Cancerous Welfare

Can the Beast be Controlled?

The public square has been buzzing over revelations that some of the nation's beneficiaries on welfare benefits are receiving over one thousand dollars a week. One couple receive $1,200 per week. They have ten children.

This is remarkable in and of itself. But more despicable than remarkable is the revelation that this particular family have been on the unemployment benefit for more than fifteen years. During the period 2000 to 2007 New Zealand enjoyed a long extended period of economic bounty which saw the unemployment rate drop to historic lows. Yet neither adult in this particular family could find a job. At least not one that paid as well as the welfare game.

The problem with all welfare based upon spurious entitlement rights is that (surprise, surprise) recipients quickly come to regard it as a right to which they are entitled. Well, blow me down with a feather. We didn't see that coming. All advocates of the current system need to answer one simple question without evasion or equivocation: is it acceptable that able bodied people are allowed to live all their lives on welfare, never having to work, never having to contribute to their own support, but exist all their lives off the work of others? Is it acceptable to have career welfare beneficiaries?

We have not found one single person, of whatever political persuasion, to opine that it is perfectly acceptable for some people to be lifetime career welfare beneficiaries. Those who ardently champion the system, however, go on to deny that such people exist. The working assumption of the Left is that no-one chooses deliberately a lifetime career of receiving welfare payments. Those who take this view, however, are wilfully blind. They are being informed by their peculiar ideology, not by social reality.

In New Zealand we now have individuals and families that are third generation career welfare recipients. Neither they, nor their parents, nor their grandparents ever held a job their entire lives. They, leech-like, sucked blood off their neighbours until they died. They can be excused for doing it to this point: they were told that it was their right to do so. They were entitled. They had a property right--a legitimate title to be supported and paid for all their lives by other people. They believed what they were told. Once again, we didn't see that coming.

We, as a nation, have to reach the point where we shuck off this heinous, debilitating doctrine. Yet the received wisdom all through the Parliament is that it is political suicide to reduce welfare benefits and entitlements.

We acknowledge that as long as secular humanism remains the dominant and established religion of the day, the ideology of demand rights will continue. So, being the tactical pragmatists that we are, we would argue for a weaning policy--a step in the right direction. There needs to be a time limit on the receipt of welfare benefits.

We propose that all working age welfare benefits (retirement, sickness, unemployment, and domestic purposes benefits) have a five year limit. Every New Zealand citizens including all immigrants, would be granted an entitlement right to five years of welfare payments over the course of their lifetime--and that is all. When they receive those payments, if they received them, and under what conditions would be up to them.

This would apply to current working age welfare recipients. Those over 65 or approaching retirement age would probably need to be grandfathered in to the new system over time.

People who are gainfully employed (that is, generating taxable income) would be able to earn welfare entitlements back on a fixed ratio--say, five to one. Part-time workers would be on a higher ratio. Five years work would earn a one year entitlement right. They would be able to build up welfare entitlement years well in excess of their five year entitlement in the same way that they currently build up holiday pay. They could convert their welfare entitlement years in for cash at any time, but, like holiday pay, would lose them--until they "earned" more welfare years.

Welfare entitlement rights would be transferable to others. But five years would be it, unless they earned more--and then they could cash in, use, or transfer them.

Now the only way this would work would be to entrench such an entitlement so that it could not be overturned or altered except by a seventy-five percent majority in the House. Otherwise, each election the bribing political parties would seek power by means of altering the entitlements. ("We will expand your entitlements from five years to seven. Vote for us, we care for you.") Human nature being what it is, the electoral bribery would of course be very effective--albeit destructive.

This proposal, of course, does not have a hope of gaining public traction or support. The current bribes are all too effective and corrupting. But eventually our economy and society will come to its knees, for the present system of open ended entitlement rights is unsustainable. It will crush us all in time. In the crushing, it is probable that necessity will prove again to be the mother of political invention.

If so, our modest proposal would likely be viewed far more favorably in the day of fiscal and economic calamity.