The Government and the Collective Will
By Leonard Fein
Why not applaud both Al Gore and Bush the Younger for their endorsement of the idea that non-profit agencies, including in particular religious organizations, should play a much larger role in providing social services to citizens in need? After all, since government cannot possibly provide sufficiently for such people, why should it not facilitate the actions of others? And would not such actions, if indeed they were taken up, help the poor and the needy, and, as a bonus, help restore the civic culture?
Here's why not: An ideal society is one in which there is no poverty. Set that Utopian vision aside, and what's next best? Next best is a society that decides that it has an ongoing collective responsibility for those of its fellows who have been left behind. And how does a society meet that responsibility? Why, through the one mechanism that human ingenuity has developed to express the formal collective will of a people - through government.
It is government that is the principal voice of the collective will. And in the United States today, insofar as government does in fact express our collective will, it would appear that we remain decidedly ambivalent about our responsibility to those who have been left behind. Indeed, many of the actions of government - e.g., our peculiar form of financing political campaigns - result in locking out those whom ill fortune has left out.
Accordingly, any action of government to transfer responsibility to other sectors of society should be viewed with grave suspicion. On the surface, the Bush-Gore proposal may seem to offer a helping hand to the poor. But if, on examination, what the proposal aims to accomplish is for government to offer someone else's helping hand in place of its own, there is no benefit, and the proposal deserves to be condemned.
The diverse efforts in which Americans have traditionally and voluntarily engaged in order to help the poor are praiseworthy, indeed, and one may hope those efforts will expand. (And the government already encourages such conduct, most notably through its award of tax-exempt status to non-profit organizations.) After all, even in theory it is difficult to imagine that government alone can be adequate to the task. And in fact, with the American government, at least at the national level, very near broken, it is obvious that a compassionate citizenry is necessary. But it is at least equally necessary that government not be let off the hook of responsibility. Our citizenry, for example, no matter how passionately and compassionately aroused, cannot provide the kind of national health insurance that every other industrialized nation has.
Consider the welfare so-called reform that has resulted in a dramatic reduction in the number of Americans receiving welfare benefits. Now the data on the results of the "reform's" consequences are becoming available, and they are distressing in the extreme. Some number, perhaps as many as half or a tad more, of former welfare recipients have entered the job market. But nearly half have lost their benefits, have no jobs, thus have no recourse but to turn to charitable agencies for help. The charitable agencies, such as the soup kitchens of New York City, are swamped, confronted with burdens they cannot reasonably be expected to shoulder. Most of us are pleased at last to be free to ignore the struggles of these lost souls, rendered invisible by a system that has officially chosen to neglect them. But the fact that we no longer pay attention does not mean, not at all, that they no longer suffer.
Now, should the question of whether a child in New York City - or Milwaukee, or Boston, or Seattle - has no place to live or must go to bed hungry depend on my charitable disposition or yours - or should we all grit our teeth and do the right thing, together?
Let the government continue to facilitate our private instincts to kindness. But is not the issue before us less one of kindness than one of justice? And justice is not the preserve of private citizens. Justice is dispensed, or withheld, in the halls of government and in our courts. Is it not unjust that some families are required to choose between paying rent and buying food? Is it not unjust that some children will not receive the medical care that all children deserve because their families have no health insurance? (Once upon a time, health insurance came with the job. No more, surely not with the low-paying and often part-time jobs that those at the bottom of the ladder hold even in these boom times.)
Only government can mandate an increase in the minimum wage - or, more reasonably, a livable wage. Is it really too much to insist that those who contract with the government be required to pay their employees at the very least a penny more than the prevailing definition of poverty? Indeed, is it too much to insist that all employers be so required?
But no new culture of support for charitable agencies can effect such requirements. As much as I believe and encourage acts of kindness, we as compassionate donors or volunteers cannot do this thing alone. It is we as citizens who are called upon to act.
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