The Political Page - The Formation Quest

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The Welfare State Dana Barbour e-mail: danabarbour@theformationquest.org
	The salient—and ironic—fact about the “welfare state” practiced first within the U.S. and other “advanced” countries is that those who most oppose it tend also to be the most benefited from it. The power they hold through the word-concept “money” shows this in its close linkage with still–other concepts, especially of a “welfare system” which itself unequally “subsidizes” the self–interests of the already rich—those who by social contract rationally own the lives of the largely–myopic and easily–led working–consuming majorities.
	Their underlying means is the instituted authority perversely given to and vested in “money” as the driving force in our lives. Here those who control currency in money's tangible and/or—increasingly—electronic form also control our economists' “factors of production,” human labor among them. Within this top-down system, they—and we—also subordinate our life–sustaining natural resources at our common peril.
	Other means converge. While our “public” and “private sectors” of “government” move toward “privatization," the obsolescent “public sector” increasingly offers tax favoritism to those who already hold the money–driven advantage. This “justifies” in the name of “economic stimulation” while we globalize to disregard what's left of each also–obsolescent nation–state's anti–trust laws. This seemingly next justifies through the self–fulfilling prophecies we refer to as “global competition” and “the economy of scale.”
	Meanwhile, the welfare benefited generally oppose including those who'd truly need social support. The homeless and those otherwise deprived legally lack the means even to their preeminent needs to survive. Many of the majority who do survive “downsizing,” “restructuring” and other applied euphemisms also “buy” into this. Rather than focusing upon the real welfare system, they shortsightedly prioritize their “own” claims upon the jobs others control from on top. They act instead to protect their interests in “their” tenuous jobs and to limit their taxes paid.
	They don't focus upon the indirect subsidies they fungibly must make up for. These also provide tax favoritism to legal fictions—to corporate “entities”—and the stockholders whose money “works for them.” They don't focus upon these and other “more–equal” others, many of whom with greater freedom lead the self–directed and—problematically—socially–productive lives denied themselves and the “lazy” others whose “welfare” they've conditioned to perceive to be a threat.
	The majority's myopia notwithstanding, we need a welfare reform which eliminates the welfare wealthy. It's they whom most greatly we all subsidize legally and monetarily at the expense of the rest of us.
	Still, we are all in it together, and can prioritize otherwise. Our shared conditions for deploying “economic” resources morally form to be as fungible socially—first socially—as they do monetarily. Legally the instituted moral social contract first should warrant that our preeminent non–economic rights equally would have greater authority than those who'd serve their own self–interests through the surrogate which is the concept of “money” itself.
	But that's another—if also–ignored social question. It forms to underlie the narrower issue of welfare reform itself. Meanwhile, around and around we'll go, self–interestedly, ironically and immorally associating the welfare “dole” with those who “profit” the least from our so–called “welfare....”