COMMENT: ‘Welfare hippies’ need real options

By Adrian Barnes

There’s been some discussion in these pages recently about ‘hippies on welfare’ that merits further analysis.

People who work full time sometimes express understandable indignation at the thought of their tax dollars supporting able-bodied but unemployed young people. For their part, some of these ‘hippies’ feel that accepting welfare is a legitimate response to a Darwinian economic system that often marginalizes and impoverishes working people. Others, of course, are just stoned and lazy.

It seems like an intractable problem--either force people to work at what are often soul-crushing, low-paying jobs or allow them to waste their lives leeching off the system. But the problem is only intractable until we realize we’re dealing with a false dilemma.

‘Work for pay or leech off others’. An either/or statement which implies that these are the only two choices available. And, at present, this is largely true. But these are not the only two conceivable or rational options. Here are two others worth considering:

1.    Homesteading

One way to solve the welfare problem would be to bring back homesteading.

People who want to live outside what they may see as a dehumanizing system should be given the opportunity to do just that. They should be offered a parcel of land to develop and build on in return for surrendering their right to social assistance.

Under this scenario, those able-bodied people who continue choose to accept social assistance would do so in the understanding that welfare is a stopgap measure while they seek employment within the economic system.  In such a case, society has the right to hold them accountable for the money they choose to accept.

Being a Canadian citizen shouldn't mean one has to be a wage slave, condemned to boring and pointless labour in return for a poverty-level existence. On the other hand, being a Canadian shouldn't mean one gets to sponge off others, either.

A return to homesteading, which existed in BC until the early 1980s, would fix this problem quite nicely. The choice would be clear: play the money game fairly or leave it behind and strike out on your own.

It would be interesting, if nothing else, to see who would take the road less travelled...poseurs would be exposed immediately!

2.    Credit for volunteer work

Why can’t people on social assistance who perform meaningful volunteer work ‘pay back’ their benefits? Eight hours a week volunteering at the old folk’s home should equal a credit for that valuable labour on one’s social assistance account just as if the recipient had worked those hours for minimum wage.

Under this scenario, if one worked off one’s monthly welfare income, one would have one’s name removed from the welfare rolls. Such a system would restore dignity to those who are down on their luck--and, again, expose the layabouts for what they are—thereby encouraging them to try harder to make a contribution.

Certainly there are people on social assistance who do just this under the current regime. And there are some jurisdictions in North America where various schemes around volunteerism and welfare are being tried, though often in a coercive manner.

Advantages to this sort of system would be enormous: it would foster a sense of dignity in people; it would lead to a general increase in volunteerism in society; and it would allow those who volunteer to network in ways that might eventually lead to paid AND meaningful work.

Conclusion

The real question here is, ‘why don’t we do something like this already?’ The answer is disheartening. We’re a society that punishes people for any signs of weakness, whether it be addiction, poverty, or mental health issues. It seems difficult for us to view people in difficult circumstances as actual human beings with feelings and aspirations. Well worth a ponder.

The great logical fallacy of our age is that money=society. That is to say, the belief that all elements of human life can have a dollar value attached to them. This is not true. Money is a useful tool for measuring and balancing out various impersonal transactions. A person works an hour in a factory in exchange for a piece of paper that they can trade for a roast chicken or an oil change for their car. Fair enough. In its place, money is an amazing human invention, right up there with the alphabet or mathematics.

But we take money too far when we say that a human life must be lived in accordance with its dictates if it is to have ‘value’. Monetary value and human value are two different things, and human value should trump monetary value every time.

There are many kinds of value that money can’t measure. Love, dignity, friendship, dreams—in fact, it is precisely the qualities we value most that money can’t measure.

This is something we should keep in mind as we develop public policy—or as we feel tempted to judge our neighbours when they find themselves caught in a trap not of their own making.

Adrian Barnes is the president of Lone Sheep Publishing and the editor of the Rossland Telegraph.  If interested in discussions about how to carve out more space in our monetarized world for human community, consider joining FOMENT West Kootenay on Facebook.