Can Social Policy Be Anti-Social?
by Dr. Doug Cardell
This article explores the question: Can social policy be anti-social? It is common today to talk about spoiling children as though it were a good thing. Consider the word itself: spoil. Spoil means to destroy or diminish the character, value, or quality of a person or thing. A loving parent would never really want to spoil a child. Helping a child without spoiling them is a balancing act that can be exceptionally challenging. It involves weighing everything the parent knows about the child’s development up to the present, understanding their strengths and weaknesses, and deciding what would be the most helpful action to take to serve their future development best. The ‘poor, little rich girl,’ Gloria Vanderbilt, once opined, “I’m not knocking inherited money, but the money I’ve made has a reality to me that inherited money doesn’t have. Her statement could logically be expanded from ‘inherited money’ to ‘unearned money.’ Billie Holiday sang it this way, “Mama may have and Papa may have, but God bless the child that’s got his own.” Government often undertakes parental-like tasks, usually by offering some sort of financial assistance. Unlike the loving parent, the government knows little to nothing about those it purports to be helping and is, therefore, as likely as not to make things worse rather than better. The government too often assumes the role of the rich parent spoiling the child with unearned money. That is not to say that all unearned money is problematic. There are emergencies and times when help is needed, but a loving parent knows when to help and how much. Government seldom does. This is particularly true of a remote federal government as opposed to more local governments or faith-based organizations. Social policy can be divided into three primary areas: poverty and social welfare, health care, and education. We can further separate views of poverty into the liberal view, the conservative view, and the progressive view. Three views can summarized as externally caused, internally caused, and systemically caused. The liberal, externally caused view essentially says that society is to blame for people being in poverty. The conservative, internally caused view says that individuals are responsible for their own condition as long as they are provided equal opportunities. The progressive, systemically caused view blames the system, that is, capitalism, for the existence of poverty. These three categories are useful in discussing social policy in general. The bedrock of social policy debate is the question of who is responsible for solving society’s problems: society, the individual, or the system. At the apex of the debate is defining society’s expectations of equality. Society must decide between legal and social equality, equality of opportunity, equality of outcome, or some combination of the three. While equality under the law may be considered the minimum standard of equality, it still may not exist in any country today. The government in every country makes some distinctions between people of different classes or groups. Some of these distinctions may be reasonable, even necessary; however, many are not. One reasonable distinction may be age, that is, drinking age, driving age, or the age at which one can run for President. Other distinctions may be less reasonable. A ‘progressive’ tax structure treats people unequally under the law because it discriminates based on income, which is why it is the most common objection to such a structure. The demand for equality of outcome assumes that if people do not get equal results, it must be the fault of society or the system that is responsible. This position is difficult to justify because it seems to assume that all the factors leading to a result are also equal. Economist Thomas Sowell addresses this by referencing a study of National Merit Scholars showing that first-born children were the finalists far more often than their siblings. He asks, “If there is no equality of outcomes among people born to the same parents and raised under the same roof, why should equality of outcomes be expected—or assumed—when conditions are not nearly so comparable?” People are blessed with a stunning array of gifts and talents. Believing that all people should be equally endowed in all areas seems ludicrous. Warren Buffett may have a genius for investment strategy, while Einstein’s gifts were mathematics and physics. It seems unreasonable to limit Buffett’s use of his ability to make money and not limit Einstein’s ability to take theoretical physics to new heights. To cap or diminish one person’s use of their talents and not another’s is inequality in the extreme. People may wish for a world where every race ends in a tie, no matter how gifted the athletes or how hard they have trained, but that would mean living in a world of clones. It is the differences in our talents and abilities that make life interesting and cause society to progress. The answer to this equality conundrum lies in equality of opportunity. At its core, equality of opportunity gives all individuals the right to explore and ultimately exploit their own unique gifts and talents however they choose. Like equality under the law, equality of opportunity is still an unrealized goal, but it is a worthier goal than equality of outcome. To argue otherwise is to say that allowing someone to provide something of worth to society and be rewarded for it is beyond some people’s abilities. It is literally arguing that some people are worthless. It is simply not acceptable to classify some human beings as worthless. Everyone has something of value to contribute, and therefore, everyone deserves a means of receiving the rewards of their contributions. Changing the conversation to contribution is a better way to address poverty. Income is the reward for contribution to society. The poor may not be underpaid so much as underproducing. Nations do not measure gross domestic income. They measure gross domestic product. It may make a substantial difference in addressing poverty to change the mindset from focusing on opportunities for income to opportunities to produce value. Capitalism gives billions of us the chance to earn a living by finding ways to provide value for each other. Society can shift its paradigm of helping people by giving them material resources to a paradigm of helping people by helping them become better producers. This is not mere job training. The many failures of job training programs to help the hardcore unemployed are convincing evidence. It may be that training for a job to earn money is not nearly as enticing or motivating as developing one’s talents to provide something that society values enough to pay for. This is a success mindset, a mindset not based on “what can I get” but on “what can I give.” In most states, the highest-paid state employee is a college football coach. Many of these coaches were not great players, but they are great motivators. They believe in their players and let the players know it. A society that believes in the poor and unemployed population the way a great coach believes in his players would produce far better outcomes. Doing too much to help people is condescending and undermining. Great coaches don’t get on the field and help players do their jobs. They empower them, push them to show what they are capable of, and let them know that they can do more than they believed they could. They are coached to focus on what they can give the team, not what they can take from it. The way the government tries to help those who are struggling is wrong-headed. It is not social policy; it is anti-social policy. It is a policy that harms the folks they are purporting to help by keeping them dependent on hand-outs without any accompanying programs to coach them into improving their productivity and helping the team, our society, to be the best team, the best society we can be. To help them to achieve and be proud of their achievement. That is what social policy should do.
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