Population Growth – Welfare Not Immigration

It was announced today that the UK population increased more last year than at any time in almost half a century. According to figures from the Office for National Statistics, the number of births in the UK is now at its highest since 1991, with 797,000 during the year to mid-2010 and this contribution to overall population growth is greater than that from net migration.

So why has there been a new baby boom without a war for an excuse?

Increased government support for families – notably the introduction of the Working Families’ Tax Credit (WFTC) in 1999 and greater generosity of means-tested Income Support (IS) payments – has coincided with a rise in births among couples who left school at 16 relative to those who stayed in education after 18.

According to research summarised in the Autumn 2008 issue of Research in Public Policy, the probability of having a birth increased by 1.2 percentage points among women with low education, which equates to nearly 45,000 additional births. The study also finds that the decision whether to have children – or when to begin having them – seems more susceptible to financial incentives than the decision over how many to have. The UK birth rate has increased steadily since 2001 and now stands at an average of 1.9 births per woman, the highest level since 1974.

Some women told researchers they had stopped using contraception. The more generous welfare system is being credited with contributing to an increase in the overall UK birth rate, which is now at its highest level since 1974. The report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies concludes: “We have shown that more generous Government support coincided with an increase in births among the group most affected by the [welfare] reforms.

The study says that the introduction of Working Families Tax Credit and an increase in Income Support between 1999 and 2003 triggered a rise in taxpayer spending on children “unprecedented” in the previous 30 years. Because the reforms were targeted at the poorest families with children, the value of their state handouts increased by 10 per cent of their total household income. For couples who both left school at 16, the reforms meant an increase in benefits of 45 per cent, from £39 a week to £56.76. This is a rise almost twice as much as the handouts for which a couple who went on to sixth form college would be eligible, which increased by 25 per cent to £37.27 a week. The researchers then looked at fertility rates both before the reforms were announced and after, for a sample of 101,330 women aged between 20 and 45. They found a large increase in the first year after the benefits were made more generous, particularly among women who had left school as soon as possible. The results show a 15 per cent increase in the probability of having a baby in the “low education group”.

People will have different views about whether a larger population is a good or bad thing. What cannot be rationally disputed is that dipping into taxpayers pockets to encourage the births of a whole new generation of welfare dependants can only take us closer to the economic collapse that state spending and borrowing has speeded us toward. Labour justified this handout on the grounds of reducing child poverty. The result will be lots more children in homes where inadequate parents don’t have the will or the ability to raise these children to be responsible and contributing members of society.

Related articles

• Britain adds half a million to population (ctv.ca)
• Population growth hits 50-year high (mirror.co.uk)

Two Types of Freedom

 

In common with others, I regard the words ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ as interchangeable and I will also treat ‘rights’ and ‘entitlements’ as having equivalence.

Jean Jacques Rousseau said: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” – The Social Contract

What he meant by this was that government was only legitimate if it had the assent of the people through a ‘social contract’. This was a revolutionary concept in the early 18^th century when European countries were largely led by monarchs claiming divine authority and rejecting the need for approval from their subjects. These kinds of ideas have been seen as influencing the French revolution and laying some of the philosophical roots of socialism.

By the 19^th century in Britain the ideas of Adam Smith about free markets and the Whig campaigns for free trade strengthened views about the importance of freedom of the individual and property rights. Into the 20^th century writers like Dickens and then the horrors of the 1^st WW, the depression and then the 2^nd WW decisively shifted thought towards the need for the state to provide a comprehensive framework of welfare so that nobody should suffer complete destitution. So the welfare state, which made its first, tentative steps in Lloyd George’s ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909, became fully fledged with the Beveridge report (Full Employment in a Free Society) of 1944 and the legislative programme of the 1945 Labour Government.

The best known modern philosopher to deal with freedom is Sir Isaiah Berlin in his 1958 lecture ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ and his later ‘Four Essays on Liberty’, and it is from his work that this paper is drawn. Berlin examined the difference between what he called the negative freedoms and positive freedoms. Unfortunately these terms carry value connotations which I would prefer to avoid so I will refer to freedoms ‘to’ or freedoms ‘from’.

‘This is a free society’ is a familiar response to perceived abuse of authority by Police or officials, but what is freedom, and a free society? For Rousseau it was sufficient that laws were enacted with the consent of people exercising free will. In that respect, so far as democracies work properly, we are free.

Berlin points out that this doesn’t really get far enough into freedom to be satisfactory. We are all free to lunch at the Ritz, take a box at the Royal Opera House, dine at Claridges and then while away the night drinking fine champagne at the tables of an exclusive gaming club. The problem with that is that most of us lack the means to enjoy such freedoms

It was necessary, he said, to consider whether people were free from hunger, free from fear, free from exposure to the cold of winter without shelter or adequate clothing. This brings us back to the idea that genuine freedom must involve some sort of fairness to the extent that nobody should be so lacking in the capacity to meet such fundamental things as survival needs because that surely takes away their freedom to live.

It becomes clear that establishing some freedoms may take away others and a moral or political judgement must be made on which types of freedom should have priority.

A new phase of development started with the Labour government which came to power in 1974 when we had a wave of legislation on equal pay, anti racism and health and safety aiming to provide freedom from discrimination, prejudice and risk. The change to Thatcherism in 1979 limited the strength of the trade unions, but did nothing to undo the 1974 reforms and when New Labour became the government in 1997 a new wave of laws prohibiting discrimination against gay people, disabled or older people as well as prohibitions on religious hatred being expressed. The state has now entrenched a position in which the law protects freedom from being offended or inconvenienced above the freedom to think, speak or write freely.

As we start to get into the detail, the distinction between freedoms of the ‘to’ and ‘from’ types can become complex. The freedom to smoke in a club, bar or restaurant has been removed in the name of giving staff and others the freedom from secondary smoke. Of course the freedom from secondary smoke is the freedom to breathe smoke free air and resorting to terms like negative or positive freedom does not help in this context.

Anyway, I think we can all recognise the difference between freedom representing an absence of constraint and freedom meaning an enablement to benefit from something that is seen as something which one ought to be able to do or have.

I started nearly three centuries ago with the evolution of ideas of freedom under the law and freedom to have one’s property protected by the state and moved to a current situation in Britain in which freedom has moved so much towards entitlement that the nature of freedom has been obscured in the public mind.

It is no longer a case of ‘I thought this was a free society’ to one of ‘I know my rights’.

When freedom from want has come to embrace a commitment to eliminate child poverty, among many other similar commitments, the freedom of the working citizen to use the product of their own labour has been greatly constrained by the tax burden and the maintenance of the national debt. It is obvious that when you define child poverty as the situation in which a child lives in a household living on less than 60% of the median income you cannot do that unless you also eliminate most differences in income. To do either thing requires massive redistribution of wealth away from those who produced it to those who didn’t. This in turn, as Adam Smith comprehensively showed, would result in a fall in national income. Paradoxically this could result in the child freed from relative poverty being absolutely poorer than before this absurd objective was achieved.

Today in Britain between two thirds and three quarters of households receive more in state benefits than they pay in taxes. The top one percent of earners pay twenty five percent of tax. Approximately forty three percent of the economy is directly controlled by the government and one in five employed people works for local or national government (that does not include the large number of people employed by quangos or large charities receiving government grants, etc.). Communist China has a more free enterprise economy than the capitalist UK, and the GDP of China has overtaken that of Britain.

Where the elimination of want by use of state benefits has extended to the point where providing for oneself and ones family has become a lifestyle choice; is part of being human lost? Where the state is a universal parent and no citizen is allowed to fully grow up, hasn’t some vital element of the freedom to live been lost.

Berlin was right to distinguish between different types of freedom. Should we now return to this subject as philosophers and examine whether we can probe further into what it means to be free?

As far as I am concerned, I think the government is taking a liberty, but like Mr Humphries in ‘Are You Being Served’. I’m free!

Poverty, Welfare & Big Government

 

The Labour Government set an impossible target to reduce child poverty and then it damaged the economy so badly by its excessive spending, enormous debt creation and crippling burden of bureaucracy on business that it made every one of us poorer than we should be.

 

David Cameron is quite right in saying that there needs to be smaller government and that individuals and voluntary organisations should be encouraged to take more responsibility improving their own life opportunities and assisting people close to them when they face difficult times. Our interfering state has made it increasingly difficult for people to help out with child care, volunteer in a youth group or do any kind of constructive community activity. The bureaucratic systems set up by local government and some of the huge charities have no ability to build genuine relationships with the people they are supposed to serve. Although usually well intentioned to begin with, they become self serving empires for their managers and the staff get reduced to box ticking target hunters rather than genuine carers.

 

The problem with the Tories is that they have not put forward any concrete proposals to show how they would cut the interfering state and we know that in government they will be hard to distinguish from the appalling Labour government they hope to replace.

 

The welfare dependency that has been built up over decades, including such deceptions as the incapacity system introduced by Thatcher to try to hide unemployment, cannot be wiped out overnight, but real progress must be made immediately.

 

Cameron says that people should not be worse off when they go off benefit into work. Of course not. He will not achieve that by fiddling with tax credits. The tax credit system is a costly, over complex, bureaucratic monster that needs to be scrapped. Incapacity benefit must be ended and the benefits for all people without work frozen at their current level.

 

As wages increase and benefits stay fixed the incentive to find work and not be penalised for taking it increases.

Rise in UK teenager pregnancies

Teenage preganancies in the UK have risen for the first time in five years. Britain has the worst record in Europe although it is not as bad as the USA where Bush’s capitulation to the Christian lobby has placed emphasis on abstention from sex before marriage while removing support from anybody helping with contraception or abortion.

Here, the government is asking whether there needs to be an improvement in sex education in schools or classes for girls to show the burdens of motherhood.

I am not sure whether the idiots who suggest this stuff believe any of it or not, but either way it doesn’t matter. They are still going to throw away vast amounts of taxpayers money doing it and building their empires while the misery caused by immature, inadequates becoming parents will continue.

One thing that these children and their families do understand is the benefit and welfare system. Some of them have been living on it for generations and they share their experiences with all their mates. Kids who do not get on at school, have miserable experiences at home and do not see any prospect of doing well in the working world just don’t care about exams or putting effort into anything which is not pleasurable in their eyes.

When a young girl gets pregnant, the state rewards her with loads of attention, a support network, financial benefits and the prospect of a home for her and her baby. Even if she does not get pregnant deliberately to escape her own disfunctional parents or to create another living thing that loves her, she might be happy if it happens for completely rational economic reasons.

These kids are perfectly well aware of the facts of sex and no amount of education is going to make any difference. Still less will there be any point in telling them to save themselves for marriage.

It is really fairly simple. Stop rewarding children for producing more children. The welfare system needs to be dismantled, but a very good start would be to say that there will be no child benefit, no housing provision, in fact no benefits of any kind whatever for parents below the age of eighteen.

That will not stop under eighteens from having sex and it will certainly not stop all of them from becoming pregnant, but it will definitely make them much more interested in using contraception and for many girls, for whom motherhood would be a very bad thing, they will choose a termination rather than going on to face the full reality of what they have done.

I know this will be repugnant to many people. So be it. Let us discuss the issue and consider the consequences of our respective opinions.

Low and Simple Taxes

We should have a flat tax on all income and purchases with no exemptions. After most of the welfare state has been dismantled, it will be possible to reduce taxes to ten or twelve percent. A simple system which does not require an army of bureaucrats.

Poverty in 21st Century Britain is a Life Style Choice

What is poverty?

First we need to define what poverty is. There is an international definition of those who have to live on two dollars a day or less. I am happy to accept that definition. There is no way that I could feed clothe and house myself for £1 a day. I don’t know who could.

Of course you cannot really define poverty in terms of monetary units. There are people in some parts of the world, living in rural areas, who manage to meet very basic needs without having any cash income at all. A simple, close to nature existence, admired and romanticised by some, that is rare and rapidly becoming rarer with the spread of globalisation. The reality is that subsistence living was probably always much harder and more brutal than western eco freaks would like to imagine. For me, even if these people have adequate shelter, sufficient clothing for protection and dignity and the nutrition necessary to achieve and maintain good health, they are still in poverty because they lack all life choices beyond survival.

No such situation exists anywhere in the developed nations and certainly not in Britain.

We are told by organisations such as the Rowntree Trust that there are very large numbers of children in Britain in poverty (over 1 million) and there is constant coverage in the media of the shorter life spans of the poor in this country, how people suffer worse health care if they are poor, the amount of housing deprivation suffered by the poor, how many people are homeless and so on.

Relative poverty

The truth, of course, is that the only way that you can talk about anybody in Britain being poor is by defining poverty in relative terms. As soon as you do that you are on a slippery slope to a fantasy world and any attempt to reduce relative poverty has horrible consequences for everybody. Especially those people that you have been describing as poor.

But first, what does relative poverty mean. Well there are as many definitions as there are people using the term, but I will return to the Joseph Rowntree Trust. They define poverty as any family living on less than forty per cent of the median income. That means that you take the family on exactly the middle income of the range from the very largest to the very smallest (I will set aside the issue of it actually being impossible to correctly identify median income with any precision because accurate information is not available) and then you multiply that sum by 0.4. For the sake of argument let us say that the median is £25,000. Then the poverty level is £10.000 or £200 per week. In a welfare state, that is not actually the true income though. It is accompanied by child benefits and in many cases free prescriptions, dental care and much else. The lowest level of income for anybody in this country who claims benefits is about £60 per week plus the full cost of reasonable accommodation. Let us say £8 per day for food, clothing and energy costs although it is actually a bit more than that which we can say goes towards replacement of furniture and equipment.

Food

It costs less than two pounds per day per person to feed people in prison, hospital or care homes. Of course there are large economies of scale in this type of feeding and it is usually not very good. However, I can quite easily feed myself on a varied home cooked diet for £20 a week Admittedly that involves looking out whoopsies, but the shop is within walking distance and as I don’t work, just like anybody who must live on £60 per week, it doesn’t matter how much time I spend shopping and cooking.

Clothing

The truth is, and it is probably very obvious, I spend almost nothing on clothes. I don’t do anything vigorous enough to wear them out and I have absolutely no idea of what might be stylish. I do not think I am so scruffy as to lose all dignity although some may disagree. What I do accept is that some people must dress to a higher standard than me to go for job interviews or for other reasons. Excellent clothing can be bought in charity shops at very low cost. £15 per week is more than adequate for anybody to clothe themselves to a standard necessary for dignity, warmth and job seeking.

Shelter

As already stated, benefits include the cost of reasonable accommodation. After food and clothing we are left with £25 per week for gas, electricity, TV licence and maintenance of furniture, furnishings and equipment. It is quite adequate to do that and a allow a very small amount for entertainment. What it glaringly does not do is to allow for the cost of cigarettes, alcohol, running a car or using drugs and this is the heart of the issue about poverty. I am a libertarian. I believe that people are entitled to enhance their enjoyment of life in whatever way they choose so long as they do not diminish the lives of others when they do it. This means that they should be able to smoke, drink and take other substances, but only if they can afford these things by their own efforts. Nobody should be able to enjoy such things at the expense of taxpayers who have earned everything from which the tax is taken to finance the benefit recipient.

It is perfectly possible in our society to choose not to work and to live a healthy and comfortable life. If you act entirely within the rules and the law, your life will not be as rich as it is for the majority of the population, but in no sense could you meaningfully be described as in poverty. If you have enough drive and interest to make full use of free services such as libraries, galleries and museums, you can actually achieve enormous mental satisfaction and contentment in learning and culture beyond that enjoyed by those who are devoting a large part of their lives to work.

Let us reject the absurd concept of relative poverty. In relation to Bill Gates or even the minnow, the Duke of Westminster I am very poor. Relative to the average citizen of Sierra Leone I am unimaginably rich. Neither thing means anything and nor does the term relative poverty tell anything about who is poor. It is the quality of the life that a person is able to live that counts.

Effects of redistribution

Those who insist that an egalitarian society is a desirable objective want to redistribute wealth away from the rich and toward those who have less than the average.

Export of enterprise

Of course, the wealth that the egalitarians (they used to call themselves socialists, but since the failure of the communist tyrannies and the rise of New Labour they are ashamed of that name now) has been created by the energy, risks and initiative of entrepreneurs. The state has never created any wealth. It only moves wealth around or expropriates the achievements of private individuals and corporations.

As soon as you start to confiscate the returns that these enterprising people earn from their efforts they will see no reason to stay here and they will go elsewhere. Their wealth creation and employment generation will go with them and we will all become poorer because of the attempt to improve the lot of those who were perceived as being poor.

Dissipation of distributed wealth

It is not for nothing that some people are immensely rich and powerful, others have absolutely nothing and most of us are somewhere in between. If we have nothing, it is not because the world has got it in for us. It is a consequence of our own personality, abilities and industriousness. From time to time you will hear of pools and lottery winners who had nothing and came into millions only to be without cash again some years down the line. Why is that? They lost the money for the same reason that they had none in the first place. When the state takes money from the rich and gives it to those they consider to be poor, they do not improve the nutrition of children or the health education or well being of those who lacked these things before. What they actually achieve is more profitable bookmakers, the growth of internet casinos, the enrichment of criminal drug gangs and the waste of vast amounts of money and energy on useless consumer products that quickly find their way to the pawn shop.

What are the causes of genuine poverty?

Protectionist trade barriers by the developed nations, thieving and murderous dictatorships and failed states (as in most of Africa), war and natural disasters. Complete free trade would do more to take the poorest out of poverty than any other single action. Foreign aid and so called development agencies keep corrupt governments in power and create new dependencies all the time. These bureaucracies waste money, distort economies and perpetuate much of the evil that they were created to overcome. Working to crush cruel dictatorships will do more to free the oppressed and starving than all the development aid could ever achieve. Good international networks exist to respond to natural disasters. They should continue to provide life saving relief, but as soon as the emergency work is done they should withdraw and allow the indigenous population to rebuild their own lives in their own culture.

Wars need to e limited by a powerful international criminal court and strong international frameworks of law which can be enforced by military force where required. Broad democratic political/economic blocs like the EU, ASEAN and NAFTA. Should be strengthened and extended to reduce the possibilities of regional conflict. The EU alone will drag millions from central and eastern Europe out of the poverty created by their coercion into the failed Soviet dictatorship.

Mental illness, homelessness and people beyond benefits.

The majority of people in our society who are described as homeless do not live without shelter. They have accommodation with family, friends or others that they regard as not being their own and in which they consider themselves to be inadequately accommodated or insecure. For somebody living within their family to be able to describe themselves as homeless and for that to be accepted is an indicator of how far we have shifted from recognising the family as a primary unit of social cohesion and transferring that role to the state. A big subject that needs another discussion.

Those who reject benefits and shelter or who are unable to handle the bureaucracy of obtaining these things will always exist and they are genuinely poor.

Dependency culture

You only have to hear a few of the weekly stories about how somebody cannot afford to take work to realise how easily people become conditioned to see work as risky and safety in idleness and benefits. I have seen this many times in my own family, friends and associates. Describing oneself as poor and underprivileged while living reasonably comfortably in an unchallenging cocoon of benefits make it increasingly difficult to consider the world of work that demands application and effort while threatening the possibility of failure. For a child brought up in a non working home, expectation is limited and the fear of the unknown can become overwhelming.

What should be done?

Freeze benefits. Allow them to diminish in value with inflation and require their recipients to get work and income. As in the USA, set a lifetime limit on the length of time that anybody can be on benefit. Similarly to Singapore and Chile,

Provide food, clothing and shelter to those in need rather than cash. Require biometric identification for receipt of benefits and set time limits where appropriate.

The final aim, although it will take a very long time to unravel the dependency culture caused by decades of state interference, will be to end state benefits completely and allow charities to grow and fill the gaps through which the least able would otherwise fall.

Unemployment, Disability & Welfare to Work

The British Conservative Party (Tories) has announced proposals to require long term unemployment benefit claimants to carry out community work to continue receiving state benefits and it is also intending, if it gets into government, that disability benefit claimants should all be medically examined to establish whether they are capable of work.

In recent years there has been a massive increase in the number of unemployed people receiving disability benefit. It is extremely unlikely that this has been caused by a rise in the number of people within society who are permanently disabled although there are two factors that account for part of the rise. One is that there has been an increase the number of condtions considered to be disabling and the other, probably smaller, factor is that improvements in medical caremean that more disabled people get through childhood and live for longer. By far the strongest cause of the increased numbers has been the introduction of disability benefit that is about twenty pounds per week higher than standard unemployment benefit.

There is no doubt that some disabled people have higher living costs, but it makes no sense at all to provide a blanket additional payment. All this does is act as an incentive to claim disability. This in turn makes it harder for the person to find work providing a higher income than benefit so they are more likely to remain unemployed. They are even more likkely to remain unemployed because having to claim disability to gain higher benefit results in a very strong incentive to maintain the disablement. Returning to work, in the mind of the claimant, detracts from the claim possibly gicing rise to suspicion that it did not prevent employment in the first place and threatening future living standards if the employment should prove to be short lived or is not to their liking.

We must return to treating all the unemployed in the same way financially. Those people with medical conditions that require specific additional costs have to be assessed individually. Having removed the financial incentive to claim disability, there will be a huge reduction in the rising numbers of disabled people and the requirement for mass medical examinations will go away.

Britain is a long way behind the USA and Australia in requiring attendance on some form of work or work substitute from the unemployed. The Tories are not going far enough orthinking clearly enough in suggesting ‘some form of community work’. While I applaud this initiative, it does not go anywhere near far enough. All unemployed claimants should be required to attend work or work training full time from the time that they register until they discontinue benefit. It is not good enough to pick them up after two years on benefit when they have fallen out of a working habit and community work is of no value unless it has all of the structure and discipline of a genuine work environment.

Those places that have adopted rigorous welfare to work schemes have achieved dramatic reductions in welfare dependency that is to the benefit of the individuals returned to work as well as the taxpayers who were previously supporting them.

Teenage Pregnancy, Abortion and State Benefits

The number of babies born to children under sixteen has increased in Britain. This continues a long run trend and it is accompanied by an increase in the number of abortions given to school age girls. In an article in the Sunday Times on 7 January 2008 Neil Lyndon argues that this situation is the result of state benefits.

Let us be clear about a few things. Underage children have sex however much they are given sex education, are told to abstain or whatever other initiative is taken. It is a simple consequence of hormones and opportunity. We are a free cociety which is not going to lock up our children or forcibly segregate the sexes at all times.

Contraception is easily available and the vast majority of children know about it. That should continue to be the case and the use of barrier contraceptives should be strongly encouraged in order to minimise the spread of sexually transmitted infections (STI’s) as well as preventing unwanted pregnancy.

Why does Britain have a worse record on teenage pregnancy than other countries? I agree with Lyndon that it is our welfare and National Health System (NHS).It is for women to determine their own fertility, but they should not have any entitlement to free termination of a pregnancy that they brought about by their own, and their partner’s, action. It is not just a case of teenage pregnancies, but all pregnancy terminations should be paid for. Pregnancy is not an illness and for clinical abortions to be provided free is quite simply a tax on the whole population for irresponsible people to have their mistakes rectified.

There cannot be any doubt that knowing they can live on state benefits means that many teenage mothers go ahead with unprotected sex and continue with their unplanned pregnancies when they have absolutely no means to care for the child. This must end. The difficulty with Lyndon’s case is that it would be extremely hard to isolate teenage mothers as unworthy recipients of benefits. We need to grasp the need to dismantle the whole welfare culture and the dependency that it generates. The children brought up in homes where nobody works and all income comes from state benefits are very likely to be benefit claimants themselves so the cycle continues and inexorably increases in its burden on the tax paying, working members of society.

We cannot abandon welfarism overnight. One possible starting point would be to say that eighteen years is the age of adulthood in this country. Below that age there is no entitlement of any kind to state benfits including child benefit, tax credits or unemployment benefits.

Once an awareness develops that child pregnancies will result in very large costs, there will inevitably be a reduction in the number of teenage mothers. One hopes that this will partly come about through young people exercising more restraint and delaying sexual intercourse until they have greater maturity. What it will certainly do is cause greater reflection on the consequences of pregnancy. Those who wish to terminate may come to that decision earlier so that they can use the so called ‘morning after’ pill although in fact these chemical methods of termination can be effective up to a month after conception.