Frances Fox Piven: The Left needs to proudly support social welfare

[marmar]

from In These Times:



For the Welfare of All
The Left needs to proudly support social welfare.

BY Frances Fox Piven


In this month’s cover story, “The Welfare State of America,” Peter Frase and Bhaskar Sunkara propose that the Left inaugurate an anti-austerity campaign that focuses on the expansion of government social welfare programs. I agree.

The Left should fight for programs that provide health services, educate children, bolster the income of the less-well-off and subsidize housing. The reasons are obvious. The first is a simple moral imperative: A good society strives to meet the basic needs of all its people. The second is that government programs that protect people from the exigencies of labor markets, or of old age, or orphanhood, or disability, make people more secure. A sense of security, the reduction of fear, is a good thing in itself. But it also empowers people, and for that reason is essential to a more democratic society. Workers are far more likely to stand up to their bosses when they know they can fall back on decent unemployment benefits, just as women are more likely to stand up to abusive husbands when they know that they and their children can rely on government income supports.

Frase and Sunkara rightly insist that welfare programs should be centralized. They emphasize the legal constraints that force states and municipalities to balance their budgets, no matter the state of the economy, and that justify the right-wing push for austerity. But there are even more powerful political constraints on welfare-state spending at the sub-national level. Because corporations can pick and choose among locales for investment, they have enormous power over state and local governments. They can demand a “good business climate” of low taxes and low welfare spending, and also extort unseemly subsidies, in exchange for promises of investment.

Americans have a romance with decentralization that the Right encourages. But a government geographically closer to the people is not necessarily more responsive. As Frase and Sunkara demonstrate, a federal system that assigns welfare-state spending to the state and local level is fundamentally biased against the program and its constituents. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/14035/for_the_welfare_of_all

[vi5]

1. "The Left" does support those things.

The Democratic party does not always support those things.

The Democratic party has power in this country, and some of them (in decreasing numbers) are what could reasonably described as "The Left".

We on "the left" have been fighting for this stuff. But our only way in so to speak is through the Democratic party which only nominally fights for things that the left wants.

Until there is a way to solve that issue, then all we can do is continue to fight.

[xchrom]

2. du rec. nt

[libdem4life]

3. K & R

[limpyhobbler]

4. k/r .nt