In the 70’s and 80’s, folks on the side of fiscal and personal responsibility tried to make the argument against a massive Welfare State by discussing the idea of incentives. It was argued that if you pay people not to work, they won’t work. And if you, say, pay people to have children outside of marriage and to raise those children in single-parent households… they will.
It was a universal argument about incentives and human nature that, most of us believed, applied to human beings everywhere. But the Left, as the Left always does, turned it into an argument about race and class in order to shut the argument down. If you believed that people responded to incentives, especially cash incentives, then you were saying something awful about poor people broadly, and people of color specifically. And so the subject became taboo. Yes, Ronald Reagan helped them twist the argument by leaning into the “Welfare Queen” label, but the use of a derogatory label does not negate the entire underlying argument, it only makes it impossible to talk about it in a constructive way.
But now, here we are in 2021. We are coming out of a year-long pandemic lockdown. Businesses of all kinds are re-opening and are in desperate need of workers. Consumers are venturing back out into the world flush with cash. The Economy should be roaring off into the stratosphere.
And yet it’s not…
Job creation numbers are anemic at best, and even though the Nation is flush with available jobs, unemployment just defied expectations by going… up?
The most common explanation seems to be that the Federal Governmet is still paying people to stay home and not work, and that a lot of people like the idea of being paid to stay home and not work. Turns out that liking the idea of getting paid not to work has nothing to do with your race, class, or level of income. Rather, it is simple human nature. People respond to incentives and you get more of that which you pay for… in this case, sloth.
I would like to think that we could get back to having a substantive discussion of how we can find ways to break people out of the cycle of Government dependency… especially now that we’ve proved the concept that people tend to get addicted to Government money is not a racist or classist point-of-view, but rather something that should be obvious and uncontroversial. Under the right circumstances, we are all capable of becoming Welfare Queens or Kings. All of us… white or black, rich or poor, male or female, Austin, Detroit, San Fran, Richmond, Miami, Portland or Nashville… all of us. Because we are all human and responding to incentives is undeniable and irrepressible Human Nature. There shouldn’t be any taboo against pointing out that fact and incorporating it into our public policy.
But then I would also like a McLaren…. and the folks at the McLaren dealership also respond to incentives… specifically, they require that I incentivize them with a couple hundred thousand dollars before they will give me one.