The Middle Class Without The Welfare State

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Road to the Middle Class

Tuesday May 21, 2013

by Christopher Chantrill

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If the poor can thrive, as we have seen, without the supervision and the resources of the welfare state, why not the middle class? Indeed, it is the middle class that bears the moral responsibility for the entitlement state and its promises that cannot be kept, debt that cannot be paid, and a course that cannot continue. We middle-class people rather like the well-worn paths of the welfare state; it saves us the bother of making our own way. All we need to do is keep up a good report card and we can fall into the middle-class entitlements when our turn comes. Social Security? Better than relying on the stock market. Medicare? Better than the bother of making decisions about your own health care. Education? Who has time, with today’s two-income families, to volunteer at the neighborhood school?

Modern middle-class Americans might be excused for thinking that life is just school writ large, for our highly organized childhoods teach us exactly that. The British call the problem “bums on seats” when they worry about the declining school performance of boys. Boys have never done well at sitting still, and have always gone unwillingly to school. And humans in general are more than bums on seats graduating from classroom to classroom in the child custodial facility of life.

If the welfare state is bad for the poor, by teaching them dependency and the low cunning needed to milk the benefit stations of the via dependencia, it must be even worse for the middle class. At least the poor learn something on the street about how to outwit the Man. The middle class can easily become deracinated, losing the basic culture of the middle class that has obtained since the Axial Age religions first invented the idea of the “responsible self.” The temptation for the poor is to sink to a culture of low cunning; the temptation for the middle class is to live life as an inmate in an institution, starting at school, the government child-custodial facility, continuing on by working in big bureaucracies for the system, and then ending in a senior planned community — really, a luxury barracks — in man-made Florida or Arizona.

If welfare dependency for the poor is a kind of addictive drug, the middle-class life in the welfare state is a form of social sterilization, and the living proof is the remarkable lack of fecundity in welfare state females. Simply stated, middle class people work too much and commune too little; we spend too much time as wage slaves at the business park and too little time socializing in the community, living a life in common with our families, our neighbors, and our communities. It all starts with the standard middle-class welfare-state benefits.

In today’s America the average business-park salaryman does not earn a wage. He gets take-home pay, the monies left over after he and his employer have paid taxes to pay for the government pension, the government old-age health care, the government unemployment tax, and the government work-place disability premium. And that is before the employer’s deductions for a 401k pension plan, health insurance, dental insurance, and disability insurance. All these taxes and deductions amount to forced savings against the common vicissitudes of life, and very worthy they are. They also amount to forced sterilization, because the salaryman in question does not have beneficial ownership of his forced savings, not yet. Suppose he wants to buy a house. Wouldn’t it be a good idea for him to access his savings and thus reduce the necessary mortgage? Suppose he wants to start a business? Isn’t that the whole purpose of savings? Suppose he wants to go back to school? It would be nice to apply the unemployment insurance part of his forced savings to his school fees and his living expenses. But he can’t, because the government in its wisdom and the employer in his cunning, have sequestered the salaryman’s savings away from reckless or independent action.

You can see the government’s interest in all this. It can take the forced savings and spend it on buying votes until the salaryman needs it decades later. You can see the employer’s interest. He would like the worker to work and not spend time on non-work-related activities like financial and health-care planning and management. He would also like the worker not to bother his silly little head about setting up in business — perhaps in competition with the employer.

All of which is to say that, despite 200 years of political propaganda, perhaps the yoke of the factory system has fallen hardest on the shoulders, not of the manual worker, but on the middle-class knowledge worker, disciplined, controlled, confined, as perhaps no factory hand in the 19th century or slave on a sugar island ever had to suffer. For let us not forget the words of the slave drivers and the factory bosses, that post-pubertal males could not be made to submit to the gang system or to factory discipline. We need our government school system to create the submissive personality suited for work as human cogs in large bureaucratic systems.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.americanmanifesto.org.

print view

The Crisis of the Administrative State
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

Government and the Technology of Power
If you scratch a social reformer, you will likely discover a plan for more government.

Business, Slavery, and Trust
Business is all about trust and relationship.

Freebooters and Freeloaders
The modern welfare state encourages freeloaders.

The Bonds of Faith
No society known to anthropology or history lacked religion.

A Critique of Social Mechanics
The problem with human society reduced to system.

From Multitude to Civil Society
The larger the government, the smaller the society.

The Answer is Civil Society
In between the separated powers.

The Greater Separation of Powers
If you want to limit power then you must limit power.

Conservatism Three by Three
Conservatism, political, economics, and cultural.

The Culture of Involvement
Imagining lives without the welfare state

The Poor Without the Welfare State
Can the poor thrive without the welfare state?

The Middle Class Without The Welfare State
How would the middle class live without all those middle-class entitlements?

The Real Meaning of Society
Broadening the horizon of cooperation in the “last best hope of man on earth.”

The Middle Class Without The Welfare State

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