When one examines public policies to ensure the care of the poor and those with special needs, and goes beyond the rhetoric about “racism,” “welfare queens,” “malingerers,” “big corporations,” insurance companies, “big government,” “compassion” and “rights,” one finds difficult choices and high stakes. The choices are often made by low level, underpaid public officials who cannot possibly have the information required to make them fairly and correctly, and who are at any moment subject to political blame for injustice and suffering, for waste, fraud and taxes. People don’t like to be forced to confront such difficult choices. And you don’t attract votes, viewers or readers by forcing them to.
Age, means and need are three answers to the question “why is it fair,” as in “why is it fair that I have to work and pay taxes to pay for a service or benefit that I, myself, cannot receive?” And age, means and need are answers that most people find legitimate in theory: because the service or benefit recipient is a child, is old, is poor, is unemployed, is disabled, or is sick.
After years of observing the inequities in government policy and programs, I have concluded that public services and benefits should be limited to those that the government is willing to provide to everyone equally, or at least everyone in equal circumstances. As we have seen, determining a person’s circumstances, and whether those circumstances result from unavoidable outside factors or (bad) personal choices and values, and thus determining who is actually eligible for means tested benefits, is difficult. Determining a person’s circumstances, and thus their eligibility for benefits based on disability, is often impossible. While fair and reasonable in theory, therefore, public services and benefits with eligibility based on means and needs are frequently inequitable in practice.
Inevitably, in fact, presumably fair criteria such as age, means and need, which have issues of their own, end up bastardized as those with power assert themselves. The next several posts will give several ways in which this happens. Rock called the simple tabulation of the scope of public sector activity something good for high schoolers to read. This week, with the hard issues, has been perhaps college-level. The next couple of weeks will provide the more cynical, age 40+ level version. Not how things are supposed to work, but how they sometimes do work.