Mother Country continued

Following on from the last excerpt posted yesterday, it describes situations in the late 1980s when the book was written but there is a lot that sounds like current discussions in the United States.  A similar scheme of youth employment has been discussed in some states, even as education,  social services and welfare are cut.

So very much depends on a poor man's wage.  At present there is a Youth Training Scheme in Britain to absorb the energies of unemployed school-leavers.  Industries are encouraged to take on trainees in place of regular hiring.  These youths are paid by the government at wages that about equal the dole.  In other words, the government donates to industry the free use of unskilled labor.  Without reference to the wealth these young people produce, their subsistence is counted as welfare spending, and they are thought of as the beneficiaries of this arrangement, from which it is hoped they will learn the value of honest work.

People in their teens are historically the most coveted workers in the British economy.  They are relatively healthy, and from the government's point of view, they are cheap, because they have no dependents and normally live with their families.  This scheme merely reproduces the ancient pattern, severing work from pay, making the wage a charity, while reducing work to an escape from the opprobrium of idleness.

Britain invests more money abroad per capita than any other country, and invested more in absolute terms, util Japan surpassed it in this decade.  Those who control capital,  whether banks or industries of the government itself, have always  had the means  to punish or starve policies they disapprove of,  or to crown with success policies friendlier to their interests simply by leaving money at home or by siphoning it off to the United States or to South Africa or elsewhere.

Mrs. Thatcher was described in an essay by Bernard D. Nossiter in The New York Times (June 15, 1988* as arguing to a church assembly "that abundance, the rich, were blessed while poverty, the poor were not, and Creation proves it."

She has her reward.  Britain is experiencing economic growth, of the hectic, selective, up-market kind which does not threaten to drive upward the cost of industrial labor or the demand of social services.  British economics is a game of keep-away.  Whence all the jiggling of statistics - it is easy to get a big percentage increase from a very small base, as in calculating wages and pensions, and it is easy to take away with one hand what is given with the other, to raise wages a little and cut benefits more, and it is easy to increase rates of saving and contribution to private pension plans by reducing benefits for the elderly or cutting back on the administration needed to deliver them or adding to the obstacles involved in obtaining them or threatening to phase them out altogether, as the Thatcher government has done. 

Ralf Dahrendorf, in his book On Britain, quotes respectfully as follows from a book titled Equality, coauthored by Keith Joseph, an important figure in the Thatcher government:  "Ultimately the capacity of any society to look after its poor is dependent on the total amount of its wealth, however distributed."  One might object that the way in which wealth is distributed determines, in a society, how numerous "its poor" will be.  To distribute wealth away from employed people, as the British do, creates poverty, which must be looked after, perpetuating the ancient relation of those who work to those who employ, which has analogues, or cousins, in slavery and forced labor.

Marilynne Robinson's contention that the Poor Law is still present or, at least, always threatens to be resurrected in Britain is clear.   The language of it seems to be almost unconsciously encoded in the way we talk about work, wealth and economic rightness.  We seemed to be learning new ways to think about those and talk about them, to break out of the Poor Law form of slavery.  My fear is that has been regaining a presence in American thought since the Reagan administration and that, now, our "liberals" in the Democratic Party sound like conservatives of the 1930s.

This week as Nancy Pelosi proposes to raise the minimum wage again, to certain opposition with the usual arguments that paying a fair wage inhibits employment, as the stock market floats to new highs over the stagnant unemployment figures and in a week after we found out who the worlds biggest billionaires are (with some having more than fifty billion dollars in personal wealth),  How we've gotten to where we are and the kind of barely realized assumptions that allow us to tolerate it are worth thinking about very hard.