Come the Revolution

Do you remember the welfare queens? An obnoxiously pervasive meme in the 1990’s, welfare queens was a term used to refer to chronically-unemployed women relying on public assistance to support their illegitimate children. While I doubt he coined it, I most closely associate the expression with Rush Limbaugh, probably because of his penchant for gross insensitivity.

So last week at an undisclosed time and in an undisclosed location, I was tacitly participating in a conversation (i.e. eavesdropping) which, in an unwelcome blast from the past, turned to the topic of welfare queens. More specifically, how the government shouldn’t expect good, hard-working Americans to support a bunch of women who function as little more than incubators of future criminals. It must be said that the undisclosed individual who voiced this opinion – far less poetically than I, I might add – is a white person from an admittedly privileged background.

This was the first time I’d thought about welfare queens in years, and with good reason. There’s really no such thing. Here’s a brief history of the welfare queen: at some point in the past 20 or 30 years, a cynical politico got tired of beating off to the collected works of Milton Friedman. As an alternate activity, he perused the papers until he found a story, very possibly apocryphal, concerning one woman in one city guilty of abusing the welfare system. The public, reliably stupid as we are, was only too happy to take this example and extrapolate, transforming the woman in question from a lone fraudster into a symbol of a positively endemic economic crisis.

Make no mistake, this woman, if she ever existed, was nothing more than a fraudster disingenuously presented as a typical welfare recipient. The problem wasn’t that our Jane Doe was collecting checks with no intention of becoming gainfully employed. The problem was that she was a criminal, and welfare fraud is a job in and of itself. Jane Doe is only entitled to one check, so if she’s looking for more than that she’ll need to develop a few aliases and obtain fake identification documents for each. She’s going to have to become an expert forger, able to convincingly disguise her handwriting. She will be obliged to traveling extensively throughout her city and state. Who knows, she might even need some disguises.

The number of people this committed to bilking the government out of taxpayer dollars in order to avoid working is most assuredly negligible. At least 99.9% of people receiving welfare do so legally and legally obtained public assistance is hardly generous enough to facilitate a life in the lap of luxury. Believe me when I tell you that a woman relying on welfare to support herself and her children is not indulging in champagne wishes and caviar dreams; she’s living in Section 8 housing and going without in order to give her kid a toy dump truck next Christmas. Also believe me when I tell you that if economic regulation were such that this woman could make more money performing unskilled labor than receiving a check from the government, she’d be working the fryer at McDonald’s as we speak.

In the interest of full disclosure, I myself am a white person from a privileged background and all I know about public assistance I learned in the pursuit of a fancy economics degree. This means that I do not understand what it’s like to be genuinely poor. I know what it’s like to be college-student poor, and I know what it’s like to be young-adult poor, but for-real poor is way beyond my scope. What I do know is that being for-real poor fucking sucks and nasty remarks from assholes like me are not helpful. The person whose defaming comments inspired this entry is insufficiently empathetic, and that’s not OK.

I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to argue that the American lack of empathy is seriously disturbing. “No free handouts” became the rallying cry of the right during the healthcare debate, and it is as heartless a statement as I’ve ever heard, particularly since they’re not committed to the idea of no free handouts as a principle. They’re committed to the idea of no free handouts for other people, but they’ll readily accept whatever the government tosses at them. House on fire? Dial 911. No garden hose can handle that. Kids in public school? Absolutely. Who can spring for a $15,000/year prep school? Affordable healthcare for poor people? Let ‘em die.

It is incumbent upon the fortunate to work to improve the lives of the unfortunate, and it’s heartening to see people, affected by the recession, coming around to this way of thinking. Acquisition is not the basis of a functional society, and greed is not good. You should feel sad when you see a homeless person wearing a thin coat in the middle of winter. You should feel sad when a bright kid can’t attend college. You should feel sad when you come across an emaciated dog in an alley. The well-being of other living creatures should matter to you. If it doesn’t, fine, but don’t be surprised when you find yourself on the wrong end of a proletarian revolution.