Moral fish tales
Posted by mofembot Sat, 23 Feb 2008 09:51:00 GMT
“If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.”
Hello out there: this is not an “either-or” proposition.
Clichés really aren’t my cup of tea, but if I had a buck for every time I’ve read or heard a Republican pundit or politician misuse the adage, “If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime,” I’d be sitting pretty (instead of sitting here in rumpled disarray in the middle of nowhere in rural France).
I am not fond of false dichotomies, especially ones that have an impact on public policy. The fish adage has been used by conservative windbags to try to portray liberals’ views of public assistance as one neverending fish-handout on a grand scale. But nowhere have I found even one instance of progressive, liberal public policy that advocates the dole. The truth is, liberals understand something that the well-fed bottom-feeding conservatives don’t seem able to grasp:
Sometimes you have to feed people so they’ll be able (to learn) to fish.
Many countries, France included, seem to understand this idea better. For example, I was unemployed for a short while, and when I finally got a job (or, more accurately, created my own company), my unemployment payments stopped, naturally enough. But to my utter astonishment, I was rewarded for finding a job: I received several months of unemployment benefits as a lump sum. It was almost as if the French government understood that many people returning to work after being jobless might have job-related costs, such as having having to put down money on a means of transportation to work, or having to pay a deposit on an apartment in a new location near work, or even needing to buy work-appropriate clothing.
Can you imagine the difference that this kind of policy would make in the lives of poor Americans?
“Think-tank” conservatives swimming in their own brine seem to think it’s possible to skip the “feed” part and jump straight to the “teach.” “Workfare” requirements that do not take into account childcare and transportation issues are a classic example of this unrealistic and punitive mindset.
Not long ago, a New York Times article profiled the heartless and ludicrous policy of requiring single parents (usually moms) on welfare to “reimburse” the state for whatever amount of child support they receive. The fact that nearly all of these low-income recipients of child support remain below the poverty line is irrelevant to the legislative barracudas who came up with this rule.
More recently, Paul Krugman wrote a column highlighting the devasting effects of childhood poverty, showing the indisputable link between the failure of our society to feed fish to children in need and those children’s subsequent difficulties in learning to fish for themselves.
Despite the new evidence Krugman cites (which builds upon a great deal of earlier research), right-wingers will still howl about “socialism” and about how “lazy poor people have a great life on the dole so they don’t want to work” and about how “‘welfare queens’ are stealing from taxpayers,” infinitum ad nauseam.
The sad truth is that many reasonably decent, moral folk still unthinkingly swallow this arch-conservative fish tale – hook, line, and sinker.