborhood so that small businesses can't take root, flight of capital to the suburbs, and wage stagnation and decline that's been sitting on everyone since 1973. These problems desperately, desperately need fixing. But saying that poor mothers are responsible for urban poverty and decay is like saying that people dying of hunger are responsible for famine. And saying that giving people enough food to survive makes the famine worse when in fact there's a huge drought going on all around you seems just as strange. So, Lee, I didn't mean to direct this rant at you...you may not in fact hold any of the beliefs I'm attacking. But I genuinely want to know which factors have gone into your understanding of how well-meaning social programs in fact perpetuate the problem they were meant to fix. I suspect there's much we would agree on in that realm. But this incentive thing has really got me mad.... >[much cogent stuff deleted] >Conservatives >generally believe that the liberal analysis is too reductionistic; it >ignores the extent to which virtue and self-discipline contribute to the >flourishing of human life -- the core problem is a systemic erosion of >virtue that no amount of money can ameliorate. (These are, of course, >caricatures intended to highlight the relevant differences.) Defining virtue is one of the major problems here, of course. When I, a generally upstanding bourgeois collaborator in all things institutional (I'm a university professor, about to get married, planning on having a house and kids and a stable family, I vote, etc.), am explicitly told that I am evil and unvirtuous and should be hounded from town at dawn (which I have indeed been told), it's hard for me to understand how we can get a workable definition of virtue going. I acknowledge that the above is caricature, and what I'm referring to is extreme as well -- but I imagine you can see what I'm saying. It's not that I think you're entirely wrong about this, but that it's almost impossible to *do* anything with the notion. Given the fractious nature of our population. >Liberals believe that conservatives lack compassion because they refuse to >let go of their filthy money, while conservatives believe that liberals >are unwittingly condemning millions of people to a lifetime of dependency >and humiliation. In other words, I admire your compassion, but I think >it's corrosive. I think it's not the compassion that's corrosive, but its paternalism. The one does not necessarily entail the other. Let me elaborate: I fear that most of the Democrats who so eloquently defend the welfare state have spent no more time in the ghetto than Charles Murray has. A large portion of traditional (dare I say Boomer?) welfare-statists are as undercover-classist (and sometimes racist, though not necessarily) as they come. They do not want to see, hear, or smell poor people. They do want to help them, and that in itself is admirable, but they can't possibly make accurate predictions about what would be workable ways to do so, because they've never SPOKEN to a poor person, much less done any serious research on the issue. They just feel bothered by the fact of poverty, which they should, but they continue to want to believe that poor people are fundamentally different from them, and *this* is poisonous. For attacking these liberals, I will hold it against you not a whit. But some of us actually *have* done the unglorious work of dealing with poor people face-to-face (I believe Piglet does so regularly, I know John Coates' S.O. has done it a lot, I've done it, I'm sure there are others here). It's not uplifting. Often it's cynic-making and boring and depressing as hell. But it gives you some glimpses into what *you'd* be like if you'd struggled to have dreams and a life in a crushingly cruel environment, and sometimes it does offer miracle plays. It has at the least convinced me that poor people are *not* very different from me after all, even if they're distant in race or nationality or language. They want to compete and succeed and exult and goof off and all like me. It *is* possible to be compassionate and not paternalistic. And therein may lie the key. >Now let's deal with yet another crypto-racist charge, according to which >opposition to the welfare state really means, "I don't like Blacks or >Hispanics." This is just the old genetic fallacy, whereby you avoid >responding to someone's argument by attacking the reason *why they're >making it*. If I know for certain that that *is* the reason they're making the argument, I feel entirely justified in attacking the reason. This happens to be true of many of my relatives, and I can say with certainty that their opposition to welfare stems *exclusively* from their perception that it gives comfort to dark-skinned people. I am not kidding. Now, if I *don't* know that this is behind someone's opposition to welfare, you are correct to say that it's an illegitimate leap. But having seen the link many times, I think it's fair game to at least find out what's really back there. >If the statement "I think welfare is counterproductive" really >means "I hate minorities," then what does one have to say in order to >*really* mean "I think welfare is counterproductive"? Must one agree with >your political views in order to avoid being called a racist? A very good point, and well made. I for one would like to be excused >from the assumption that because I oppose the death penalty, I have no compassion for the families of murdered people. This one really gets me. For crying out loud, I know a woman in Virginia whose 81-year-old mother was raped and stabbed to death by a man who was later caught, jailed, *escaped*, and finally recaptured and put to death. She had thought at the beginning of his trial that she wanted him to get the chair -- this to let you know she wasn't previously a D.P. opponent -- but by the end of the whole ordeal she realized that it was not going to give her any comfort or sense of justice, and her other human instincts told her it was a bad idea. She ended up lobbying against his sentence (to no avail of course, this was Virginia after all). Point being, we would all do well to tease apart the underlying assumptions we're using in these debates. Thanks for a good post anyway... --Kathleen (Oh, and to *really* mean "I think welfare is counter- productive" you must say "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously moose tingle splaAaaAaAAA!") -- /=\ \=/ /=\ \=/ /=\ \=/ /=\ \=/ /=\ \=/ /=\ \=/ /=\ \=/ Kathleen Hubbard "haraka haraka haina baraka" \=/ /=\ \=/ /=\ \=/ /=\ \=/ /=\ \=/ /=\ \=/ /=\ \=/ /=\