Welfare: Average America?

Talking about social welfare is serious, influential, and taboo in the American context. Doling government entitlements seems to go against Puritan, anti-tax leanings that cut across the aisle. To struggle and to fail indicates an individual moral ill, whereas profitability is divine providence. And to entitle a group to receive social welfare is to assert they are somehow more than deserving--a controversial charity case of public concern which is unmerited given the failure of individuals to provide for themselves.

Do you agree? I want to avoid normative assertions in this post. I don't want to imply that certain concepts of social welfare are better or worse. That might sound weak and indecisive, but I promise it's so I don't exclude anyone from the conversation I hope to have.

Whether you're Democrat, Republican, or other, I feel the above statement is a more than apt description of American attitudes toward social welfare--even among welfare recipients. My own concept of social welfare before coming to Norway was one of inequality and unfairness (however justified): welfare recipients are asserted to be incapable of providing for themselves, so they become public burdens for the rest of society which doesn't have so hard a time succeeding. Again, taboo and serious, but I encourage anyone to disagree.

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The American concept of social welfare is rife with sympathy and pity. After studying it, I define sympathy as a sort of "doing unto others as you would have done unto you." Vital here is the dark chasm that separates self and other. There is no solidarity, and though noble, sympathy is often motivated by pity. Pity is a state of personal sadness or distress that is relieved by doing what we feel is "right" (and often times what makes us happy). The emphasis here is on self. The entire experience of sympathetic charity is discussed in terms of "me" ("us") and "them."

At the end of the day, sympathetic charity and goodwill is a great start. It still means something good gets done (however that's defined), but could it also mean it puts a limit on the amount of good we can accomplish? If so, it has to deal with how we--as a society-- think about social welfare.

Targeted welfare programs are good for recipients. For instance, affirmative action indisputably increases minority representation in higher education, and lower-income insurance programs like Medicaid are well-intended, too. But at the end of the day, these targeted programs miss out on a huge opportunity to discuss what it means to be American. Here's why.

Targeted welfare programs qualify general benefits of citizenship. While they're pragmatic to social liberals in the United States, such programs are not empathetic with the groups they benefit. They can qualify the question of civil liberties by implying that "the poor" or "minorities" in some way cannot independently achieve what is a generally-held standard quality of life. Targeted welfare divides the United States into racially- and economically-charged camps of "beneficiaries" and "non-beneficiaries." No matter where you sit, inferiority takes hold in a nation that commits itself to universal equality. Such rights to education, health, and general welfare are secured for some but not all. Or, there is something especially inferior about some that prevents them from providing for themselves in the same way most people do. Some are entitled, some are not; and qualification for entitlement is failure on any number of items for which we expect personal responsibility.

Is this the inclusive, free, and equal America we strive to be? Does this system benefit all concerned? More importantly, is there any better way of alleviating extreme and illegitimate social inequalities without marginalizing individual rights and freedoms? In Part 2, I will share what I've learned from the Norwegian example.