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.