Sportingly, The Sun offered Susan the chance to make a few quid manning the Shop-A-Sponger Hotline over the weekend, but she didn’t fancy the disruption. “I shop on a Saturday,” she said, “and on Sunday I sit at home and relax a bit.”
But then my eye fell on the amount “scrounger Susan” had managed to scrounge: thirty thousand pounds in sixteen years—two thousand pounds per annum. Forty quid a week. She and her mum get another forty-five-pound housing benefit to live in what looks like an attractive and spacious semidetached house, and she’s trying to claim “income support” on medical grounds, because she suffers “monthly painful spells.” But, if an average forty pounds a week is the best a “super-sponger” can do, it should remind us of a basic truth: the greatest crime of welfare isn’t that it’s a waste of money, but that it’s a waste of people. Forty quid wasn’t enough for a “welfare queen” to queen around on, but it was just enough to enable her to avoid making anything of her life, enough to let her sit around all week “listening to CDs and watching videos.”
“I just haven’t been given a chance,” says Susan. But when the space on your CV for the period from adolescence to early middle-age is one big blank, no one’s ever going to give you a chance. It’s hard to think of anything capitalism red in tooth and claw could have done to Susan Moore that would have left her worse off than the great sapping nullity in which Her Majesty’s Government has maintained her for her entire adult life.
When welfarism becomes the organizing principle of society, as it is in much of the west these days, the danger is that a Susan Moorish inertia descends on the entire state. I see that the Duke of Edinburgh has called for schoolchildren to play more team games because they learn so many “valuable lessons”—effective cooperation, self-discipline, rules, competition, etc. Good luck to His Royal Highness commending those to Britain’s educational establishment.
Primary schools have given up on the egg-and-spoon and sack race because, under the great Cult of Self-Esteem, it’s too much to ask a child to endure the sting of defeat. A third of London schools play no competitive sports. Teachers are uncomfortable with the notion of an “opposing side” one must strive to “beat”—just as, in the war on terror, many grown-ups are uncomfortable with the notion of “the enemy”: to the progressive mind, there are no enemies, just friends whose grievances we haven’t yet fully acknowledged.
If the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, it seems unlikely victory in Afghanistan owed much to the playing fields of Tipton Comp. Assuming the schools of Tipton and Luton still have any playing fields, their main contribution appears to have been to the losing side—the British Muslims captured among the Taliban and al-Qaeda forces. Even when it’s not specifically teaching you about the millennia of atrocities committed in the name of British imperialism, the modern multicultural state at the very minimum absolves you of any meaningful allegiance. So it’s not surprising some of us seek it elsewhere.
As an idea, the multicultural welfare state is too weak to have any purchase on us: that, indeed, is its principal virtue in the eyes of its few boosters; politically speaking, it’s an allegiance for those who disdain allegiance. Most of us give a shrug of indifference and go back to watching the telly, like Susan Moore. A few look elsewhere, like those Tipton Talibannies. On the Continent, they’re just beginning to wake up to the looming iceberg of unsustainable welfare systems. But, like The Sun’s Shop-A-Sponger Hotline, they’re missing the point. It’s not the cost, it’s the system itself. The cradle-to-grave welfare society enfeebles the citizenry to such a degree you can never generate enough money.
Happily, not all recipients waste their time on the dole: Muhammed Metin Kaplan set up his Islamist group, Caliphate State, while on welfare in Cologne; Ahmed Ressam, arrested in Washington State en route to blow up Los Angeles International Airport, hatched his plot while on welfare in Montreal; Zacarias Moussaoui, the “twentieth hijacker” currently on trial in America, became an Islamist radical while on welfare in London; Abu Hamza became Britain’s most famous fire-breathing imam while on welfare in London; Abu Qatada, a leading al-Qaeda recruiter, became an Islamist bigshot while British taxpayers were giving him ten times as much per week as Susan Moore. If only the Susan Moore-ish super-spongers were as purposeful as the neo-Moorish super-spongers.
I’m not saying every recipient of Jobseeker’s Allowance is a terrorist welfare queen. I am saying that the best bet at saving the next generation of Susan Moores is if the U.S. declares European welfare systems a national security threat.
A TOWN WITH PITY
The Western Standard, October 25, 2004
ASIDE FROM THE small matter of the war for civilization, I don’t have much time for Tony Blair. But, among many marvelous passages in his speech to the Labour Party Conference the other day, he had one especially striking moment: “When I hear people say, ‘I want the old Tony Blair back, the one who cares,’ I tell you something. I don’t think as a human being, as a family man, I’ve changed at all. But I have changed as a leader. I have come to realize that caring in politics isn’t really about ‘caring.’ It’s about doing what you think is right and sticking to it.”
Anyone can “care,” for what it’s worth. Anyone can say, as Tony Blair’s fellow Third Wayer did, “I feel your pain.” But he doesn’t really feel it, does he? He doesn’t have to live with it, day in, day out. Under the debased rules of politics, self-proclaimed empathy is all that’s required. The question is, when you stop talking, what do you do?
A decade ago, Canadians and their government were “shocked” by TV images of the Innu community of Davis Inlet in Labrador, a shantytown whose inhabitants were snorting drugs, glue, gas, and pretty much anything else that came their way. Having claimed to be “shocked,” our rulers then claimed to “care.”
So they decided to build the Innu a new town a few miles inland, with new homes with new heating systems and a new schoolhouse with all the newest accessories. The new town—Natuashish—cost taxpayers $152 million.
Two years after the resettlement of the Mushuau, let us turn to our good friends at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for a progress report:
Alcoholism and gas sniffing continue to be a problem for people living in Natuashish, two years after the Innu community was relocated from Davis Inlet. The community of about 700 has seen four suicides in the past few months, and drug and alcohol abuse is rampant, say local officials.
Former Mushuau Chief Katie Rich says she has never seen anything like it before. . . . Rich says children are going to school hungry because their parents are drunk or stoned. . . .
RCMP officers in Labrador agree with the assessment, saying alcohol-related problems in the community are worse than ever. . . .
At this point, let’s ask every reader who’s surprised by this to put up his or her hand.
Well, okay. You’re Western Standard readers. But let’s ask Toronto Star and Globe and Mail readers, and Maclean’s subscribers, and CBC viewers and listeners: how many of you impeccably liberal, “caring” Canadians stuffed to the gills with the Chrétien Liberals’ “Canadian values” are truly, genuinely, honestly surprised by the results of your “caring”?
I thought as much. Now what are you going to do about it? Build another new town ten miles down the road from Natuashish but spend three hundred million dollars this time, and then another ten miles from that costing six hundred million, and another for a billion, and another and another, secure in the knowledge that by the time you run out of vacant land in Labrador, the government will have been able to refurbish the original Davis Inlet trash heap for another two or three billion?
Gas-sniffing is not a traditional Innu activity. Before the first European settlers came, the Mushuau did not roam the tundra hunting for Chevy Silverados. That’s something the white man taught him. Or, to be more precise, the lazy, posturing Liberal establishment white man. And, if any of us propose trying anything different, the Liberal Party white man a
nd his cronies in the rotten “First Nations” tribal band structure dismiss us as racist.
Remember a year or two back, when the papers were full of stories about the aggrieved alumni of residential schools? They were doing a grand job of suing Canada’s Catholic and Protestant churches into oblivion, a very small number of them for the usual excesses of randy clerics, but the overwhelming majority for the far vaguer offense of “cultural genocide.” On closer inspection—which not a lot of guilt-ridden liberals could be bothered giving it—“cultural genocide” turned out to involve not genocide in the Sudanese, Rwandan, or Holocaust meaning of the word but in the sense that generations of Canadian natives had been forced to learn about Queen Victoria, Shakespeare, Magna Carta, Sir Isaac Newton, etc. Or all the stuff which, back when Lord Macaulay was writing his famous memo to Her Majesty’s Government on education for (east) Indians, it was felt that everyone needed to know in order to be able to function in the modern world. The (east) Indians still feel like this, which is why when you dial for tech support you wind up talking to Suresh or Rajiv.
Imagine if our own Indians had just, oh, 2 or 3 percent of that business. Instead, they fell into the hands of a vile alliance between the ostentatious “carers” of Ottawa and a corrupt artificial form of “self-government.” Residential schools aren’t “cultural genocide,” but what’s happened to the Mushuau of Davis Inlet should surely qualify. They were hunters and trappers originally, like the first Frenchmen on this continent. But the pur laine Quebecker doesn’t do much trapping these days. He moved to Montreal’s village gai, settled down with a nice young constable from the LGBT outreach unit, and has no desire to return to James Bay. The Mushuau were denied those kinds of choices. Their old culture died, but we “cared” about them so much that instead of embracing them as full, free citizens we’ve maintained them in an artificial government cocoon for four decades. The gas-sniffing adolescents of those “shocking” 1993 TV pictures are now gas-sniffing parents with wee little soon-to-be gas-sniffers of their own. And on it goes, the curse of Canadian compassion, unto the next generation.
Consider the sums of money involved: $152 million for seven hundred people. That’s $217,142.85 for each man, woman, or child. Totting up my household, I see that, had we been in Davis Inlet, that would have been $1,085,714.20 just for us. Imagine what you could do with that. Build a new house. Start a company. Hire some people. Invest in business opportunities. Get the kid an Ivy League education.
But the Innu don’t have to do any of these things. They don’t need to work, because the “caring” government pays them to lie around the house all day. And they don’t need to buy a house because property rights is some racist whitey racket, so all the homes are communally owned. That $152-million new town was a one-off, but the regular payments aren’t so bad. In 2002, the local band council got fourteen million dollars just in federal funds. That’s twenty thousand per—or, for me and my family, a hundred grand a year to do nothing. The result is pretty much as you’d expect. Everyone cruises around in brand-new pickups on roads that go nowhere, and, although there’s no liquor outlet in Natuashish, when a town’s that flush with cash, there’s plenty of bootleggers prepared to provide the service: a forty-ounce bottle costs three hundred dollars, and up to eight hundred dollars on popular holidays. But, in a town where the government gives you twenty thousand dollars to do zip, it’s holiday season all year round.
The difference between Natuashish and other native communities is one only of degree. If you drive along the Lower North Shore of the St. Lawrence, where Quebec towns and Indian reserves nestle side by side, you’ll see the “regular” schoolhouse—an older, cramped building past its best and remodeled one time too often, but still showing signs of life—and then the reserve school—new, vast, money no object, and already a dump. At Natuashish, a hundred children show up for class in a school that cost fifteen million dollars. Lop that and a couple of other public buildings off the total of $152 million, and the 130 family homes cost on paper a million bucks apiece.
Would it have been any more expensive to put everyone up in the Ritz-Carlton in Montreal with an unlimited room-service tab? That way, their vices might have been the comparatively mild ones of club sandwiches and mini-bar Toblerones. And there’s a small chance that, after a year or two of watching pay-per-view movies round the clock, a handful of them might have ventured out onto Sherbrooke Street, and taken the first steps to becoming full participating citizens of a developed society.
The buildings were never the problem in Davis Inlet, only a symptom of it. There’s a reason why certain ways of life (those taught in residential schools a century ago, for example) spread around the world, and others (the Innu’s) didn’t. When you isolate people from the system that’s created the most prosperous, healthiest, and longest-living communities in human history, when you insulate them from the impulses that drive most of us—to build a home, raise our children, live full lives—the result is the government-funded human landfill that is Indian Affairs. Natuashish is a plantation with the government as absentee landlord, but the absence of work makes it, in fact, far more destructive than the cotton fields of Virginia ever were. How many more generations of the most lavishly endowed underclass on the planet have to be destroyed in the name of Canadian “caring”? We need to blow up the Department of Indian Affairs and end the compassionate apartheid that segregates natives from their fellow Canadians.
THE POST-WORK ECONOMY
Syndicated column, December 6, 2013
ONE CONSEQUENCE OF the botched launch of Obamacare is that it has, judging from his plummeting numbers with “Millennials,” diminished Barack Obama’s cool. It’s not merely that the website isn’t state-of-the-art but that the art it’s failing to be state of is that of the mid-twentieth-century social program. The emperor has hipster garb, but underneath he’s just another Commissar Squaresville. So, health care being an irredeemable downer for the foreseeable future, this week the president pivoted (as they say) to “economic inequality,” which will be, he assures us, his principal focus for the rest of his term. And what’s his big idea for this new priority? Stand well back: He wants to increase the minimum wage!
Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos of Amazon (a non-government website) is musing about delivering his products to customers across the country (and the planet) within hours by using drones.
Drones! If there’s one thing Obama can do, it’s drones. He’s renowned across Yemen and Waziristan as the Domino’s of drones. If he’d thought to have your health-insurance-cancellation notices dropped by drone, Obamacare might have been a viable business model. Yet, even in Obama’s sole area of expertise and dominant market share, the private sector is already outpacing him.
Who has a greater grasp of the economic contours of the day after tomorrow—Bezos or Obama? My colleague Jonah Goldberg notes that the day before the President’s speech on “inequality” Applebee’s announced that it was introducing computer “menu tablets” to its restaurants. Automated supermarket checkout, 3D printing, driverless vehicles. . . what has the “minimum wage” to do with any of that? To get your minimum wage increased, you first have to have a minimum-wage job.
In my book (which I shall forbear to plug, but is available at Amazon, and with which Jeff Bezos will be happy to drone your aunt this holiday season), I write:
Once upon a time, millions of Americans worked on farms. Then, as agriculture declined, they moved into the factories. When manufacturing was outsourced, they settled into low-paying service jobs or better-paying cubicle jobs—so-called “professional services” often deriving from the ever swelling accounting and legal administration that now attends almost any activity in America. What comes next?
Or, more to the point, what if there is no “next”?
What do millions of people do in a world in which, in Marxian terms, “capital” no longer needs “labor”? America’s liberal elite seem to enjoy having a domestic-servant class on hand, but, unlike the Downton A
bbey crowd, are vaguely uncomfortable with having them drawn from the sturdy yokel stock of the village, and thus favor, to a degree only the Saudis can match, importing their maids and pool-boys from a permanent subordinate class of cheap foreign labor. Hence the fetishization of the “undocumented,” soon to be reflected in the multi-million bipartisan amnesty for those willing to do “the jobs Americans won’t do.”
So what jobs will Americans get to do? We dignify the new age as “the knowledge economy,” although, to the casual observer, it doesn’t seem to require a lot of knowledge. One of the advantages of Obamacare, according to Nancy Pelosi, is that it will liberate the citizenry: “Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance.” It’s certainly true that employer-based health coverage distorts the job market, but what’s more likely in a world without work? A new golden age of American sculpture and opera? Or millions more people who live vicariously through celebrity gossip and electronic diversions? One of the differences between government health care in America compared to, say, Sweden is the costs of obesity, heart disease, childhood diabetes, etc. In an ever more sedentary society where fewer and fewer have to get up to go to work in the morning, is it likely that those trends will diminish or increase?
Consider Vermont. Unlike my own state of New Hampshire, it has a bucolic image: Holsteins, dirt roads, the Vermont Teddy Bear Company, Ben & Jerry’s, Howard Dean. . . And yet the Green Mountain State now has appalling levels of heroin and meth addiction, and the social chaos that follows. Geoffrey Norman began a recent essay in The Weekly Standard with a vignette from a town I know very well—St. Johnsbury, population 7,600, motto “Very Vermont,” the capital of the remote North-East Kingdom hard by the Quebec border and as far from urban pathologies as you can get. Or so you’d think. But on a recent Saturday morning, Norman reports, there were more cars parked at the needle-exchange clinic than at the farmers’ market. In Vermont, there’s no inner-city underclass, because there are no cities, inner or outer; there’s no disadvantaged minorities, because there’s only three blacks and seven Hispanics in the entire state; there’s no nothing. Which is the real problem.