WELFARE POLICY

It mirrors — but cannot mend — our fragmented society

By LEROY S. WEHRLE

NEITHER the expansion of the social programs in the sixties nor their retrenchment in the seventies has brought an end to the strife over welfare policy in America. Some critics proclaim that an affluent society should greatly increase welfare support for poor people. Others respond that welfare payments should be reduced because the welfare system is becoming a con game allowing lazy folks to live as parasites on society. Angry shouts from both sides, but little understanding of what welfare should or can do today, little effort at rational discourse and analysis.

To begin that discussion, we need to look at the two basic functions of welfare over the years and at what welfare policy can do and at why attempts at welfare reform today are stalled.

Consider Lincoln's New SalemVillage in IlHnois in the 1830's. Largely self reliant households were closely tied together in the community through the church, the craftsmen, the bountiful land, common values and the need to work together to survive. The village was a web of life largely independent of the outside world. To ask which ends and means were economic and which were not would have puzzled these pioneers who lived for children, for God, for country, for community, for honor and for harvest. It was all one.

Now suppose it were decided (as indeed it was) that production could be increased if populations were centralized and industries became more specialized for greater efficiency. The people would have to move in the interests of increasing production and profits. Henceforth they could specialize their production and their labor, even their land and minerals, to gain a larger income. They were told that a Scotsman had invented a new economics based on free markets which would make everyone rich.

The really important aspects of this new way of life are economic. Real man is economic man. Real society is economic society. If the economic affairs are organized correctly, prosperity will follow. Other aspects of humankind such as honor, pride, fun and service to others would have to be subordinated in the new economic village to the incentives of work and the use of property. Old-fashioned beliefs and values would slowly have to give way to the new values of efficiency and markets. Value would be determined by price.

Enticements were plentiful. "Move to the new economic village; a plentitude of commodities awaits you there. Find freedom. Sell your labor for a good price. Forget your old village of superstitions, of poverty, of the power of the ministers and elders over the rest of the village.

But the people felt disquieted in their new industrial village, even surrounded by commodities. Some tried to go back to their old village. But they found that a bulldozer had been busy there, leveling their shops and homes. Like the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath, the people had to move on, pursuing economic dreams. The Joads tried California. No one could go home again.

Life went on in these new industrial towns. Goods proliferated, profits soared, and in time people forgot about the old village. Life became more and more complex, more dependent than ever on things like markets and profits. New inventions, imports and business cycles threw men out of work. What happened in New York and London affected towns in Illinois. No longer was there a family plot to fall back on for sustenance. Loyalty to the new village didn't seem to count for anything. Compliance was rewarded with misfortune.

Trucks and bulldozers

In bad times, a truck would make the rounds of the village. A worker would hand out unemployment checks, payments to those injured at work, stamps to buy food, dollar checks to widows with children, and tickets for admission to hospitals and doctors' offices and schools. But between the work of the bulldozer pushing people off their land and into new jobs, and the rounds of the welfare truck dispensing relief supplies, there was increasing anxiety and discontent in the now affluent town. The money bought many things, but there seemed to be something missing. The church seemed irrelevant. The craftsmen lost their skill and commitment. The land was tilled by huge, impersonal combines. But when times got really bad, the truck would come and dole out necessities so things never looked hopeless.

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The truck, of course, was not a new idea. Long before the truck, long before the bulldozer, societies had grappled with the challenge of creating a full and fruitful life for their members. The concept of welfare was not new and neither was the conflict between those who wanted to bulldoze people to work and those who wanted the truck to give more things to more people.

In Elizabethan times economic activity was expanding throughout Europe. People were on the move looking for jobs, escaping the privation of their native villages. Labor, for the first time, came to be viewed as a commodity which could be sold, no longer an inalienable part of the ancestral soil. Around 1600, Queen Elizabeth signed into law a series of welfare reforms which came to be known as the Poor Laws. These laws transferred responsibility for poor relief from the church to the local village elders. It gave these elders authority to levy a tax to finance assistance to the worthy poor, those who through no fault of their own were destitute.

The rise in power of nation states in Europe during the 1600's and 1700's led to a revised view of welfare that said, in essence, "The best welfare for the state is the least welfare for the people." The state wanted power and believed the people were lazy and didn't want to work. The state needed large exports to earn the gold and silver with which to buy the armies and navies which constituted national power. Exports depend on cheap labor at home. So good public policy consisted of keeping wages low to benefit exports, encouraging population growth so as to produce more laborers, and providing no welfare relief to the poor so they would be forced to work. The bulldozer pushed people out of their old villages to new jobs, but there was no delivery truck.

Attitudes changed back again to helping people in the latter half of the 1700's. Increasing population coupled with poor harvests created dire hardships for the people. The price of food rose so high that even a working family often couldn't buy enough to survive. Moreover, the English could see bright flames of revolution etched in the morning sky across the channel. The English ruling class feared that social unrest might leap the channel and ignite all England. The bulldozer was parked. To meet desperate individual needs a new delivery truck in the form of a wage supplement system was introduced whereby a welfare allowance was added to the worker's paycheck so that sufficient food could be purchased for a family to survive — an early form of guaranteed income.

The Napoleonic wars brought high prices and irksome taxes to the English. Public sentiment turned again to looking for a better bulldozer. The Poor Law Reform Act of 1834 incorporated the view that individuals requesting assistance should be tested by giving them the choice of living in a squalid public workhouse where they would live and work for their keep or of going without assistance. But this Mercantilist strategy, designed to ensure that public monies were not squandered on welfare cheaters also led to the conditions that Dickens portrays in Oliver Twist: innocent children starving to death in the care of sadistic or bumbling administrators. Fortunately, this harsh solution was not carried out throughout all the parishes of England. Economic growth and political liberalization brought economic betterment to the working classes in ensuing years.

By the turn of this century, however, it was clear that the capitalist system In a bureaucratic system, the sharp image of a particular individual fades itself was in crisis. The industrial system had proved that it could turn out things, but it had not proved that it could protect those who did the turning out. The rise of giant corporations and powerful financial institutions left the individual at bay, at the mercy of impersonal and seemingly capricious market forces. Like Steinbeck's Joads, the simple villagers could be bulldozed away by a decision made in some office across the ocean. Loyalty of the worker to his firm meant nothing before the juggernaut of business cycles, imports and immigrants who could work for a pittance. After a workman's death, his years of faithful work made no difference to his widow who was forced into pauperism. Capitalism could produce, but it couldn't protect those who did the producing. Was Marx right? Were the socialists right?

Out of the financial panics and depressions, out of the hardships and misery of the bad times in America, came the Populist and Progressive political movements here. These reform movements marched under the banner of social and economic reform, social insurance and trade unions. Protect the worker by allowing him to amass countervailing power. Protect him from the insecurity of capitahsm. For every risk within industrial society there should be a protection or remedy. The ensuing burst of social legislation before World War I and during the Depression and then again during the War on Poverty in the 1960's allowed capitalism to survive.

Helping and hurting

Then in the late I960's and 1970's the public mood changed again. There were renewed calls for the bulldozer along with new demands to check the delivery truck to see if it was too well stocked and too unselective in its deliveries. There was an increasing public feeling that welfare was helping unworthy as well as worthy poor. As in England after the Napoleonic wars, there were popular demands for tightening up welfare administration and reducing taxes.

Over these 400 years, public moods have alternated between blaming jobless people for their plight and blaming society for allowing such privation to come to individuals through no fault of their own.

Never have these two views collided so dramatically yet poignantly, as they do today. The tragic poor of central cities and the forgotten poor of rural areas cannot find work. Yet, the welfare system, designed to help people, also has the capability of hurting them even as it burdens the taxpayer. It seems that the industrial system has led the bulldozer and the delivery truck a merry chase for 400 years and won. Repairs to people never catch up with the new damage. There is a widespread perception that welfare programs have simultaneously succeeded and failed.

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What does the present welfare system do? It provides help to people during most economic calamities occuring in modern life; it stretches a safety net under the entire society below which no one is allowed to fall. But while such a net provides safety and security, it can also promote carelessness and laziness.

Within the welfare system no way can be found to discriminate between individual-caused calamities and system-caused calamities. Programs such as Aid to FamiUes with Dependent Children (AFDC) provide a good illustration of this complexity. Though AFDC assistance was originally designed for the widows of workers, it iuon became clear that the children's need for food was the same whether their father died or just left, or whether he was ever married to their mother. Who after all could identify or judge fault? And in any event, the children had to be fed. So the concept of need drove out the previous emphasis on personal responsibility.

In the years before the Depression, determination of need was based on personal knowledge of the people involved — and on local prejudices. In today's bureaucratic system, the unfair distinctions based on prejudice are erased. The sharp image of a particular individual fades, and only circumstances are left. And welfare law is written in the language of circumstances. If a woman is under 65, has children, has no breadwinner and her income and assets are under a certain amount, then these circumstances entitle her to assistance. In the administrative sense, there is no person, only circumstances. And as circumstances change, so do entitlements for welfare.

The unspoken but critical assumption undergirding the welfare legislation was that dire circumstances happen to people; people don't seek those circumstances. In the 1930's this assumption was valid. Few then chose to be certified as poor, or to leave their children to gain aid. Today, it is not unheard of for people to "use" unemployment, workman's compensation and welfare assistance by creating circumstances that entitle them to public help. If a father "leaves" — at least on the days when the social worker comes — then he can share in the increased AFDC payments as his family grows. He has created circumstances which enhance his income. The safety net has become a cradle.

Making welfare assistance depend on objective circumstances rather than personal judgments was a compassionate and progressive step forward. In this way, many people who desperately needed help gained assistance. But others, who deserved a swift kick got welfare instead. The line separating deserving and undeserving poor has become fuzzy. Though compassionate in intent, the bureaucratic approach to welfare has caused and allowed more people to make irresponsible life decisions and more people to end up needing public help. It has made it easier for people to become more dependent, to lean more on government and less on themselves, their families and their friends.

Welfare is complex, value-and race-laden, and morally ambiguous. Consider the following situations. Does welfare help or hurt? Is it a safety net or a cradle?

People and circumstances

A 14-year-old Chicago girl becomes pregnant. She wants her baby; she imagines how good it will be to have a baby who really loves her. With the baby she obtains AFDC assistance and rents an apartment. Welfare is her way out of her mother's house which is drenched with anger and too many mean men. Would less or more welfare have been better?

A working mother in Springfield, dog-tired after work, slumps down before her TV set. She has used food stamps to buy candy bars, taco chips, bologna, bread and cheese. The mother responds to the children's persistent calls for supper with a weary: "Go fix yourself a sandwich." For top long, suppers have been candy and sandwiches. Medical exams for school disclosed that the children are seriously anemic. Food stamps could have purchased adequate nutrition, but they were ill-used. The mother does not care or understand. She is tired from work, from life, from men who have abused her. What should welfare do?

A young man in Decatur is fired because he got smart with his boss. He doesn't mind. He can pick up unemployment checks and secretly get a part-time job and live well. He even knows a friend who tricked the workman's compensation system and is now living well without working at all.

Finally, consider a black man in his late thirties in East St. Louis. He lives off the welfare checks of several women. He loves his two children, but he has no conception of what it means for a father to be a dependable, providing and consistent parent. He has never seen men act that way. He has only seen men proving their maleness in fighting, in drugs, in tricking the system and living smart and easy.

The welfare problem mirrors society. Liberals often fail to appreciate that compassion, however well intended, can lead people to both a meretricious behavior and to a dependency and weakness that bode ill both for themselves and for society. Conservatives, on the other hand, frequently fail to see the bitter pain and harm that society metes out to individuals in not providing jobs, security, challenge and meaning in life.

Welfare policy is today confounded at three different levels. It is inadequate at the level of the individual because only a few of the ingredients which make up a good life can be furnished to individuals through governmental money transfers. Compassion and kindness are priceless hallmarks of our way of life. Bygone times were often brutal and heartless, where those on top could deal as they chose with those beneath them. And while no one would advocate a return to a ruthless laissez-faire in welfare policy, we must be aware that too much weakness and generosity in raising a child or in running a society can destroy the integrity of either. Too many opportunities for getting by without making responsible decisions will result in less responsible and animate citizens. Too many opportunities for gaining unearned income through welfare will attract exactly those persons for whom the assistance is not intended. An impersonal bureaucracy can validate circumstances; it cannot deal with unique individuals in need.

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Welfare policy, at a second level, inevitably fails to deal fairly among individuals. AFDC programs are designed to help families with children when, for whatever reasons, income falls too low. Then as family income again increases, assistance is slowly decreased. If a meager first paycheck from a new job resulted in immediate termination of all welfare assistance, people would have little incentive to work. Thus, with work incentives, even after the family is earning $8,000, it will still be receiving perhaps $5,000 in welfare benefits in the form of food stamps, Medicaid and a small cash grant. But the rub is the fellow living next door. He might be earning the same salary as his neighbor, but receiving no welfare assistance at all. His only crime is that he was never so poor that he could apply for welfare, or perhaps he chose not to apply. So he receives no help for his costly family medical bills, no food stamps to help with high food costs and no cash assistance to help with rent.

There is no solution to this clash between meeting minimal needs, equity and work incentives. If a person were given no incentive to work in the form of a gradual reduction of welfare as earned income is received, he might very well never start work. Alternatively, if welfare benefits were kept very low, this would solve the inequity problem mentioned above by denying assistance to almost everyone and thus giving inadequate help to people in desperate straits. Finally, if the equity problem were solved by giving everyone with identical salary and circumstances equal assistance, the costs of welfare would skyrocket.

At a third level, welfare policy is in trouble because it has been asked to carry out an impossible mission for society. Welfare policy is viewed as a way of sewing up and making right a society rent by the privation, suffering and alienation caused by industrialization. Welfare policy cannot carry such a burden. Study of welfare policy inevitably leads to the fundamental question: what constitutes a good society and a good life? The welfare trail leads back toward the supportive wholeness of life in New Salem, but New Salem is irretrievably gone.

Life is wonderfully organic and whole. Each of us are intimations of forces larger than ourselves — in spirit, in community, and in nature. Modern man has sundered connections to these larger grounds of being and meaning by placing an exaggerated value on man's power and freedom. The obsession of Enlightenment thinkers to find a way forward for men, out from under the dogmas and authoritarianism of priests, professors, fathers and kings, led to an exaggerated notion of the individual as real in his aloneness. The machine became the new model of reality.

Man and machine

Not the moon reflecting on the water, not the story of the bravery of Little Bear the night the Red Berries Blew Down, not the rights for gleaning the barley field on the West Willow Bank — no longer were these the reality of the people. Reality came to be seen in what was produced. Reality was the wage one could sell one's labor for. Reality was the economy, and all else was secondary. Rather than the economic sphere of hfe being a subordinate part of the larger society, the tables were turned and the social sphere became a subordinate part of the larger economic realm. The shaping of industrial society to suit man has become transmogrified into the reshaping of man to suit the machine.

The misperception of the artificial and the transitory as reality is the delusion of modern times. The most well-intentioned welfare policy cannot set this right. The individual apart from his relationship to society is not real. The economy apart from nature and moral values is not real. The old village of New Salem was real, but it is gone. Our current village cannot be sustained by bulldozers and delivery trucks.

The great need is for exploration for new villages with a new balance and harmony of life, for villages based on more than the cash nexus, where there is a wholeness of life, where there is a realization that life is relationship: with God and the moral order, with family and friends and with nature.

At this fundamental level, welfare is imperative to help and to protect the helpless and needy. But it cannot by itself make right what industrial civilization has made wrong, or create a right conception of reality.

Leroy S. Wehrle is professor of economics and public affairs at Sangamon State University; former senior economist, Council of Economic Advisors to President Kennedy; Former Senior Fellow on Social and Urban Policy for the Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C.; and current chair of the World Food and Nutrition Study for the National Academy of Science.

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