Picture a baby born in a field, for whatever reason you care to imagine. Having been born there, on that patch of grass, she is instantly branded a trespasser. You see, that field is private property.
She could be liable for punishment, but no one cares to expend any effort on her behalf, so she is simply left there to die. Within a few days, she does. The property owner then claims the remains for partial compensation for his time and trouble.
This, my friends, is what I think every time I hear someone say, "The world doesn't owe you anything!" or see one of those posts of a blank piece of paper with the title, "List of Everything the World Owes You!"
Because that's what that phrase literally means.
 |
Child on Left: "We get a bowl of gruel per day."
Child on Right: "And we're grateful." |
Oh, true, that's not how it's meant. It's meant to teach children to be self-reliant, productive, hard workers, and to not go about begging and whining for alms. It's meant to get them to participate in the great economic game that's been going on for centuries now.
But it does get took too far. It gets used, by some, to excuse a multiplicity of abuses that while not quite as egregious as letting a newborn girl die alone in a field before rendering her body for the chemicals, comes a bit too close to that at times.
First off, let's clear up the obvious. The "world" is not a person, nor has it even sentience, let alone sapience. So "it" cannot owe you a thing, for good or bad. It just is. The "world" here is being used as a synonym for "humanity" as in "all of". The saying might well be rephrased to "No one owes you a thing" and it sometimes is re-phrased that way.
Second, let's get parents out of the way. Everyone on all 1,000 sides of this, gets that parents do, in fact, owe their kids some minimal amount of care. It might be debated "how much" and for "how long" and the answers might range from "food, clothing and shelter till 12" to "a million dollars to be a hotel magnate at 24" but "something" is owed for "awhile".
The parents tried to have a kid though, or at least engaged in activity that could reasonably have been foreseen to lead to one. What of everyone else who did not get even that modest amount of fun out of this nine months prior to the birth?
This is where the liberals are likely to say, "food, clothing, shelter, education and healthcare till he's 18", or to hear some, till he dies of old age. So there's that. And this is also where conservatives are likely to say, "I only owe leaving him alone". So there's that.
And while this might surprise some of my conservative friends, I agree - you personally only owe "leaving him alone". But are you intending on leaving him alone is the question.
You see, there's a lot of assumptions about our current culture, our current way of life, that is took for granted. I don't blame people for taking it for granted, because it's the culture that "won" over all the other tens of thousands of cultures, and now exists - in various forms to various degrees - over the entire planet.
And has for almost 500 years.
What am I referring to?
Private property. By which I do not mean "personal property", even communist societies let the individual have "personal property" of food and clothes and such. "Private property" refers to ownership of stuff not simply for personal use. Notably land, but also companies and corporations and machinery and ships and such.
Private property - and the concept of "corporations" - make up the system that is generally called "capitalism", even though capitalism in a pure form does not, and has not, ever existed.
So what does that have to do with whether we can - after the parents raise the kid till 12 or 18 or 21 - "leave him alone" to fend for himself?
Well, in a state of nature, that guy would have been exploring about as a child, finding fruit trees, roots, berries, small game, maybe even big game. He'd know where to get his food, and how to get it, and by adulthood, even if as young as 12, he'd be pretty competent to feed himself off of that, and clothe himself, too. You could safely leave him alone, and he'd do just fine.
But such children are not allowed to roam about learning how to hunt and gather nowadays. They quickly find out that their parent's property is not so vast, and that others do not wish their gardens raided or house pets hunted. Nor does the city they are in care for them to hunt the birds that may be available, or the squirrels.
Not only do they not then get to learn those life giving skills, they will NOT be allowed to use them - if they some how acquire them - when they reach any age of adulthood. They will not be allowed to hunt and gather, but instead will be expected - by conservatives most of all - to comply with what the majority of people in our culture think is a good way of doing things.
Now, if one is leaving a man alone, one may well make a case that you "owe him nothing". But when you are actively thwarting him from feeding and clothing himself in the most natural way possible? Ahh, then yes, you do owe him something.
You are expecting that new adult human to play by rules that you so take for granted that you hardly grasped that they are "rules". Rules that are one way, a way you're familiar with, but could as easily been other ways, that others around the globe are familiar with. If I want a man to play any game I enjoy or find desirable, then I must consider what is in it for him, and offer him inducement.
Historically, the "inducement" we principally offer is "fear" as in "do it our way according to our rules or we will hurt you until you do". Thus the child in school who wants to sneak out to play with his dog gets paddled or confined to a spot, and the adult who doesn't recognize private property gets arrested and confined for trespassing and/or theft.
But one of the Founding Fathers of America, Thomas Paine, realized that it would be fairer to offer a positive for people to comply with those rules, not just negative punishment. He actually recognized it then as not a "gift", but a payment owed. Owed by who?
Owed by all those who were accepting of, and benefiting of, the current order of things. You see, a person who is freshly an adult did not agree to the Earth being divided up in such a way that he has nothing, and not even a place to hunt or gather in peace. That's an arrangement that is no doubt satisfactory to those who already have land, but not so much to those who do not.
And of those who would say that they worked for their bit of land or property, well, I am glad that they overcame the inherent disadvantage they were at during the start, and I'm glad that they agreed explicitly or at least implicitly with the rules of the game that they've apparently scored some points in. But surely they can understand that not everyone is so willing to forgo their share as they were, and nor do I think they'd decline their share were it offered now.
Some still will resist, and really think that their "earning" of the land is in some way making the whole system appropriate. It does not. Tracing back the titles of land, it all goes back to the original "owners" who owned it by "right" of their sword. Later it was inherited by their children, who the landless had to call "Lord" and "Lady". Only more recently has that been swapped about for any who cared to play the game that - rather than be agreed to by all - was set up centuries ago by a few, and chiefly insisted upon by those who have benefited by it since.
No 18 year old has ever been asked to sign consent to the lands of Earth being divvied up as we see them divided today. None are currently being asked to agree. That 18 year old is thus the infant in the field, and unless he does as he is told by those who came before him, he may starve. That you don't see any starving is simply that faced with that "choice", obviously everyone "chooses" to play the game.
But such coercion takes away the consensual nature of that "choice", and means that any who wish to now remind the world that a Basic Income is owed as a duty, not charity, gets to. Or conversely, if no Basic Income is desired to be paid, then one forgoes the right to complain about folks running over farms and factory lands to hunt, fish, pick fruit and dig for roots!
Besides being owed for the land and resources withheld from him, there is the matter of the common inheritance from his ancestors that is currently being withheld from him. As Edward Bellamy pointed out in "Looking Backwards", most of the productive value of your labor does not come from you, but from all the processes, technologies and machinery that you've inherited from those who came before you.
Consider your standard of living. On average a two bedroom house, a car, televisions and computers and such. Your standard of living is incomparably greater than a person of your equivalent social station 100 years ago, let alone 1,000 years ago!
Is this because you are 1,000 times the superior of a man from the year 1017? Is it because you work 100 times harder than a man from 1917? Or is it that mankind as a whole has grown and progressed, learning more things, specializing in more things, cooperating in more things, and accumulating more wealth and knowledge each year, each generation, each century, so that your own labor - no greater or lesser than that of your ancestors, is magnified by the accumulation of the entirety of humanity?
I think we know - as Bellamy pointed out - that only 10% of what you have is the result of your own labor, the rest, the 90%, is a gift from all the billions who have worked and strove and studied and learned and such before you, and have left you all that as an inheritance that you did not earn, and hardly even recognize as a gift, let alone as a gift to be grateful for.
When you then see a man - or woman - who is disabled, or even simply claiming a disability whether you perceive it or not, whether they are faking it or not, who are you to deny them their portion of the wealth that we are all common heirs of? Is your brother denied a share of your father's inheritance because he failed to meet your standards? Is your sister to be left without any thing of her mother's as you do not believe that she is "really" ill?
Such an inheritance was theirs whether they met your standards or not, whether they worked or not. As an anarchist, I would advise a different and more peaceable way of apportioning their share to them, but you, with your belief in the morality of a government have left such to a government. You cannot then complain and try to withhold from your fellow man that which is theirs by right.
And you cannot, as Bellamy pointed out, add "insult to the theft" by telling them that the "table scraps" you dole out to them grudgingly are an imposition. The disabled are not imposing upon you by receiving such scraps, rather they are being insulted and robbed by those who were blessed with a health that they were simply given, and had no part in earning.
Nor is the possibility of some of them "faking it" any concern. For one, the presumption of guilt before any trial is remarkably evil, and generally supposed to be against Anglo-American common law. For two, if some were faking, would that not mean that their disability was just different than they claimed? That rather than they truly suffering from this or that ailment, that they instead suffered a condition that made them shy away from what you think of as productive work?
But for three, what if they were to be just purely lazy? Would that be any different from those who have never served in the armed forces of their nation?
What's that, you ask? What's that got to do with anything?
Ahh, but military service, or lack of it, has everything to do with this supposed "welfare". As Bellamy pointed out, only a very few are called to defend a nation with their strength, and those who can't - or won't - are not deprived of their citizenship for not doing so. Maybe they couldn't fight. Maybe they found it immoral. Maybe they were too busy with other concerns. Maybe they were just cowards. No one questions why a man did not serve, it's a choice left up to him. He is still a citizen, he still receives - unearned - the protection of the very military he did not support.
Likewise, and industrially, if a man cannot - or will not - support the great industrial complex that is the American economy, why would that deprive him of his inheritance? Or his benefiting from the industrial complex the same way a non-veteran benefits from the military complex?
So you see, "welfare" is not your taxes. Your taxes are pretty much as filthy rags compared to the combined and collectivized might of any nation, let alone this one called the United States. "Welfare" is but the odd name we assign to the pittance we dole out to those who have had their inheritance - in land and in cultural heritage - robbed of them by the elite.
That welfare deserves then to be re-named "Basic Income" and ramped up to be as fair as anything that the elite are already awarding themselves. No, not so that everyone gets the same billion dollar bail out that a Wall Street CEO gets. But that so that CEO then receives no more or less of a "bail out" then any other man, woman and child in America.
