Wasted Potential

Recently I read an article by Don Brash on benefit numbers. The numbers were shocking. As of June 2021, there were 354,744 receiving a main benefit from the government. This represents 11.3% of the working-age population. Part of this (2.1%) is made up of people receiving sole-parent support. A massive 6.1% are people receiving jobseeker support. These are people (supposedly) looking for work, or temporarily unable to work due to a health condition or injury. There are just over 190,000 or 6.1% of the working-age population in this category. As Brash rightly points out, this number has not reduced in any significant way despite the fact that employers are screaming out for even unskilled workers. He writes, “Clearly having more than a third of a million adults dependent on a benefit at a time when employers are desperate for staff shows that there is something fundamentally wrong.“

Brash goes on to make some interesting points, and I’d encourage you to read the full article. What I wanted to do was reflect very briefly on the way that the religion of Statism gets things wrong. Forcibly taking other people’s money and giving it to unproductive members of society might seem like a nice thing to do. After all, none of us wants another person to starve. Yet the problem is that in providing assistance like this, and then in the creation of perverse incentives not to work (like minimum wage laws), the State actually causes a percentage of the population to be unable or unwilling to work. This is not good for them, and it is not good for society. Once again we see that the mercies of the wicked are cruel. For a country to have a full 6.1% of people who could work not working is an incredible waste of a society’s potential. Furthermore, the encouragement of family breakup through rampant sexual immorality has led to more sole-parent (i.e. economically unviable) family structures that require government (read unwilling other people) to support.

Paul’s rule with the Thessalonians was “If a man will not work, he shall not eat.” It’s a good rule, and if charity was more personalised, it would force those who should be working to actually work to their own benefit, and the benefit of the community around them. God’s law is good and brings blessing to society. Statism pretends kindness but causes a spiral of societal degeneracy and destruction, which it then uses to argue for more of its ‘kindness’. Stop voting for it.

Cruel Mercies

It’s a funny thing. Those of a more godless statist bent tend to like to paint those who disagree with their methods as uncaring. But the truth is, we are actually caring, it’s just that our care is more thought out. We tend to be sceptical of state solutions because…well when have they ever improved a situation before?

A classic case is all the hand-wringing about child poverty. Leaving aside the definitional problems of child-poverty, what is one of the largest causes of child-poverty? Sole-parent families are a huge contributing factor to child-poverty. Lindsay Mitchell, a researcher into welfare in New Zealand recently authored a report which found that although single parent families make up 28 percent of all families with dependent children, they are the poorest families in NZ. Indeed, 51% of children in poverty live in single parent families, and these parents have the lowest home ownership rates and highest debt ratios. But do we see our leaders point out the truth that men and women who decide to have children together ought to stay together for the welfare of their children? Do we see government initiatives to support and strengthen two-parent families? Do we see an acknowledgement that this is the best way to bring children up? Of course not, that wouldn’t be…kind. So instead our leaders encourage behaviour that leads to more and more children being born into poverty and therefore we increase income inequality and hinder the life prospects of a large proportion of our population.

Truly, the mercy of the wicked is cruel.