The Case for Institutions

[lydy]

(And me an anarchist. Sheesh. Ok, kind of a badly failed anarchist, in all honest truth.)

I said this in the long Farm Bill thread, but I wanted to promote it because it says some things I think are important:

I would never denigrate the great power of individual kindness. Random acts of charity are wonderful and important. But they cannot do what food stamps did for me. They gave me back my future.

When you are that low on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, when you don't know when or even if you will eat again, you stop planning for the future. It's not that you, or at least I, spent all my time wondering about where my next meal was coming from. In general, I tried not to think about it at all. I had done all the things I knew how to do to arrange for food to happen on a regular basis. It had all failed. So now everything was in the wind. It was all up to chance. Maybe a friend would buy me dinner. Maybe I'd find a dollar bill in the street. Maybe I wouldn't eat. But planning, there was no planning. Once I had a guaranteed amount per month coming in, once I _knew_ with certainty I could eat, suddenly, I had my life back. I could access my future again. I could plan.

In point of fact, as our economic system is currently constituted, this type of stability is best supplied by institutions. Typically, by a corporation paying something at least resembling a living wage in exchange for labor. Less commonly, the government stepping in to provide this function for people who are unable to access that part of economic system. There are still some people who are entirely dependent on an individual for their daily needs. But the most common sort, housewives (and househusbands) who do not work outside the home, still most usually have a contract to help provide some stability. We call this marriage, but it is at its root a civil contract. The exact nature of that contract is changing as the economic roles of women change. Most of these changes are for the good. But there is still a very real, contractual relationship. The other type of person most commonly entirely dependent upon the largesse of a private party are children. However, again, there is strong law which requires that their daily needs be met daily. All children are at least theoretically attached, legally, so some parent or guardian who is, by law, required to provide food, shelter, education, and health care.

Some people do thrive in less certain circumstances. But the truth is, they are rare. Most people in uncertain circumstances, dependent upon random acts of charity, have that uncertainty ricochet through their lives causing chaos. A dependable source of food provides a floor, a place to stand, a way forward. If a kind man on the street had given me $70 it would not have had anything like the same effect. Yes, I would have been able to eat for a month. But it is just the problem of the two cans of soup writ large. It puts the end a little farther away, but it doesn't resolve the issue. It doesn't offer a way forward. At best, it provides a holding pattern over the sea of chaos.

Comments

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

mmm I use "lapsed anarchist" from time to time.
Regardless of where we want to go, we're here now.

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

People have memory. Once you get anything being repaid in the future, that thing memory allows, you've got a competition for social structures, institutions, patterns of managing future trade, that can get themselves into the future better. (Since having to reinvent how you handle credit every six months is intolerable; the better institution is in large part the one that gets copies of itself into the future better, this is the core insight about systems under selection.)

The institutions are dependent on people to copy them, so the institution has to benefit somebody. What you're seeing in the US is a widespread belief that the institutions should benefit only a narrow part of the population.

That's not stable at all, it's probably at least partially a response to general labour compensation being flat or declining for the last generation (all you can do to make yourself better off is try to capture a greater relative proportion of what's available), but it's definitely what you've got in the moral dialog.

Yes

[judith-dascoyne.livejournal.com]

This!!

Thank you for giving words to 'stuff' I have been struggling with for a while.

[57degrees.livejournal.com]

It seems to me the institution of Church is missing from these discussions. Before there was Government Welfare....

I was on the finance committee of my church many years ago, and we paid the utility bills of people in our neighborhood who came to us in dire straights. We bought food for them too, as I recall. And of course, our church makes a monthly donation to the local food kitchen.

The difference between public and private charity is that the private charity has motivation to not waste the money that they have. There is precious little of it, and there will be even less if the institution is perceived as being wasteful. Public charity has the opposite motivation - the more cases, the more caseworkers are needed (winning the my-department-is-larger-than-your-department game).

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

The reason there is government welfare is that it was obvious to the meanest intelligence that church and other private charity wasn't working well enough. (Or do you want to conclude that several entire generations in many countries were deluded idiots?)

In the present day, this is obvious just from the percent of GDP involved. Churches, any religious group, are totally incapable of handling the problem. They're incapable even in the present "heavily publicly funded" model, in significant part because churches generally refuse to do a bunch of necessary things. (Starting with "provide services with no religious component to non-believers".)

And, finally, public charity -- government bureaucrats -- tend to do better than private charities in terms of the delivered services per dollar. There are a few comparable private examples (the Canadian United Way, significantly publically funded, cleverly outsourced fundraising, and so utterly regulated that it might as well be a government department), but public charity doesn't need, and doesn't have, fundraising departments. This matters enormously, because fundraising is difficult and expensive and inherently competitive; you wind up with charity delivered based on fundraising skill, not a quantified analysis of need.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

The institution of the church was more important hundreds of years ago, when it had the powers of taxation. While churches do do charity work, in general, they tend to lack the ability to provide long term, stable support. My understanding is that the Mormon church actually does very well at this, but of course, only for other Mormons. I am not in favor of turning over the job of providing a stable economic future to the churches using tax dollars because of several things. In the first place, doing so turns what safety net we still have into a much greater patchwork than it is already. Each church organization would have its own standards. Moreover, they would be less transparent than the current government standards. While some of the ways that the government means-tests drive me crazy, at least one can find out what they are. And as such, they are subject to public debate. Finally, many churches would choose to judge the moral character of the people they help and provide help accordingly. And I massively do not want my tax dollars to be used to make judgments about people's moral lives. Churches get to do that on their own time and on their own dime. And if you clear out all these objections, I fail to see what benefit it is to make the churches do the work that the government does now. The churches do provide supplemental charities, and those are good things. Much like the United Way, which ran the food shelf that helped me out, is a) an institution, and b) were an instrumental stop gap. But for long term support, I prefer secular institutions.