Weiye Loh's Library tagged Welfare →  View Popular, Search in Google

“You have to help and have compassion as a people, because otherwise you have no society, but financially you can’t destroy yourself. And that is what we’re doing.”

“I’m glad I’m not a politician,” he said. “We’re all going to complain no matter what they do. Nobody wants to put a noose around their own neck.”

He cites the Soviet Union as an extreme example of the consequences of benevolence. Marx, he says, was truly motivated by humanitarian concerns. Indeed, he proposed to eliminate human suffering. As for Stalin: “Given a monopoly of power, as he was, any consistent disciple of the Enlightenment would have done essentially the same things as Stalin.” The primary difference between communism and the welfare state, he says, is the speed at which the wealth of a country gets consumed and its people impoverished.

Andrew Irvine, a professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia who edited a just-published revised version of Mr. Stove’s book, tries hard for a more hopeful note in his introduction. All we need do to avert Mr. Stove’s bleak expectation, he says, is restrain the growth of government.

The interesting thing was that the difference between Catholics and Protestants was quite small, and much smaller than the difference between the religious and the non-religious. The effect is quite large - equivalent to five more years of education or increasing household income by €500/month.

Now, there are three reasons that the religious might be less keen on social welfare. The first is that they may get social support from their fellow Church members, and so be less interested in state support. But, in this analysis, churchgoing had no effect on support for welfare.

Another possibility is that believers may think that God will take care of them. Or they may think that their god will favour them, and so they will not end up at the bottom of the pile. That's certainly a possibility that is not ruled out by this analysis.

But the third possibility is that religious people may resent the idea of giving money to people who aren't part of their 'gang'. That wouldn't be surprising - it's well known that countries that have a large mix of ethnicities have lower support for government welfare. People don't mind paying taxes to help their own kind, but they're not so keen to see their money going to help 'them'.

Stegmeuller found that more religiously polarized countries (defined by the difference in religiosity of religious group members compared with non-members) had lower the support for social welfare.

So religious polarisation reduces support for social welfare. But the surprising thing was that it had no effect on the link between individual religious affiliation and rejection of governmental intervention to reduce inequality.

Even in the least religiously polarized countries, religious people are still just as opposed to the idea that the government should try to reduce inequality.

Stegmueller, D., Scheepers, P., Rossteutscher, S., & de Jong, E. (2011). Support for Redistribution in Western Europe: Assessing the role of religion European Sociological Review DOI: 10.1093/esr/jcr011

Sabio Lantz said...

As with countries with large ethnic mixes, maybe religious folks just don't feel money taken from them will support what they value. They may not mind sharing with other groups, but not groups with cross purposes.

So perhaps countries with peoples of significantly polarized cross-purposes doen't want their incomes involuntarily obscuded ("tax") to support perceived contrary purposes.

There, I took "religion" out of the picture and captured more fish.

Chris Hitchcock (Cal Tech) writes:

 

 

Actually, your two links on Ayn Rand display a frightening logical consistency. 

 

The first says:

 

"Ayn took the bail out even though Ayn "despised government interference and felt that people should and could live independently... She didn't feel that an individual should take help."

But actually, that's not quite right. As the second one quotes:

 

"The recipient of a public scholarship is morally justified only so long as he regards it as restitution and opposes all forms of welfare statism. Those who advocate public scholarships, have no right to them; those who oppose them, have." 

 

So it would be more accurate to say that she didn't think people who disagreed with her should take help. Those who agreed with her were entitled to all they could get.

What are the global trends? – firstly, the poor are getting poorer and the rich are getting richer – income gaps are widening to historical levels and that simply means the tea auntie and those who may not have the right papers will just see themselves getting poorer and poorer as time goes by. There are many reasons accounting for this, but to simplify the case; it all boils down to the whole idea of globalization. You see globalization means exactly what it means; we all have to compete globally; that means a factory in Boon Lay has to compete with a sweat shop somewhere in Shenzhen and whoever produces the cheapest products wins the contract.

Sure we call this “free trade” – “level playing” – “healthy competition.” And all this comes under one word – capitalism. But you know what? These days with the disparity in wealth distribution where the poor are getting squeezed and the rich are getting fatter – capitalism doesn’t work anymore – don’t believe me, then consider why are the Communist in China promoting capitalism could it’s even way better than Marxist Leninism to keep the masses in line? Is it even possible capitalism is a far more effective way to squeeze much more out of the ordinary man in the street – and another thing about Capitalism, like all great Hollywood movies with great endings; it even comes complete with the promise of redemption – that’s to say, capitalism as an idea can even relieve the rich and of the burden of guilt by perpetuating the myth; “hey, if you are down at the bottom of the ladder, it’s all your fault; you just didn’t study hard enough in school and now it’s all coming back full circle….that’s your lot, suck it in!” Another great thing about capitalism is it envisions the idea that the world is fair, “if you produce a great mouse trap, someone will always beat a path to your shed!” You see one of the things that I find almost impossible to square off when I try my best to square income divide and the whole idea of capitalism is simply this; not only does it provide a multitude of reasons for the rich and privileged to continue squeezing more out from the ordinary Joe; but it even cap able to engendering the false belief amongst the rich, that their hands like their conscience is clean and when you translate all these into nuts and bolts it’s a far more expedient way than communism to devise a system to grind the poor legitimately with a set of justifications that’s darn hard to push to one side.

You see one reason why the capitalist system works so well as compared to the moribund communist system is unlike the latter; it even comes complete with the “rags to riches” fairytale; the whole idea that anyone can just go out there and carve up a good and decent life; if he works diligently, hard and intelligently – the myth is perpetuates its one that engenders everyone within the capitalist machinery

But as I said, let’s not kid ourselves and this becomes apparent when we compare the economic realities against the myth of capitalism – facts don’t lie, for example: if you really want a snap shot of wealth inequality, consider this: the top 1% owns 60% of all the bonds, stocks and business assets; while the bottom 50% owns a paltry 2.5% of the net worth of a nation like the US – I mean mirror these realities with Singapore or even Timbuktu and you would roughly be right even if you were off a few percentile points. So in a nut shell, we have already successfully re-created a slave driven economy that so well packaged

Seems to me a day of reckoning will have to come; I could be wrong, but I really can’t see with the figures facing me against the hubris of the ever widening wage divide how its possible for us to keep living on this harshly divided world while squeezing productivity gains out of the masses as we continue to hold wages down to levels in an economy where basic commodities are going to go up, just based on the rhetoric. It just doesn’t make any economic or social sense to me; as even in the days of slavery; masters had to provide food, shelter and warmth; if they really wanted to get the best deal out of their lot.