Herbert Spencer and the welfare state

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)

The philosopher Herbert Spencer, commenting in 1851 on the possible effects of welfare, a century before the inception of the modern welfare state:

We do not consider it true kindness in a mother to gratify her child with sweetmeats that are certain to make it ill. We should think it a very foolish sort of benevolence which led a surgeon to let his patient’s disease progress to a fatal issue, rather than inflict pain by an operation. Similarly, we must call those spurious philanthropists, who, to prevent present misery, would entail greater misery upon future generations. All defenders of a poor-law must, however, be classed amongst such. That rigorous necessity which, when allowed to act on them, becomes so sharp a spur to the lazy, and so strong a bridle to the random, these paupers’ friends would repeal, because of the wailings it here and there produces.

Spencer’s comments could be interpreted as implying that welfare may have negative effects on a society’s gene pool:

Blind to the fact, that under the natural order of things society is constantly excreting its unhealthy, imbecile, slow, vacillating, faithless members, these unthinking, though well-meaning, men advocate an interference which not only stops the purifying process, but even increases the vitiation — absolutely encourages the multiplication of the reckless and incompetent by offering them an unfailing provision, and discourages the multiplication of the competent and provident by heightening the prospective difficulty of maintaining a family.

Spencer did not, however, condemn charitable actions in general:

To that charity which may be described as helping men to help themselves, [the foregoing argument] makes no objection — countenances it rather. And in helping men to help themselves, there remains abundant scope for the exercise of a people’s sympathies. Accidents will still supply victims on whom generosity may be legitimately expended. Men thrown upon their backs by unforeseen events, men who have failed for want of knowledge inaccessible to them, men ruined by the dishonesty of others, and men in whom hope long delayed has made the heart sick, may, with advantage to all parties, be assisted.

The above extracts are taken from: Herbert Spencer, Social Statics, chapter 25, available at Online Library of Liberty.

Tesco and the ‘living wage’

Tesco says national living wage will cost it £500m by 2020

Tesco has said George Osborne’s new ‘national living wage’ will cost it £500m by 2020, putting further pressure on profitability at Britain’s biggest supermarket.

The current Tesco boss, Dave Lewis, said focusing on profits had led Tesco to make bad choices for staff as well as customers. ‘On behalf of myself and the team, the only thing we can say for the choices we made is sorry.’ (The Guardian)

The implication here is presumably that, if resources are transferred from shareholders to people who are paid a relatively low wage, this must be a good thing.

No wonder the share price has been falling if the CEO says, in effect: ‘Sorry we have been trying to make profits for shareholders.’

Maternity pay

When my colleague Dr Fabian Wadel was a graduate student in economics at Oxford, he once expressed to another such student (male) possible reservations about the idea of maternity leave. The other student found this so unacceptable that he stormed off. Fabian says his reaction was not atypical.

In his conversation with the fellow graduate student, Fabian did not express the most serious objection to maternity leave, which is that it deprives employers of the freedom to employ whom they wish. They will tend to employ fewer women if they know that a potential liability such as maternity leave is attached to them. Since the state does not wish fewer women to be employed, but more, the result is that quotas then have to be introduced with which employers have to comply.

Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn recently said that self-employed women should have access to maternity pay. Presumably this is because it is considered ‘unfair’ that they should miss out on an advantage provided to women who are employed. If one regards maternity leave as allowing women to have children without risking dismissal, the idea of applying it where a woman employs herself may seem illogical. But perhaps it should really be regarded as a form of unemployment benefit.

Jeremy Corbyn is proposing that, in the case of self-employed women, it should be the state (as opposed to the employer) which funds maternity pay. Intervention is a violation of the freedom to contract as one chooses. However, it is not clear which is the worse violation: forcing an individual employer to pay for an arrangement he would not otherwise have chosen, or forcing all taxpayers to contribute an additional amount towards funding such an arrangement.

I appeal for financial and moral support in improving my position.
I need people to provide moral support both for fund-raising, and as temporary or possibly long-term workers. Those interested should read my post on interns.

Early closing and the road to serfdom

Jarrow marchers (1936)

In the pre-totalitarian world which prevailed in this country before the onset of the Welfare State, there was a constant awareness of the risk of starvation. An undersupply of food would lead to physical weakness, and eventually illness and death. People were motivated to earn money in any way they could, and to gain favour with employers who were capable of paying or feeding them.

People then wished to do what their employers wanted – unlike employees now, who will not, for example, do laundry within the hours for which they are paid because, they say, that is too ‘personal’.

The underlying ideology of totalitarianism was, however, already present then. For example, there was a wish to prevent people from competing with one another in ways which might lead some to improve their position faster than others.

At a very early stage, interventionist legislation was brought in which had the effect of restricting competition.

When my mother was about eight, that is, about 1910, my maternal grandfather, who was a shopkeeper, started to take her to music halls on Sundays, because he was not allowed to sell anything in his shop on that day of the week.

The reforms of 1904 to 1914 introduced a number of restrictions on the operation of shops in Britain, including limiting trading hours. For example, the Shop Hours Act 1904 gave powers to local authorities to make ‘closing orders’, fixing the hour at which shops had to stop serving customers; while the Shops Act 1911 made it compulsory for shop assistants to be given half a day off every week (‘early closing’).

Previously my grandfather had been willing, and able, to sell things at any time. People who wanted to buy a bar of soap or a packet of sugar in the night could throw stones up at his bedroom window, and he would get up and come downstairs to serve them. By being more willing to provide this service than other shopkeepers, he could have made more money, allowing his additional efforts to be rewarded.

The rules on trading and employment by shops must have reduced the ability of people like my grandfather to improve their position for the benefit of themselves and their families.

The famous Jarrow March which took place in 1936 is now taken to show the inadequate nature of unemployment benefit at that time. The level of benefits available two or three decades earlier would have been even more limited. It seems reasonable to assume that the restrictions that were introduced in the early twentieth century, doubtless bringing about job losses in some instances, will have caused harm in some cases, including starvation and death.

As Friedrich Hayek wrote in The Constitution of Liberty,

A society that does not recognize that each individual has values of his own which he is entitled to follow can have no respect for the dignity of the individual and cannot really know freedom.

The Welfare State and the exponential function

The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. (Professor Albert Bartlett)

I do not know that I would agree that unawareness of the exponential function is the greatest shortcoming of the human race, but certainly this unawareness (real or apparent) facilitates legislation which is designed to reduce the advantages of one section of the population while increasing those of another. This may be represented as ‘fair’, but it should not be overlooked that it may produce drastic shifts in the balance of the population quite rapidly.
If an initial quantity A increases by n%, and the result is again increased by n%, and so on, the resulting growth is shown by the graph of
y = A(1 + n/100)^x.
To illustrate how this may apply to groups in the population which are increasing continuously, here are the charts of a hypothetical population group which numbered one million in 1945 (at the onset of the Welfare State) and increased by 1%, 2%, 3% and 4% respectively until the present day, i.e. 66 years later.

Characteristically, the exponential graph remains close to the lower axis at first, but the gradient gradually increases until it is more vertical than horizontal and tends asymptotically to infinity (i.e. it approaches infinity ever more closely and rapidly, but without ever reaching it).
On the timescale being considered, the increase in the population supposed to increase by 4% per annum is already acquiring the characteristically exponential appearance, aiming upwards rather than merely along the lower axis.
The unsophisticated are unlikely to imagine how great the changes may be which ultimately result from relatively small percentage changes in taxation or benefits, which may be applied, initially, only to small populations.

I appeal for financial and moral support in improving my position. I need people to provide moral support both for fundraising, and as temporary or possibly long-term workers. Those interested should read my post on interns.

NHS budget ‘to rise for ever’

Andrew Lansley last night warned that NHS spending may have to rise for ever, simply to keep pace with rising life expectancy.

The Health Secretary told the Spectator magazine he was not satisfied with managing to get a real-terms rise in health spending for this Parliament – he wanted to see increases in the years beyond. Mr Lansley said the NHS was still immune from cuts, even though other departments were having to cut back on spending.

He added: ‘We have been very clear that the NHS is going to have real terms increases year on year. We have a profile of rising demographics and demand and cost pressures and technology in the NHS.’

Asked whether he believed that spending would have to rise in real terms every year from now ‘until kingdom come’, he said: ‘I believe so.’ (Daily Mail, 14 December 2011)

This is misdirection of attention in order to focus attention and blame on those of pensionable age – a population with above-average IQs. The ‘rising demographics’ referred to – rising expectation of life – may owe something to the increasing number of people who reach pensionable age as a result of NHS expenditure throughout their lives, rather than as a result of their own genetic endowment and prudent life-style. But is the expectation of life not also somewhat reduced by the ever-increasing population of life dependents? Kept alive at considerable expense, the genetically dysfunctional must, statistically, have a below-average expectation of life.
And surely this ever-growing population must contribute far more to the increasing costs of the NHS (and also of ‘education’ and other forms of ‘welfare’) than does the population of pensioners which statistically has an above-average IQ, and is hence the most convenient scapegoat.
On page 23 of the same issue of the Daily Mail there is a report on the case of a girl who has died at 13 after a short lifetime of painful and expensive medical treatments, reduced in her case by her convincing her parents that she would prefer to be free to get what she could out of life without treatment (at least without the most expensive treatment, which kept her in constant pain).
How does the life expectancy of those who never have a normal expectation of life, but are kept alive as victims of the NHS, affect the overall life expectancy figures?

* * *

The state pension system was not originally part of the (oppressive) Welfare State, but mimicked commercial schemes, in which what you paid in was supposed to be what determined what was to be paid out to you at a certain predetermined age, whether or not it provided adequately for your ‘needs’, as determined either by your own aims in life, or by what other people would consider acceptable.
As the costs of the Welfare State, and its growing population of dependents, increased, the state pension was brought under the umbrella of Welfare by being retrospectively means-tested. This brought the population of pensioners, with its above-average IQ, into play as an acceptable scapegoat on whom the rising costs of the NHS etc. could be blamed.
So long as they had commercial-type pensions they were outside the benefits system, and pensions were paid ‘as of right’. That is the reason that I, as a victim of state-funded ’education’, made voluntary contributions for so many years.
Now attention can be focussed on this above-average population as the cause of the rising costs.

* * *

Further misdirection of attention is in asserting that it is not ‘fair’ that those who go into ‘care homes’ should have to sell their houses (if they have them) to pay for the ‘care’ they receive. This, of course, will lead to families being deprived of their inheritance.
Families are said to be ‘betrayed’ by care home funding, which leads to many pensioners being forced to sell their homes. This is described as a ‘scandal’, and it is hoped that a ‘fairer’ system can be devised. This rhetoric in itself should make one aware that a misdirection of attention is involved.
The population of those who reach pensionable age, and have homes to sell, are a population with an above-average IQ; so will their offspring be. So surely the modern mind can see nothing ‘unfair’ in a relatively high-IQ population being deprived of the inheritance it might have had from its parents, also with (statistically) above-average IQs. It is the obtaining of advantages from a previous generation of above-average people which is regarded as unfair, surely? How can ‘fairness’ be increased by transferring assets from one relatively high-IQ population to another?
And so we infer that these expressions of concern that homes will be lost to some of those who might have inherited them must have an ulterior motive. What is presumably aimed at is justification for an additional tax of some kind, resulting in the usual transfer of resources to a relatively low-IQ population.
It is suggested that what a pensioner pays towards his care home fees should be ‘capped’ with ‘the state stepping in’ to pay the rest. That means taxpayers stepping in to pay the rest, including pensioners who do not go into care homes. ‘In a further blow Health Secretary Andrew Lansley refused to rule out a pensioner tax to pay for old age care.’ Aha! This idea – an extra tax on those above retirement age, mooted in the Dilnot Report – approaches more closely the principle of transferring assets from the relatively high to relatively low IQs.
The population of pensioners who do not go into care homes at all may be expected to have higher average IQs than those who do go into them and have homes they might be required to sell, because the former are likely to have better genetic constitutions, have lived more prudently and/or successfully, or because they have devoted relatives, which are all factors likely to be correlated with high IQs.
So it may be seen as ‘fair’ that those pensioners who do not go into care homes should be taxed in order to transfer assets to those who do go into them.
This is no doubt the real reason for blaming the rise in life expectancy of pensioners for the increasing costs of the NHS, so that as usual a population of people with above-average IQs can be penalised for the benefit of a population with below-average IQs.
As for changing demographics, figures for life expectancy are usually quoted in relation to specific ages. E.g. people who are 50 now have a life expectancy of so much. But by the ages one sees quoted, the majority of those with a low life expectancy at birth are likely to have died off, although not before being a considerable drain on the NHS, state education (with ‘special needs’ tutors?), etc. Clearly these are an important part of the real demography, usually left out of the discussion. Those who are still alive at pensionable age (a population with a relatively high average IQ) are certainly not responsible for the rise in the costs of the NHS caused by the genetically dysfunctional (a population with a low average IQ).

Abortion policy: other motives

Women considering a termination could be offered independent counselling as part of the biggest shake-up of abortion laws for 20 years.

The move is designed to give women a breathing space before going ahead, and pro-life campaigners claim it could cut the abortion rate by a third, or 60,000 terminations a year. At present counselling is offered by abortion providers, but there are concerns that the advice may be biased because they are run as businesses.

Under the proposed changes, abortion clinics would be told to offer free access to independent counselling run on separate premises by a group which does not carry out abortions. (Daily Mail, 29th August 2011)

Allegedly, there is a fear that a financial motive might enter into the counselling given by abortion clinics; consequently, women should be given counselling which is ‘free’ (to them, but not to the taxpayer) and which cannot be influenced by any financial motive (of profit to the abortion clinic, or reduction of cost to the taxpayer in the form of child benefit, education etc.).
But, without going into the rights and wrongs of abortion per se, is anyone considering the possible motivation of MPs to increase the rate of growth of the population?
- We may guess that the IQ of the population of women seeking crisis abortions is below that of the population as a whole. Those with above average IQs are more likely to be sufficiently forethoughtful and efficient to avoid unwanted pregnancies.
- We know that MPs are motivated to ensure that legislation achieves a transfer of financial resources (freedom of action) from a population with higher average IQs to one with lower average IQs. This motive is in no way diminished by the fact that the policy has been applied so successfully since the onset of the Welfare State in 1945 that the country is already bankrupt.
- In the eyes of MPs, that is no reason at all for putting a brake on the increasing rate of decline, which can all be conveniently blamed on populations with above-average IQs, such as pensioners and bankers.
- After all, their salaries as MPs depend on their having appealed to the electorate as likely to advocate redistributive policies of this kind, and will depend on it again at the next election.

There are many similar examples of ideology on which critical analyses could be being published by Oxford Forum if it were provided with adequate funding to do so.
While it is true that Western civilisation is in general beginning to crumble, the decades of Welfare State culture and its redistributive policies in this country in particular have finally brought it to its knees, with children unable to speak by school age, old people being abused and killed in care homes and hospitals, riots in major cities, and one of the fastest rising national debts in the world.
This state of affairs has been allowed to run free of any criticism or reform from either the academic community or former aristocracy, both of which are by now fully complicit in the wholesale destruction.
This is a plea for funding for our independent university, or at least one active and fully financed research department. We appeal to all universities, corporations or individuals who consider themselves to be in a position to give support, either financial or by working here.
We represent the only possible chance to halt, or at least soften, the impact of the impending crash.

Evolution, subspecies and the Welfare Junkies

If a radical change is introduced in the structure of a situation, such as was introduced in 1945 with the onset of the Welfare State, there are two reasons why what people anticipate as the consequences of this change may turn out to be wildly inaccurate, even if their anticipations are not rationalised and intended to conceal their real motives.
It is a fact of genetics that if a situation arises which favours some new subsection of a species of plants or animals, that subspecies will quickly arise and expand, with characteristics which are increasingly well adapted to the favourable situation. And the development of the subspecies will increase geometrically with every generation.
It is a less well established fact, but may be surmised, that human psychology adapts itself to the circumstances in which it finds itself. If it knows that its survival and that of its offspring is entirely dependent on its own achievements in making provision for them all, it will be motivated in certain ways. If, on the other hand, it finds that it will be rewarded (at least to a certain extent) for dependency, it will go into a psychological mode that will make the best use of these circumstances, and drives and ambitions which it might otherwise have will fall into abeyance (or repression).
In the Daily Mail of 9 July, A. N. Wilson wrote an article about the growth of populations of welfare junkies, as shown on a BBC television programme.

The participants on the programme will probably not live as long as the average middle-class person who abstains from heroin and a daily diet of chips. But they are still — those of them who do not die of an overdose — going to live a full span. Most of these families, who have never worked and are not really in a position to work, or to do anything useful ... will simply have to be ‘contained’ by society. ...When they have wrecked their livers with alcohol and their digestions with fried food, they will be taken to expensive National Health Service hospitals. And when they can no longer manage on their own, they will be taken into even more expensive care homes. ...We have had 66 years of a fully-funded welfare state.
(From article ‘The welfare junkies’)

My parents, with very high IQs and aristocratic ancestry, lived to 82 and 89 respectively with very little contact with the NHS until the very end, when they were considered too old for it to be worth trying to prolong their lives. On the other hand, it is probable that many who would not previously have survived to pensionable age now do so, at considerable expense to the NHS. And these are probably more likely to go into care homes than those with the highest IQs, such as my parents, who had good genetic constitutions, a frugal and forethoughtful lifestyle, and a devoted offspring (in me) who would do everything possible to prevent their being taken into care.
The proportions of different types of people within the population of pensioners has been changing continuously since 1945. Before that date, careful and conscientious people like my parents, with above-average IQs, probably predominated, and people who had lived as Welfare Junkies, or in some equivalent way, were probably a small minority. If the relative proportions have not already been reversed, they are surely on the way to being so.

Obese mothers and the loss of a principle

A newborn girl was taken into care because of fears her weight would balloon in the care of her obese parents. The child was removed from her mother within hours of being born earlier this week and has been placed with a foster family. Her parents, who are both clinically obese, have already had two children taken into care amid concerns about the youngsters' weight.
They have been warned they risk losing their remaining four children if they too fail to shed pounds.

Before she became pregnant, the mother weighed 23st. At that time one of her children, a toddler, weighed 4st and her 13-year-old son weighed 16st. Social workers in Dundee confirmed they took the baby because of fears the infant's weight would balloon. Her devastated mother, who is 40, discharged herself from hospital on Tuesday, a day after the birth. She and her husband, who cannot be named for legal reasons, were warned last year to bring their children's weight down.

Last night a Dundee council spokesman said the decision to take the girl was given 'careful consideration'. She added: 'It is never taken lightly and always at the forefront is what is the best course of action for the welfare and safety of the child or children.' (Daily Mail, 22 October 2009)

Before the Welfare State came in, in 1945, there must have been many people who would have found the idea of a new-born baby being taken away from its mother, whether or not the mother was obese, horrifying in principle. Now this does not seem to be the case. People may argue over whether the reasons are good enough, but the basic idea that the state should be free to remove children in their 'best interests' (as assessed by agents of the collective) has apparently been generally accepted.

Cameron: "we are all to blame"

How do you reduce crime in a socialist society? David Cameron, supposedly a ‘conservative’, has said:

... the police could not be blamed for rising crime. Nor, he added, was it up to officers to mend the ‘broken society’ responsible for increasing lawlessness. ‘We broke our society — all of us, as parents, as citizens, as members of society — and we have a shared responsibility, with Government, for fixing it.’ (Daily Mail 18 May 2007)

No, it was not the individuals who have broken modern society. It was the rise and rise of legislation influenced by socialist ideas. Especially, and crucially, society was broken by the inception of the Welfare State in 1945.

Those responsible for this were middle-class intellectuals who should have known better, such as those who held office in the Attlee government, or supported it, and who planned to use their supposed concern for the numerically large working class in order to destroy territorial individualism.

Extracts from article ‘Dual Britannia’ by David Kynaston (Financial Times Arts & Books 18 May 2007), my comments in square brackets:

“Oh wonderful people of Britain!” exalted Iris Murdoch. ”After all the ballyhoo and eyewash, they’ve had the guts to vote against Winston! I can’t help feeling that to be young is very heaven!” Another Oxford philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, danced a jig at hearing the news that Labour had won the July 1945 election by a landslide, while a precocious public schoolboy in Sussex, the 16-year-old Bernard Levin, was so ecstatic that he hung a red flag out of his window and braved the consequences ...

Put baldly, there existed in 1945, at the apparent birth of a new world, a dichotomy between the expectations of most progressive-minded politicians, planners, public intellectuals and opinion-formers — call them ”activators” — on the one hand and those of the great mass of ”ordinary people” (still some 75 per cent working class) on the other. ... For all the Attlee government’s notable achievements [i.e. for all the appalling and irreversible onslaughts on individual liberty] — above all the creation of the NHS and the modern welfare state — this mismatch was soon apparent. ...

There were many reasons why Old Labour failed to enthuse the electorate, but four areas were particularly telling. [E.g. divergence between the social conservatism of the working class and the progressivism of the "activators".] ... the millions were no more enlightened when it came to education. "The Party are kidding themselves if they think that the comprehensive school has any popular appeal," was how the shrewd, Lancastrian, working-class Minister of Education George Tomlinson put it in early 1951; but by later that year the abolition of the divide between grammars and secondary moderns was official Labour policy, following intensive pressure from the largely middle-class National Association of Labour Teachers. Towards the end of the decade an authoritative survey (by Mark Abrams) of working-class attitudes to education found widespread admiration for grammar schools and almost equally pervasive suspicion of the goals of comprehensive schooling, especially the egalitarian aspect. Yet not all that long after, in 1965, Anthony Crosland (Highgate and Oxford) famously, or infamously, set out to destroy "every fucking grammar school" in England and Wales ...

The working class, like the non-leftwing middle class, were at the time (the 1940s and 50s) largely uninterested in collectivism, planning and intervention. They wanted to identify with their own territories, families, small houses with gardens, and pay packets. The ‘privileged’ middle classes had, on the whole, larger territories and a different range of activities, which included intellectual and cultural activities. In destroying their lives, the ‘activators’ (as Kynaston calls them) severely damaged territorialism and individual liberty throughout the population, leading to the current breakdown of civilisation.

Civilisation, in any of the ways in which I would define it, has already broken down, although this may well continue to become more obvious to the naked eye of even the politically correct observer.

A civilised society may be defined as one in which an individual has a clearly defined territory within which he is free to operate. In a non-territorial, tribal society he must constantly refer to the subjective preferences and pressures of the communal group.

In modern society it has become difficult to be sure of whether one is acting within one’s rights or not, and any form of behavior can be turned into an imprisonable crime if it is made the subject of an ASBO. E.g. ‘You are not allowed to look as if you might be intending to visit your family in such-and-such streets within such-and-such times of day.’

Unfortunately, the word ‘civilised’ is nowadays used to refer to ideals which cannot be achieved, or even aimed at, without unlimited confiscation and reduction of liberty. E.g. ‘In a civilised society no child of school-age should have to spend hours every day attending to the needs of a physically disabled parent.’ This is a goal which recedes into infinite distance as increasing numbers of the genetically dysfunctional are kept alive to reproductive age by the NHS, and as everyone is ideologically indoctrinated by their state-financed ‘education’ with a total aversion to doing anything ‘menial’ (or really useful) for anybody else.