Willpower best weapon against poverty

Winnipeg Free Press
Saturday, September 2, 2006
Page: A15
Section: Focus
Byline: DALLAS HANSEN

THERE have been calls recently for the introduction of so-called workfare — that is, forcing welfare recipients to do some kind of make-work to get their cheques. Totally unnecessary.

It’s ironic, even absurd, that so-called libertarians and certain smaller-government advocates are the ones making such demands. They are so blinded by their disdain for the downtrodden that they fail to notice the inconsistency between their supposed libertarianism and their insistence that the provincial government enter the business of running a temporary-worker or day-labour agency.

There are plenty of such agencies already in existence. If you’re an able-bodied worker willing to work, you need only show up in the morning and they’ll give you a job. At the end of the day, they issue a cheque.

I’m familiar with the process because I’ve been through it, having put in a day on the back of a refuse truck back in 2000. It was hard work, but kind of fun also, and although it was sociological curiosity rather than economic necessity that brought me to tossing trash for eight hours that day, I knew that, if I needed to, I could do it the next day, too.

Never mind workfare — from a libertarian standpoint, a much better argument could be made for altogether eliminating welfare for employable workers.

Welfare is subsidized idleness, and when you subsidize something, you can expect more of it. The dependency cycle becomes a difficult one to break, damaging one’s sense of self-worth. The negative moral effects of welfare have been chronicled over and over during the welfare-reform arguments in the 1990s, when then-U.S. president Bill Clinton vowed in 1996 to “end welfare as we know it.” Critics predicted a surge in begging, crime, and homelessness. The reality, a decade later, is that welfare rolls are down 57 per cent and child poverty among African-Americans has seen its sharpest decline since statistics began to be kept in the 1960s.

In this economy of superabundance, decent-quality consumer goods — the necessities of life — are available to everyone, regardless of income level. Whether kitchen supplies, clothing, furniture, TVs, etc., there’s so much being given away or sold for next to nothing that only those lacking the will to attain life’s comforts can fail to have them.

Whatever the reasons — substance abuse, racial discrimination, psychological problems, etc. — for such a widespread lack of will among Winnipeg’s indigent population, a few obvious steps can help improve anyone’s economic and social standing. Don’t drink or do drugs. Keep your hands, face, and body clean. Get a good haircut. Wear decent clothes. Be frugal with your money and industrious with your time.

Earlier this year in Brooklyn, N.Y., I visited a taqueria (Mexican take-out restaurant) on 4th Avenue that was essentially a one-man operation. The owner, about 30, was a Mr. Guerrero, who barely spoke English, and it was clear he catered to a mostly Latino clientele. Through a combination of my broken Spanish and his broken English I ordered my gorditas and watched in marvel at his uncanny knifework and noted the pride with which he took to his task.

Following my delicious meal he solicited my opinion on it — highly favourable, of course — and we got to a bit of talking. Mr. Guerrero had come from Mexico — via the Arizona frontier several years before. Having paid his dues doing day labour as an undocumented worker, he used his savings to open up the taqueria, fulfilling the American Dream.

It is precisely that sort of entrepreneurial ambition — a triumph of human will — that makes the seemingly impossible actually possible.

Unfortunately, in Manitoba poverty is big business. There are many who earn their living as advocates who would be obliged to find another line of work should the poor ever manage to prosper. When a whole section of the lower middle class is dependent upon a steady, even growing, number of poor people, it makes it that much more of a challenge for the poor to rise up.

Even so, the poor are often their own worst enemy. Years ago, when I carried an almost socialistic sympathy for Winnipeg’s disadvantaged, a woman of nearly 80 offering supermarket samples opened my eyes.

“Canadians don’t know what poverty is,” she said in an East London accent. “The welfare recipients come in here and buy Pizza Pops and all this prepackaged stuff. They’re not buying big bags of taters and the like. I survived the Blitz inside a tube station — we had nothing.”

Would, as many so-called poverty advocates claim, eliminating welfare for able-bodied workers bring a rise in crime and the number of homeless? Quite the contrary. Without the security of that meagre but sufficient cheque at the end of the month, the chronically unemployed will learn to appreciate the value of their time. They’ll move to find temporary, and then longer-term, work, and both they and provincial taxpayers would be better off without the government handling this and calling it workfare.

dhansen@mail.saabnet.com

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