Hello!
There is a popular belief that so-called “benefit scroungers” are a scourge, sapping the strength of the economy by choosing to live on state hand-outs forcibly taken from the tax payer. Of course we cannot simply leave helpless people to die, but many people would argue that benefits should be cut in order to force everyone who can work to earn their living like decent citizens, instead of gorging on the wealth generated by the honest and productive working population.
When we talk about benefit scroungers we need to be clear about exactly who we mean. We are not talking about benefit fraud – that is simply illegal, like any other fraud and obviously cannot be condoned by anyone. Nor are we talking about people who have a job, but who do not get paid a living wage – the “deserving poor”. You could argue that they should get a better job – but somebody has to do the jobs which do not pay a living wage – unless you force ALL employers to pay a living wage – which we can come back to another time.
We are obviously not talking about people who are sick or disabled – it would be a savage and barbaric society that let them starve. Nor can we be talking about children. We cannot mean the unpaid carers of toddlers or the old or the otherwise infirm, because without the carer, those people would have to be supported by the state at greater expense. We shouldn’t penalise people who are genuinely looking for a job – nor should we force people who are finishing a higher degree to abandon their studies. Finally, it would be a serious injustice to cut off people who have been paying national insurance and find themselves unemployed through no fault of their own – they have paid into the system and are entitled to take something out.
Is there anyone left? Is there a mass of people who have consciously chosen to live in poverty, rather than enjoy the wealth they could gain by picking fruit and cleaning toilets? I don’t know. But just suppose there is. What is to be done about them?
Firstly, I must point out that with power comes responsibility; if you want people to work, you have to provide jobs that pay a living wage. It is surely wrong to insist that people work when there is no work for them to do. There is fashionable belief that the Free Market Will Provide, but this has to be set against the observation that actually, it doesn’t. And there is after all no shortage of useful work to be done; within the next few years we will have to transform our energy and transport systems away from fossil fuels, a task that has been compared to a war effort, that could employ millions of people with every possible skill. It is a paradox that has often puzzled me, how there there can be so much work to do, and so many people to do it, yet no way of getting the work done. I realise now that the key to the paradox is our system of money.
Followers of this blog will know that I am in favour of restoring the power to create money as debt to the Government (that is, us, we the people). Many people do not understand that
However, there is second, powerful idea that can eliminate benefit scroungers at a stroke. The Green Party suggest that all citizens should receive a basic “citizens income” simply because they are members of the population. This seems a very radical idea until you realize that most useful work is done by machines with little human input. A farm of a thousand acres can be run by a handful of people; electricity can be generated by unmanned turbines and solar cells; freight trains have a single driver; modern factories rely on robots with little intervention. Certainly machines do enough work to give everybody a basic standard of living with very little input, so why should we not all be entitled to benefit from that? If some people choose to live on that basic income, earned by machines, there is no rational reason why they shouldn’t only our puritanical work ethic insists that they should work anyway.
Keynes suggested that in extremis the government could pay people to dig holes and fill them in again. This seems like a crazy idea – until you realise, on consideration, that a a great part of our economy is exactly such a giant make-work scheme. The primary purpose of jobs in our economy is not to produce goods and services, but to redistribute the wealth created by machines – and to redistribute it in a capricious way, rewarding the selfish and strong at the expense of the selfless and weak. To start with, in my view (and in the view of Lord Adair Turner, former banker and now regulator) almost all the “city” is redundant, and simply extracts the wealth created by others by various devious schemes – but it goes further than that. We live in a consumer society of “built in obsolescence”. Almost every “durable good” we buy is in fact not made to be durable but to be ephemeral, so that we constantly have to dispose of old items and make new ones. The fashion and electronics industries are prime examples. In my previous description of a thneed factory I explained how, by producing genuinely durable goods, and working shorter hours, everybody could be materially and socially better off.
So to stamp out “benefit scroungers, I suggest a two-pronged approach – firstly guarantee a good job for everybody by starting the urgent effort of rebuilding our energy infrastructure, paid for by government created, interest-free debt. And secondly pay everybody a “citizens income” in recognition of the fact that most work is done by machines, and most human effort is unnecessary anyway. And incidentally, stop wrecking the planet by pursuing this mad policy of increasing activity (read GDP), by making stuff and throwing it away at ever increasing rates.
There. That’s enough for one evening!