The Dole (and not the pineapple company, either)

There's a blogger from Rome, NY who codifies his frustration with his hometown in his blog's title, Rome, NY Sucks. He's a staunch conservative who, while enormously frustrated with the economic morass that is New York State (where, if you're anywhere outside New York City or Yonkers, the state government is as reluctant to admit your existence as the Department of Defense is to admit that of Area 51), has stuck around and tried to make a go of it. Kudos to him for that, but the lack of jobs in his town has taken its toll, and now he's very likely applying for public assistance.

Now, given that Romey (sorry, but I got nothing else to call you!) is a conservative who seriously dislikes public assistance stuff, he finds himself in a philosophical quandary:

Here's some interesting questions. Can you still be conservative and on government assistance? Does your opposition to handouts make you unworthy to receive them? Is it hypocrisy to be one of the people you criticize? I'd tend to say no.

I'd also say no, for all the various reasons, most of which are cited in the comments thread to his post. There's the "You paid your taxes, so in a way this is your right" argument, which I don't have a problem with at all. But there's something else: I also paid my taxes, and this is part of what I have been paying for. So, if you need to do this to get by for now, I have no problem whatsoever with it.

I've never been one to feel moral outrage for when people use their public assistance funds to buy anything other than Ramen Noodles and milk or whatever the cheapest subsistence-level stuff available happens to be. (Not including cigarettes and alcohol, of course.) In fact, I feel rather the reverse whenever I'm in a store checkout line and I overhear someone griping about what the person on public assistance is buying: "How can they get away with buying ice cream on Welfare? How dare they?" Well, I don't know the welfare recipient's life story, do I? I'm not going to jump to moral outrage without knowing what's going on. Maybe they're abusing the system, but in my experience, they're very likely not. They're unlucky, in that (a) they are unqualified for what few jobs there are; (b) those jobs don't pay enough to live on; and (c) they lack the means to either get qualified for whatever good jobs exist (and in these parts there aren't too many of those, either) or to move to where the better jobs are for which they are qualified.

I tend to find the assumption behind the disdain for people on public assistance to be that getting a good job is like shopping for toothpaste at Target: you just pick the brand that works best for you and off you go. You hear it in the rhetoric: "Learn some skills, dumbass." "Go to where the jobs are, you slacker." It just isn't that easy, and if there's a tendency by some (fewer, I suspect, than many believe) to use the safety net as a hammock, I find that preferable to allowing every falling person to plummet to the pavement by removing the safety net entirely.

Some evidently think that not only should society not provide a safety net on a moral basis, but that it is also immoral for a person to accept aid from any safety net that exists. I reject this view as well. I myself was on Unemployment for over a year, and without it, my family would have suffered greatly. And Little Quinn receives assistance from Medicaid that covers treatments that our employer-provided health insurance would not: his various therapies, for instance, without which he would be little better than an immobile child with little hope of recovery; or the in-home nursing assistance, which provides a trained medical professional to watch over him while I'm at work. To say that there is a moral fault in accepting this assistance is, to me, absurd; I would claim that it would have been morally negligent for us not to accept it. What were the alternatives? Look around for employers whose insurance plans might provide better coverage? and then work for the usual required year of service before the insurance kicked in, a year during which Little Quinn's prospects for improvement would have been set back immeasurably? for me (the secondary income) to stop working again? Not in this lifetime. We were stretched thin on a single income with one healthy child. Our heads are above water, and it's because of the state assistance we've accepted.

Do we like dealing with the state, and its mishmash of regulatory agencies and requirements? No. But we had no choice, and in a way, I'm glad, because I'm very wary of trusting the market to help in situations like ours.

I guess I just have trouble faulting individual people who are on public assistance, because they're people, and I can't look into their hearts. Nor can they look into mine. And that's not changing.