The broken society revisited (plus a little on big government)

Since Julian Dobson has smothered me with kind words and references to West Ham winning the world cup it would be churlish to return to the debate. However, I am nothing if not a churl!

It seems to me that we are – as we often do in these debates – tearing down carefully constructed straw men. There are a few things that should be said to develop the thesis on the ‘broken society’ and the significance of Government as a factor in this thesis. But first I should discuss what we mean by “broken society” – it is after all a loaded term.

I have a vacuum cleaner sat under my stairs. It is broken but can be repaired. Perhaps this is what we mean by “broken” in this context. I certainly hope we don’t mean “broken” in the manner of a broken glass – beyond the possibility of repair! To continue the vacuum cleaner metaphor, we have some parts of our society that are not working properly and those broken parts affect how well the whole operates – to the point maybe of threatening its viability.

I would also like to remember what one person said on the subject of society:

“I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand "I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!" or "I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!" "I am homeless, the Government must house me!" and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.”

A great deal of rubbish has been said about what this means but, in the context of government, it defines a very important point in the debate. Government – whatever its intent – is not a neutral player, a benign agent. And my biggest worry is that the delivery of social and welfare services directly through the coercive agency of taxation affects incentives – society’s problems become somebody else’s problem – the surest way to vanish something as Douglas Adams observed.

Government squeezes out individual social initiative by giving people the incentive to disengage

The next element of Julian’s post relates to myth-making (hence the West Ham references). Now leaving aside the contribution of mythopoeia to human joy and understanding – I am concerned not to confuse longitudinal study with the creation of myth. My argument wasn’t that the late 1960s and early 1970s represented some sort of mythic shangri la of social condition but that, after a long period of social stability, certain indicators of social breakdown (crime, worklessness, etc.) began to increase dramatically at that point. I’m certainly not suggesting we return to a time when homosexuality was barely tolerated, when racism was so ingrained we hardly blinked at language that would get you fired today and where women in senior positions were so unusual as to be borderline weird!

However, the telling of stories is an integral aspect of how we understand the world in which we live – those stories provide empathy, understanding and appreciation to the dry, dusty facts & figures. But stories are dangerous since they can also use emotion to mislead and misdirect – the construction of socialism and fascism is founded on the preference for the qualitative over the quantitative in our search for understanding.

The problem with Government is that 30 years of relentless pressure (redoubled in the past ten years) on these social problems and challenges have resulted not in the end of poverty, the elimination of crime or the banishing of unemployment but in these problems becoming more intractable, a permanent feature of our society’s landscape. Despite directing one pound in every ten we earn to the relief of poverty throughout that period, there is no sign of poverty’s elimination.

The big government discussion isn’t about the aims – it is an observation that decades of bureaucratic initiative (if that isn’t an oxymoron) have failed. David Cameron quite rightly seeks an alternative – perhaps looking to that new age of mutuality and private initiative presaged in David Beito et al’s The Voluntary City.

I close with two quotes from the great Ronald Reagan:

“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.”

And

“I know in my heart that man is good.That what is right will always eventually triumph. And there's purpose and worth to each and every life.”

It is this sentiment that informs my thinking rather than a narrow, selfish perspective. Given the right incentives and the means people will respond to their neighbour’s suffering – but so long as governments proclaim a misplaced capability to solve the problems we will not grasp any incentive and respond.