Imagine Grateful Welfare Recipients

You forgot public school students. Ungrateful little brats.

What if we means-test for politeness? What if in hyper-efficient libertopia welfare gets replaced by a bounty system where you get $5 for shaving and $10 for pulling your pants up, for gosh sakes. We could all live comfortably functioning as a model citizenry for Warren Buffet’s viewing pleasure.

Since student loans and unemployment insurance are paid for by the recipients themselves, would they need to send thank you notes to their own homes? Should we relax postal regulations so they could drop the cards into their own mailboxes or require them to put a stamp on the envelopes and mail them properly at the post office?

Food stamps and Medicaid are different, but student loans, unemployment insurance, GSE loans, Social Security, Medicare, and other middle class benefits are paid for by the middle class themselves with the government taking a vig along the way. Welfare for the poor is tiny in comparison.

I’m waiting for the day that the PBS announcements thank NOT the “viewers like you” but the taxpayers whose forced exactions “make this program possible”…..by paying the outrageous CPB/PBS salaries and also the fees for “program acquisition” so that, for example, MacNeil and others can make millions on the public dole.

Mercer:
So if someone who does benefit from the welfare state criticizes it, he’s a hypocrite. And if someone who doesn’t benefit from the welfare state criticizes it, he’s greedy. Got it. Is anyone allowed to object to the welfare state, or is dissent inherently illegitimate?

“But conservatives and moderates would no longer feel like suckers. In the current regime, the welfare state robs and insults them.”

Conservatives are probably net-recipients of transfers. See a nice chart by Paul Krugman. Talking about “robbing” in this context is absurd.

[Angle brackets changed to quotation marks in several places else the quoted text would not have shown up for readers. To quote text, please use quotation marks or html-blockquote; or use the “quote” button we offer. –Econlib Ed.]

The absence of a revolution is already the expressed gratefulness.

Brandon Berg,

When did Mercer ever say that “someone who doesn’t benefit from the welfare state criticizes it, [they’re a] hypocrite?”

Way to beat a strawman.

Bryan Caplan is a state employee. He could look for work in the private sector, but he won’t. Unless his salary and benefits are paid for from outside the state treasury, by his own standards he’s “an ungrateful welfare recipient.”

Think of it like this: if you’re a man, say you took a woman out to dinner and a movie and even bought her gifts and flowers (talk about a Ponzi scheme). How would you feel if she complained that you didn’t take her to a better restaurant or didn’t buy her a nice enough purse or brought lilies instead of roses? And what if she called you cheap afterwards? And even if she wasn’t so hostile, what if she never said “Thank you”?

In a similar vein, a co-worker told me about a story he watched about 10,000 head african antelope farm in Texas. They pay the bills by letting people hunt the antelope. The herd was originally much, much, much smaller (and apparently this breed of antelope is nearly extinct in Africa)

The news report presented the facts – the antelope are being saved and protected because of the hunting. An anti-hunting advocate apparently said that she would rather see the antelope go extinct rather than tolerate hunting.

Some people just want to watch the world burn.

But conservatives and moderates would no longer feel like suckers. In the current regime, the welfare state robs and insults them.

I’m not so sure less opposition = more welfare. Or, at the very least, I think there may be a built in countering force that decreases the increase.

Yes, you often hear that ‘back in the day’ folks were ashamed to be ‘on the dole’ and, indeed, grateful for help received from either the forced (govt) or voluntary (charity) contributions of others; while today what you see, at least from recipients of forced giving (how grateful, btw, are most of us when givers have been forced to give?), is the “you owe me because you exploited me” attitude that @Nathanael Snow noted goes hand in hand w/ this type of giving (“entitlement, resentment, and stagnant living”; cue Walter Williams).

I don’t know about ‘back in the day’, but I have experienced plenty of the latter attitude, first hand, from the 1970s to today in cities like Watts and Memphis, and abroad, as well, in transition economies where certain classes found it impossible to adjust. Just how prevalent this attitude is, or how different it is from the past in this or that location, I don’t know; it’s merely accumulated anecdotal evidence.

If, however, the presumption that at one time folks *were* more grateful is true, does it stand to reason that perhaps grateful recipients today might also be less apt to casually apply for benefits?

In other words, the sense one gets from many who complain about benefits being given is not merely that recipients are not grateful, but that many who do not *need* them apply for them, i.e., a lot of people game the system, or choose to live off given rather than earned funds.

I’m suggesting that a culture of gratitude may go hand in hand with a culture of shame and/or self-respect that, at least in part, reduces the number of people seeking benefits, leaving a larger proportion of recipients who are truly needy as opposed to merely entitled (in their heads and hearts).

Btw, when choosing charities I assume that most of us look for those with pass through rates of 90% or higher.

Does anyone know where I can find current figures regarding the pass through rate of welfare?

@Realistic:

You do realize that professors have to work to earn their salary right? And I don’t mean make-work work, but like actually productive work where there are real-life customers who pay for the service provided. I’m not sure that Bryan could be said to benefit from “welfare”.

This article by Scott Adams seems relevant. Bryan’s probably already seen it, as Robin Hanson plugged it when it was first published, but it has some interesting (not completely serious thoughts):

In reality, fairness is not so much about the actual distribution of loot as it is about the psychology of how you feel about it. That’s important to understand because the rich won’t give up their cash unless they feel they are getting something in return. And so far, saving the country doesn’t seem to be enough of a payoff.

If we accept that the rich can be taxed at a different rate than everyone else, we can also imagine that there could be other differences in how the rich are taxed…..I can think of five benefits that the country could offer to the rich in return for higher taxes: time, gratitude, incentives, shared pain and power.

Suppose we change the tax code so that in return for higher taxes on the rich, we figure out a way to give the rich some form of extra time. The bad version is that anyone who pays taxes at a rate above some set amount gets to use the car pool lane without a passenger. Or perhaps the rich are allowed to park in handicapped-only spaces.

Suppose (bad idea alert) the government makes it a condition that anyone applying for social services has to write a personal thank-you note to a nearby rich person who, according to a central database, hasn’t lately received one. Gratitude goes a long way. It’s easy to hate the generic overspending of the government. It’s harder to begrudge medical care to someone who thanks you personally.

Suppose the tax code is redesigned so that the rich only pay taxes to fund social services, such as health care and social security. This gives the rich an incentive to find ways to reduce the need for those services, which would in turn keep their taxes under control. Perhaps you’d see an explosion of private investment in technologies that make it less expensive to provide health care.

Everyone loves power. I’m guessing that the rich like it more than most people, on average. Another bad idea is to give the rich two votes apiece in any election. That’s double the power of other citizens. But don’t worry that it will distort election results. There aren’t that many rich people, and they are somewhat divided in their opinions, just like the rest of the world. And realistically, is the candidate who gets 51% of the vote always better than the one who gets only 49%? That’s a risk I’ll take.

Why limit this to welfare? Why not thank taxpayers for firefighters, police, roads, schools, defense, parks, etc? Surely everyone benefits from at least some publicly provided service.

Since I pay more than the average amount of taxes, I’m fine with this system, since I’ll gain more thanks than I give out.