The political divide in the midst of 2016 has never been so visibly pronounced for some time. In the US the Presidential race is dominated by extreme right wing candidates (both establishment and maverick) and not so right wing establishment vs what the Americans see as the extremes of centre left. In the UK there is a pending referendum on whether to remain or leave the European Union. The Conservative government has placed punitive measures in public spending that has resulted in severe cuts to services and the pockets of ordinary people. Zero hours contracts become more common adding further insecurity to the ability to make ends meet. As a direct consequence the Labour party found themselves with a new leader whose ideology is more left wing than most since the 1970s.
Austerity measures further increase the discontent of those who cannot afford to make ends meet while stock market figures soar to new heights. The essential assets of countries, like gas, electricity and water are sold to pay off debts created by policies of central banks (This is an entirely different story) leaving them not only without the means to create profit from their consumers but doomed to a perpetual cycle that can never return to self sufficiency. House prices have risen so high that hopes of owning one are far less than ever before. For many in the Millennial generation, it feels like the goal posts have been moved so much that any dreams of being able to afford anything beyond just keeping a rented roof over their head is now an unrealistic pursuit.
Before I continue, I hold my hands up and declare that my political leanings are of the centre left but not of the bought and paid for established political party cronies to corporate business. I have worked all my life (how hard is a matter of perspective) barring a couple of times where I was grateful that the UK government had a welfare system that enabled me to concentrate on looking for work instead of struggling to keep a roof over my head.
I have not once sat back in the belief that the world owes me a living. In fact I have never met a person who does think that way. It is a phrase that has been around for at least 100 years. Mark Twain is reported to have said, “Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living; the world owes you nothing; it was here first.”
Conversely, the UK welfare system is replete with words like ‘benefit’ and ‘entitlement’. The whole welfare system has shuddered at the notion of millions of people who have not paid into the UK tax system suddenly becoming entitled to take money out of it, courtesy of the European Union, to the degree that hasty legislation prevents people from taking money out of the system until they have paid taxes into it - in short, to get a job. After all, the work does not owe them a living.
But it is not the world in this instance; it is the UK that does not owe people who do not live in the UK a living. And in many ways it is not even the UK. It is the system set up by successive governments that does not owe people outside of the UK a living. So what of the people inside the UK? Does the system owe them a living?
Part of my life was spent working in the benefit system. So I think I have both the qualification and the expertise to speak about them. Every form of welfare benefit has certain conditions of ‘entitlement’. If you satisfy the conditions then you can claim a certain amount of money. The whole idea about claiming money when not working originated in 1911 by a group of professional people who decided to make weekly contributions to a pot in order to insure themselves against harder times. Later on, when the idea caught on, the UK government developed a much wider insurance system that included everyone; they called it the National Insurance payment. Everyone paid into it from their wages while they worked, never knowing if one day they might need support. After all, the world did not owe them a living - at least the UK government did not.
So the phrase using the words ‘The World’ is a catch all phrase and highly inaccurate. The world was around long before the system that used money, long before the system that encouraged the illusion of ownership and long before those who imposed these systems all but killed off those who had no need of either money or ownership.
To ‘owe’ implies that first a contribution has to be made. You can only possibly get out of life equal to the effort you put into it. This statement is untrue of course.
‘Life is not fair’ is certainly true. The amount of effort has to be weighed up according to the amount of ability. Some people struggle to grasp budgeting for their weekly needs while others with the same amount of money and circumstances hardly have to think about it. ‘Living’, if one were to assign the word as meaning the financial requirements to live is incredibly unequal.
I don’t propose to labour on the obvious differences between skilled and unskilled work and the incredible variance of remuneration. Suffice it to say that ‘a living’ depends on a person’s skills and abilities. But there are some people for whom work is not an option and it is often a measure of a society how those who can work are prepared to look after those who cannot.
But the term ‘The world does not owe you a living’ does not apply to the infirm, the incapable or the sick. It really only applies to those who can work but either choose not to but still want to receive some form of welfare. But how much of this belief is true and how much is just a contrived perspective?
Imagine a ten thousand piece jig-saw puzzle made of cardboard. You empty the box on the table and proceed to put the puzzle together. When it is completed you discover there are tiny pieces of dust that the puzzle did not need. What do you do with them? You wipe them away to reveal the perfect puzzle all by itself.
Some people who do not fit into the system are those specs of cardboard. Does the world owe them a living, or does the system need to include them in some way?
In my years of working in a job centre, I noticed how often the job vacancies and the skills of the unemployed person did not match. The employer did not want the office worker to be a chamber maid and the office worker agreed. But there were no office work jobs in the area. There were far too many office workers and not enough chamber maids; a situation that is called a skills mismatch. The office worker could earn twice as much as a chamber maid for the same effort. So if the office worker did not have the skills to be a chambermaid and the employer did not want to train them (and indeed believed them to be overqualified or liable to jump ship as soon as a clerical job arose), is the system entitled to support them or does the world still not owe them a living?
The phrase is catchy but inaccurate. More accurately, when people say ‘the world does not owe you a living’ what they mean is, ‘A system that exists by societal agreement, where everyone is automatically included does not entitle you to benefit from it without having contributed to it or participated in complying with it.’
Mark Twain is right. ’The world’, does not participate in this agreement, whereas ‘owing a living’ is only valid if the person who wants something out of the system for nothing agrees with the system.
So for people who subscribe to the system and participate fully in it, irrespective of their success within that system, the notion of the world not owing you a living is incumbent on their belief that the system in which they participate is the only system; and that it is fair and achievable by everyone.
But life is not fair.
War is one of the fastest ways to create inequality. The innocent flee a war zone and join the millions of other refugees trying to escape a conflict they had nothing to do with. They have nothing but the clothes on their back.
The world does not owe them a living.
The soldiers fighting in those countries who become injured and suffer mental health issue, if they are lucky to survive, history shows they end up on the streets or tucked out of the public eye. Governments spend fortunes on honouring the war dead but not the war living.
The world does not owe them a living.
People oppressed by their governments or neighbouring countries, are forced to live in conditions of penury and abject poverty; the examples of this spread from the nazi holocaust to the Palestinians, Native’s of invaded countries to slavery in all its forms.
The world does not owe them a living.
War is stupid but is invariably created by the very system that just loves people to believe that the world does not owe them a living.
George Carlin was pretty close to the truth of it. The owners of this system don’t want educated people capable of critical thinking. Certainly they don’t want people to question why we live in a system where it is essential to manufacture things that don’t last long, so people have to keep spending money. They don’t want people to question why Corporations attempt to monopolise seed while attempting to kill off nature’s reproduction. They don’t want people to question why corporations attempt to deny water as a right, selling it to us in bottles while other corporations poison the rest with toxic chemicals. In the meantime these same corporations take out more money than they put in and exist only to serve their primary purpose, which is to make a profit. There are no environmental considerations or concerns about what is left behind. They take without giving back.
The world does not owe them a living either, and yet they do more harm than the total sum of people who do not work for whatever reason.
Naturally there are other perspectives to the statement that the world does not owe you a living; an example given here questions the motives of the ‘occupy’ movement
http://spectator.org/36784_world-doesnt-owe-you-living/. Yet I can only think of this kind of perspective as someone who thinks they are in what George Calin describes as the ‘Big Club’, even if it is by acceptance or association.
In fact the only time you hear someone say, the world does not owe you a living, is when they think that they are pulling their weight and contributing to society and someone else is not. They don’t like it when someone does not want to play in the game but in the next breath claim that it is a free country.
So what if a person does not like your system but does not want to take from it? Is that ok? Apparently not. Several people have rejected the capitalist system to the point where they have found a way to live off grid. But instead of being applauded for becoming self sufficient they get arrested.
But let’s stick for the moment to those who do take from the system but could work. It is impossible to make a blanket statement about them because their circumstances are bound to be as different as there are people, which is inconvenient for a system that wants the opposite to be true. This is not new and in the UK I traced the problem back for 500 years (see footnotes). In every time period there was a problem with the poor and those who did not work. In every time period the rich had to pay but the poor were always ill treated, sometimes branded and even hanged; in fact any way the rich people could to brush the jigsaw puzzle dust off their system.
Clearly the problem has not gone away for those who see it as a problem. Yet the history of poverty provides evidence that offering some form of welfare is inevitable. Today we have a pretty good description of what we would regard as basic human rights, which includes food, water, shelter etc. It therefore begs the question as to why people would be penalised for being homeless or self sufficient.
In the end it is not about whether the world owes someone a living; it is about whether individuals are part of the jigsaw or the unwanted dust.
In conclusion, when someone says ‘The world does not owe you a living’, it is a subjective statement. At best it is based on a short sighted ideology designed to deny tax money paid by someone who has paid into the fund (It is their money. ‘I don’t owe anyone a free lunch’), to someone who they see as capable but has not contributed to it. Then they make the mistake of believing that all monies paid in welfare are paid to people who are capable but not contributing to it.
At worst it is a statement devoid of empathy and in complete denial that in different circumstances, they could find themselves in need of support.
The world does not owe people a living. The system does, if it is to survive as a model that everyone can live within. And like it or not - you have always paid into it one way or another; if not with money then with passively accepting the existence of the homeless, the poor, the disenfranchised and those denied work for a kaleidoscope of reasons.
Footnotes
In the 15th century, poor people were being punished for vagrancy. There was no distinction made between those who looked for work, those who chose not to work, the sick, the disabled or the incapable.
In 1531 Henry VIII introduced a new Vagabonds and Beggars Act that gave licence for those unable to work the right to beg. Those who were able to work were still subject to punishment if they had none.
The Vagrancy Act of 1547 introduced branding for a first offence and lifelong slavery after that. But the population continued to outgrow the work available and so the problem of earning a living got worse.
In 1552 a new Act meant that rich people were asked to donate money. This did not always work. So in 1572 a new Act was introduced that set a ‘tariff’ of donation, which over time became a tax. In return the rich set new punishments including hanging. This did not deter vagrancy in any way.
In 1576, the first attempt of the state to provide a poor person with work, introducing the first ‘House of Correction’. The task of collecting taxes for this work creation was passed over to the church.
By 1590, those who were poor by no fault of their own, the ‘deserving poor’: orphans, physically and mentally sick or disabled, were helped and those who deserved nothing were not. The deserving poor got food and clothing.
The Acts of 1597 and 1601 was the first time that local Parish Councils were charged with providing basic shelter food and clothing to the needy but only for those within their parish. The tax to pay for this was charged to everyone else.
The Act of 1662 divided classifications of the poor thus:
Impotent poor would be cared for in Almshouses or the poorhouse
Able bodied poor would be given work
Idle poor sent to house of correction or prison
Pauper children to become apprentices.
In the 16th and 17th centuries the population outgrew the need for labour. Capitalism in trade began to grow, causing inflation, a drop in wages and an sharp increase in poverty.
The explosion of the industrial revolution introduced more child labour than ever before, often without pay. As time went on employers would rather pay child wages than adults, which meant more adults ended up having to go to a workhouse.
In 1782 the Relief of the Poor Act created poor houses for the sick, elderly and infirm but not the able bodied.
In 1834 the Poor Act was completely overturned in favour of a new system. The Whig (right wing) party at the time sought to address what they saw as abuses in the 1601 system by which relief would only be awarded through workhouses, latching on to the notion that some people might prefer to claim relief rather than work. This Act was not repealed until 1948 with the introduction of the National Assistance Act. This Act worked as a safety net for those people who did not work: the homeless, the disabled and unmarried mothers. It was recognised that the National Insurance Act, while providing a safety net for working people if they became sick, did not provide for those who were unable to contribute. People with mental health illnesses and condition were given protection by local authorities under the new National Health Service, regardless of their ability to pay.
Debtors prison: abolished in the UK in 1869
In 1910 the great unrest of workers in the UK striking appears to have boiled down to the simple equation of increasing prices and stagnant wages, hence standards of living dropping down to poverty levels. Capitalism had seemed to work well for a period and then reached the end of a natural cycle, in which profitable practices and products had to change with the times. This meant trying to extract more productivity for less. Understandably the workforce already experiencing a drop in money (in real terms) were hardly going to accept having to work harder for less and with fewer employees.
Changes to work and new technology continues today to challenge the stability of profitability over employment numbers and retaining healthy consumer activity. And yet it is hard to accept that in an environment of austerity and cuts to wages in real terms that stock market price values push ever higher to unprecedented levels. Just over one hundred years ago, strikers, who could in today’s parlance be described as worker who had become ‘radicalised’ took action against the imposed changes of their employers. Is it any wonder then that the ideological left wing values are once again becoming more popular among the people?
National Insurance Act 1911 (originally Germany had provided NI in 1884). This applied only to wage earners as a protection against loss of earnings. People who did not work were not covered. Applied by Lloyd George (Liberal) opposed by Conservative AND trade unions.
