Moishe ben Amram and the "Nation of Takers": Wednesday Hoisted from the Archives from the Reign of Rameses II Weblogging
Another thought...
Focus on those entitlements--unlike Social Security or unemployment insurance--where you do get more the poorer you are. These are programs that you can think of as providing an incentive to slackerhood, of subsidizing moocherhood. Nicholas Eberstadt writes in his A Nation of Takers:
[p]overty- or income-related entitlements... increased over thirty-fold [since 1960]...
Yes, I know that these are aggregate--not per capita--nominal--not real--spending-growth numbers, and hence the wrong numbers to look at. But he does then take much of it back:
two-thirds of those... are... Medicaid... traditional safety-net programs now comprise only about a third of entitlements granted on income terms...
Had Eberstadt gone a step further, he would have computed that cyclically-adjusted spending on traditional safety-net programs have risen from 1.1% of GDP in 1960 to a cyclically-adjusted 1.5% of GDP today. That is an increase. Our safety-net programs really are somewhat more generous as a share of our national resources than they were in 1960. Should they be?
Eberstadt likes to talk about how Americans in the past were self-reliant Randite individuals, scornful of dependency and charity, different from the moochers of these degenerate days, and how we should return to our old time values. But before America's rich were Randites America's settlers were church-going Protestants. They saw themselves as building a City Upon a Hill, building the New Jerusalem, becoming the New Israel. I know: those who hit the beaches at Plymouth in 1620 and Boston in 1630 were pretty much all (some of) my ancestors.
My New England WASP Puritan ancestors read the Hebrew Bible very seriously indeed. And they hearkened unto Moishe ben Amram:
These be the words which Moses spake unto all Israel on this side Jordan in the wilderness, in the plain over against the Red sea, between Paran, and Tophel, and Laban, and Hazeroth, and Dizahab...
[...]
Now therefore hearken, O Israel, unto the statutes and unto the judgments, which I teach you...
[...]
Thou shalt not oppress an hired servant that is poor and needy, whether he be of thy brethren, or of thy strangers... lest he cry against thee unto the Lord, and it be sin unto thee....
Thou shalt not pervert the judgment of the stranger, nor of the fatherless; nor take a widow's raiment to pledge: But thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in Egypt, and the Lord thy God redeemed thee thence: therefore I command thee to do this thing. When thou cuttest down thine harvest in thy field, and hast forgot a sheaf in the field, thou shalt not go again to fetch it: it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow: that the Lord thy God may bless thee in all the work of thine hands. When thou beatest thine olive tree, thou shalt not go over the boughs again: it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow. When thou gatherest the grapes of thy vineyard, thou shalt not glean it afterward: it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt: therefore I command thee to do this thing...
Note that these laws as set forth by Moses are not commandments to isolated self-reliant Randite individuals, or even to members of one little sect to take care of other members of their sect.
Moses is not speaking to one or to another of his audience, telling them to "be generous".
Moses is, instead, speaking to "All Israel": He is laying commands laid upon the nation, which the nation as a body must observe if it is to be worthy to remain in the Promised Land. And, my ancestors would say, it is because the nation did not fulfill Moses's commands that the nation was judged, and exiled to Babylon.
The logic of Moses's commands are that the Lord thy God has given All Israel a great deal of what Nick Eberstadt and Mitt Romney would call "free stuff":
remember that thou wast a bondman in Egypt, and the Lord thy God redeemed thee...
And what follows from the fact that we have gotten all this "free stuff"? Moses commands:
Thou shalt not oppress an hired servan.... Thou shalt not pervert the judgment of the stranger, nor of the fatherless; nor take a widow's raiment to pledge…. When thou… hast forgot a sheaf in the field, thou shalt not go again to fetch it: it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow…. When thou beatest thine olive tree, thou shalt not go over the boughs again: it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow. When thou gatherest the grapes of thy vineyard, thou shalt not glean it afterward: it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow…
No. 1.5% of national income is not too much.
Thus endeth the Lesson…
