The Fatuousness and Dangers of Middle Class Welfare

An Open Letter to the Child Poverty Action Group

Dear Sirs and Mesdames

We understand that you are a special interest group which asserts that children have a right to security, food, education and healthcare. You have also set a goal to end child poverty by 2020 in New Zealand. You define poverty as earning less than 60 percent of the median New Zealand income.

You have recently called upon the government to transfer $4bn of money taken from New Zealand citizens via redistribution mechanisms to new entitlements and programmes to alleviate child poverty in New Zealand. (NZ Herald, 29th April, 2008)

You want to be taken seriously. You want people to have respect for your work and your policy ideas. We presume that your concern over child poverty in New Zealand is genuine. We note that your organisation is led by pediatricians and academics and inevitably reflects the values and views of the upper middle class to a significant extent. Your achievements demand that your views be treated with respect and granted due weight.

However, before you are granted the time of day or a moment's consideration we think that you need to cover off a few fundamentals necessary to give you views any credibility at all.

Firstly, since you define poverty to be living in a situation where children are dependant upon incomes that are less than 60% of the median New Zealand income, and since you have a declared goal to have child poverty abolished by 2020, could you please explain how that target can be in any sense meaningful. By your standard, you are perpetuating poverty in New Zealand, since by definition there will necessarily always be people below the median income level. It is inevitable that some will be more than 60% below, given lifestyle complexities, transitions, and preferences. And, while we are at it, why 60%; why not 65%? Why not 50%? Please explain.

Secondly, it is hard to get remotely interested in supporting your work when the definition of poverty is so relative. Would you please give us hard standards that do not adjust constantly with the changing whims of economic fortune. In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king. In a world where the medium income is ten million dollars, why would you even remotely want to suggest that the anyone living on an annual income of $6 million is poor . Now, of course, our median income is far from that, and will be so in 2020 (assuming, that is, we are not afflicted at the time with Zimbabwean records of mass inflation)—but you get the point. Unless you are prepared to give some hard, absolute standards that define and measure poverty, don't even waste our time asking for serious consideration. We suspect that definitions of poverty in such a loose and relative context end up being any state or situation less well off than one's own. Poverty is too important an issue to be thus trivialised.

We notice that you assert that children have a right to security, food, education, and healthcare. Would you please explain on what basis children have this right. Where does this right come from? Who grants it? On what is it based? The current democratic preference or popular prejudice? Can you suggest any law, any principle that transcends the fickleness of the current politics of guilt and pity upon which you ground or assert this these rights? If you are to be taken seriously and be given a respectful hearing, please explain. We note that others talk about a rights to life, and oppose abortion. Do you ground your assertion of child rights in the same vein as these people, or do you have a different rationale? Why should we listen to you and turn away from them? For, if they are right, surely abortion is the ultimate impoverishing of a child. Surely we should begin to address that issue first.

Fourthly, when addressing some of the more substantive and complex issues involved with the causes of child poverty we notice that some of your more serious papers acknowledge the causal complexities and confirm that superficial social actions often generate worse problems than those they were intending to fix. (D. Wynd, “Violence Against Children: Domestic Violence and Child Homicide in New Zealand”) Would you please explain how the latest call for a $4bn spend-up shows due concern for the complexities of the problem and avoids the law of unintended consequences. We are simply not interested in giving you a hearing until you are able to demonstrate that the most likely evil unintended consequences of your proposals have been identified, weighed, and removed, lest what you are advocating only makes the problem worse.

Fifthly, would you please declare what your view is of human nature. Some of your papers imply that human beings are predominately, if not universally, innately responsible, altruistic, aspirational beings. All they require is a chance. If such a chance is delivered in the form of more money, people will respond responsibly and gratefully. They will accept the help and, in gratitude, take serious steps to improve their lot and lives. So, fundamentally, the solution to child poverty (assuming it can be meaningfully defined) is very simple—more money provided. Could you please tell us where that view of human nature comes from and upon what it is based? For, if you are wrong on this, your programme risks the unintended consequence of consigning more people to wretchedness than ever before. We care far too much about poverty to allow that to happen—so, until you can convince us you know what you are doing by addressing the question—forget it.

Further, if people are innately responsible and altruistic and are going to respond to the carrying out of your governmental re-distribution with gratitude and a sense of obligation, could you please explain how this will happen when, at the same time, they are told that they have a right to such assistance? If people are owed the help, as a fundamental matter of justice, it would be entirely inappropriate to expect them to be grateful for it, would it not? After all, do we expect the victim of a crime to be grateful to the criminal when he receives restitution? It would be entirely inappropriate—even morally grotesque. Equally, we suggest, it would be morally grotesque to imply that people should have a sense of gratitude, thankfulness, and moral obligation to move out of a state of poverty when they are given state assistance that is both their right and due. How condescendingly middle class is that!

Finally, would you please explain to us how your programme will take account of people's trade-offs. Everyone makes trade-offs. We are prepared to assert this as a universal axiom. Until wealth and resources are without limitation—which will not occur any time soon—everyone ends up choosing some course or goods in preference to others. Behind every choice lies a trade-off which in turn draws upon the complete world-view of that person. Some will choose to purchase the weekly lotto ticket in preference of bread for their children. Behind that choice lies beliefs about truth, right, wrong, priorities, the past, government and justice, and hopes for the future. People are entitled to make those trade-offs—it is fundamental to being free—is it not? No-one has a right to compel them to make a certain set of trade-offs have they? Or do they? Simply providing more of others' money via state redistribution, while ignoring the power and rights of people to make trade-offs, is to be air headed in the extreme.

So, to be taken seriously, you have to tell us how you are going to address the fundamental paradox implicit in all programmes attempting to confront poverty: on the one hand, recipients of support need to be treated with dignity, such that their freedom, responsibility for their own choices, and respect for their preferences is maintained. On the other hand, if the support is to avoid merely perpetuating poverty in the lifestyle of the recipients (that is, merely funding their current trade-offs), what trade-offs which they are currently making which are contributing to their poverty, must change—and how can they be changed, without recourse to external compulsion (that is, a form of reduction in liberties)?

If you cannot address this paradox seriously—or give no indication of being willing to face up to the inherent problem—don't even waste our time. What you are proposing is not worth serious consideration. Even worse, what you are advocating, if executed, will make child suffering in New Zealand many, many times worse.

Until you can demonstrate that you prepared to do far more than make fatuous appeals to middle class guilt and pity please desist. Move over and make room for those who are genuinely and seriously concerned with the plight of the wretched of the earth and who refuse to duck the hard issues and questions.