In the thread of comments to yesterday’s post, Stealth Jew raised the matter of life choices, which of course is essential to Plain thinking – anyone who walks the Plain way is making a counter-culture life choice, and anyone who does that sooner or later comes up against the question of how they will finance it. Plain dress diminishes chances of finding employment drastically. Plain people want to raise their children at home, not put them in nursery, and often prefer to homeschool and homechurch as well. Plain people also prefer family-based employment rather than leaving the home empty while the household members go their separate ways to employment by people whose values they (probably) do not share. But Plain people traditionally have preferred to avoid accepting any kind of government benefit – and in some traditions do not vote either. So the question of funding life choices is a live Plain issue.
Jesus said the poor would always be with us. It seems He spoke truth indeed.
In America President Obama has instigated the biggest programme of public investment since Roosevelt’s New Deal. This has won him some vociferous enemies, notably the Tea Party movement, who view the direction he is taking as disastrous. In some ways they have to be right.
The government is not an entrepreneur and has no funds of its own, it can only administer public funds. Therefore when the government goes into the business of providing household incomes and a large raft of public services, what happens is a short term solution with a long term larger problem attached. A kind of financial fistula is created. The hole closes over on the surface but gets bigger underneath. The government must derive its income from taxes, and if the taxes come from incomes paid by the government, then the result is that government income is de facto going to be less than expenditure, which will take the country into debt in short order (as it has in the UK). The suffering of the poor at least should be relieved for now, but the result will be that the country will enter a slow economic decline that may be disguised, as it has been in the UK, by public borrowing.
So the solution of the Tea Party movement is that relief of poverty should be the work of the church and the family and the generosity of private individuals. Their approach is that hardship provides a natural motivation to the workshy and an incentive to frugality. I agree with that. It seems to be common sense to me.
I read a comment online on this subject a couple of days ago. A lady posted that in Iceland the country had become poor for this very reason, and the needs of the people have been met by government initiatives. She said that as a result two things had happened 1) the Icelandic people had lost their generosity. My need would be the concern not of my neighbour but of my government. 2) The people had lost their faith in God. Need had been the spur that caused people to turn to God in prayer and experience His presence and provision. Made comfortable by government systems, they forgot Him.
I have no idea if she was right because I don’t know anything about Iceland – but I was interested in the point she made.
But… there is a lurking ‘but’, for me.
England did not always have the provision it does now. There was a time when poor people had no government benefits. The church did provide assistance, but the people who administered that help were not always sensitive, understanding or kind. It was notorious for being a cripplingly humiliating experience.
There was the workhouse, again notorious for the sorrow it brought. At its entrance, husband was separated from wife, brothers from sisters, parents from children. I had in one of my congregations a woman who grew up in the workhouse, then married a man who was disabled early in the war. She cared for him all her adult life. By the time he died, she was too old to work. A generous, Godly woman who tithed even her small pension in support of the needs of others, what would her options have been?
Before William Henry Beveridge’s Welfare State, the poor lost their teeth, died of diseases that could have been cured, left small children alone at home while their mother went out to work, and subsisted on bread and broken biscuits. Before the mass production that has so damaged the environment and enslaved the poor overseas in sweatshops, the UK poor crippled their feet in boots that did not fit or went barefoot, and dressed in rags, unable to afford school uniforms or warm winter coats.
There are two books I think people really ought to read to help them make up their mind – or at least guide their thinking – in these matters. One is Helen Forrester’s Twopence To Cross the Mersey, the other is Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. Anyone who would like to know what life looked like before we had the UK Welfare State can read all about it here.
The more I look into these things, the more I am forced to this conclusion: the only economically viable way forward for a nation is reliance on low taxation and wealth generated in the private sector, with public sector employment and provision kept very small. But this would increase reliance on private generosity to turn around the social ills that create poverty, and support the weak and vulnerable. And experience from my own life, observation and reading convinces me that such generosity has not been forthcoming for everybody. For me, it was, thank God. Generous and frugal family members helped me financially when I was in need, kind friends offered me work – and sometimes, unsought by me, Christian brothers and sisters gave me gifts of money because the Lord had told them to. But the poor who are always with us are our responsibility, because we belong to one another. If we cannot afford government benefits because their provision takes the nation down economically, and our private generosity in the past left them crippled, sick, cold, afraid, heartbroken, hungry and dying – what’s our plan?
As a coda to this, I want to tell you something God said to me about Barack Obama. When the US elections were on, God called me to pray. I know next to nothing about US politics, so my praying was not informed by an educated mind. All I know was when election day came, God said to me that Barack Obama was chosen by Him as His man for America at this time, and told me that Obama would be someone who brought hope to a people who had been without hope. That’s what the Spirit said in my heart, and He made me pray and pray and pray until there came a point when He said, ‘You can stop now’. This was before all the election results were in, but He said I could stop praying at that point. I have no comment to make on this occurrence, but I do recognize the voice of God in my heart, and I witness that this is what He said to me.