"The Voluntarism Fantasy"

[applegrove]

The Voluntarism Fantasy

by Mike Konczal at Democracy Journal of Ideas

http://www.democracyjournal.org/32/the-voluntarism-fantasy.php?page=all

"SNIP......................



The government’s footprint has always grown alongside the rest of society. The public post office helped unite the national civil society Alexis de Tocqueville found and celebrated in his travels throughout the United States. From tariff walls to the continental railroad system to the educated workforce coming out of land-grant schools, the budding industrial power of the United States was always joined with the growth of the government. The government played a major role throughout the nineteenth century in providing disaster relief in the aftermath of fires, floods, storms, droughts, famine, and more.

Business risk management through the law was crucial in building out this nineteenth-century capitalist economy. The limited liability corporation, for instance, allowed for a massive expansion of passive investments, which provided necessary working capital for business. Charles William Eliot, the president of Harvard University, called this “the most effective legal invention for business purposes made in the nineteenth century.” Bankruptcy laws were introduced in the wake of nineteenth-century economic crises to allocate losses and help the economy move forward.

As for social insurance specifically, the historian Michael Katz has documented that there has always been a mixed welfare state made up of private and public organizations throughout our country’s history. Outdoor relief, or cash assistance outside of institutions, was an early legal responsibility of American towns, counties, and parishes from colonial times through the early nineteenth century. During this period, these issues were usually dealt with through questions of “settlement.” A community had a responsibility to provide relief to its own needy, native members, defined as those who had a settlement there. This became increasingly difficult with an industrialized society, as people moved to and fro looking for work and were forced out of communities when they couldn’t find any.

The next major initiative was the construction of poorhouses by state governments, especially in the early nineteenth century. The central idea was that by forcing people in need of aid to live in poorhouses where living conditions were quite harsh, there would be fewer applicants. This ended up not being the case, as able-bodied people would still seek out these poorhouses, especially when work was slack and unemployment high. Worse, these institutions became the default support for orphans, the mentally ill, and the elderly without income or family to support them.



.....................SNIP"

[Adam051188]

1. some able bodied people may realize that they cannot, no matter how hard they work, gain very much.

all -isms are horribly flawed. applying rubber stamp ideology to the myriad of situations faced by the myriad of different individuals in the world creates far more problems than it solves. our -ism is capitalism. in a world of automated production and global distribution networks the idea one person, or even many persons, can be the sole beneficiaries of advancement is fairly mid-evil.

capitalism can work very well in an environment with the possibility of expansion through motivation and ingenuity. this is no longer the reality of our world, at least in my observation.

[greatlaurel]

2. Thanks for the link.

I have it bookmarked for reference. Very interesting read. I learned new information from the article.