No poor among you

Caring for others, particularly the poor, is a central tenet in nearly every religion. In the Christian tradition it is particularly important. Various translations of Deuteronomy 15:4 state, “there [should/need/will] be no poor among you,” and then reference the blessings God’s people will receive in the land of their inheritance, implying, in my opinion, that economic prosperity is a blessing granted from God with the expectation that His followers use it alleviate suffering and poverty. In the New Testament, Jesus several times extols the virtues of the poor and admonishes the rich for withholding from others. My own faith adds emphasis and clarity in other scripture. Alma 34:38 states, “if ye turn away the needy, and the naked, and visit not the sick and afflicted, and impart of your substance, if ye have, to those who stand in need—I say unto you, if ye do not any of these things, behold, your prayer is vain, and availeth you nothing, and ye are as hypocrites who do deny the faith.” In addition, Moses 7:18 describes the ideal city of Enoch in part by their collective effort to eliminate poverty, “And the Lord called his people Zion, because they were of one heart and one mind, and dwelt in righteousness; and there was no poor among them.” It seems extremely clear that faith requires us strive to improve the condition of others, and that we have a special obligation to assist the poor – especially when we are blessed with economic prosperity.

I’ve just written an article on universal basic income about how we could rather simply and completely eradicate poverty in the United States as we define it. You can read the details in that article, but the basic idea is that we could institute a new 10% income tax on everyone, then distribute the revenue of that tax to every household up to the federal poverty line, guaranteeing a universal basic income for everyone in the country, and fulfill the edict to have no poor among us. This idea is not mine nor is it new. Most social welfare programs are a lesser version of this vision, but build on the idea that we have a societal responsibility to lift up the poor, that we are or ought to be our brother’s keeper. While there are some potential drawbacks to this particular plan or any generous welfare policy, our country has been sufficiently blessed that it is easily within our means to ensure there are actually no poor among us.

So why don’t we collectively choose this path? I understand and appreciate the several reasons why people with a genuine desire to reduce poverty and improve the welfare of others might be opposed to extensive government involvement in that goal, especially a redistributive policy like this, and will discuss those reasons shortly. However, my goal in this article is to persuade those with whom I share a desire to reduce or eradicate poverty – whether that desire is motivated by religious, secular, moral, philosophical, or any other sentiments – that the government can and should play a larger and effective role in this worthwhile effort.

One of many arguments I hear against government welfare, especially from those with religious beliefs similar to my own, is that it eliminates personal choice and accountability. It forces people to help the poor, rather than allowing them to choose for themselves. Many people feel a responsibility and willingness to provide for the poor at an individual level, but believe it is inappropriate to ask or force others to do so through a government policy, even if that policy is democratically enacted through our collective choice. I deeply respect this sentiment, and spend a lot of time thinking about it. A few thoughts, however, make me believe that social welfare is a morally desirable policy, even when the state demands that the rich provide for the poor.

John Rawls’ theory of justice is important to this discussion. This is an extremely influential ideology for determining how a just society should be organized. Rawls introduces the concept of a veil of ignorance, and essentially asks us to determine the rules of a morally just society by imagining we had no a priori knowledge of our place in that society. Let me try to give a very clear and oversimplified example.

Imagine a scenario where you have a 50% chance of striking it rich next year, making $10 million dollars through some combination of your efforts, circumstances, luck, and Providence. You also have an equal chance of losing everything, leaving you with no ability to provide for yourself and your family, but have no idea which outcome will happen. Now let’s say I offer you one of two options. Option A is a perfectly free society where you will be entitled to keep 100% of your profits, but have no guarantee of help if you lose everything. Option B is a welfare society where you will be asked to pay 10% of your profits if you strike it rich, meaning you will keep $9 million, but you will be provided a basic income to meet your minimum needs if things go poorly. Would you think that Option B is some sort of morally unacceptable infringement on your liberty, or simply a reasonable insurance policy that most people would willingly accept? Obviously people might vary in their preferences depending on their risk tolerance among other things (see Prospect Theory), but what if a group of people, all facing this same scenario had to decide the rules together before the year began? If the majority, not knowing whether they were going to be rich or poor, voted for the welfare system acknowledging that it required everyone's mandated participation to work, would we consider it an affront to individual agency or simply a reasonable collective decision to mitigate economic risk? Hopefully the parallel to social welfare is obvious here, but there’s a more important point I want to make.

The key point of the veil of ignorance is that we must decide the rules without prior knowledge of the probability of our outcomes. You can imagine that those who had some reason to believe they would strike it rich might be more inclined to resist the welfare system. Unfortunately this veil of ignorance is impossible to achieve. Those who have already been successful know they are less likely to meet disaster in the future, and more able to mitigate that risk without help. Such people also know that their children are less likely to face unrecoverable loss since they can provide them with the tools to avoid it. In addition, those who have been successful tend to underestimate the effect of luck and Providence in their success and overestimate their own efforts, and might thus be biased against the welfare society. You can also imagine that implicit knowledge about the probability of our or our children’s success based on skin color, nationality, ethnicity, gender, etc. would also affect our idea of the most just society. Perhaps we need to work harder to truly put ourselves behind this veil of ignorance – acknowledging our biases – before we form our opinions.

With all this in mind, I think that a welfare policy that asks us to make this social contract is just, reasonable, and morally sound. We must think about it in terms of future payouts, not past income or current wealth. Instituting a universal basic income is asking people to forfeit a portion of future potential high income to reduce societal risk, not confiscating current wealth. We are not redistributing accrued wealth from the rich to the poor, but saying that we all should willingly contract to provide for the social welfare if we happen to be rich in the future. However, those who are currently wealthy (or privileged by color, nationality, gender, education, or other circumstances of birth) know they are more likely to be among the wealthy of the future because we do not live behind the veil of ignorance. From this perspective, a welfare policy is not forcing the rich to give to the poor, but choosing – democratically – a social insurance policy that recognizes our inherent equality and the biases that favor the already successful.

But why, you might ask, must this be a government policy? Can’t churches, communities, or other private actors put such policies in place? Though they can't mandate universal participation, private actors can and do institute admirable welfare systems, yet there are still poor among us. So long as we, at any level, are not of, “one heart and one mind,” we will fall short of our goal to have no poor among us. The burden of the poor will be placed on the generous few who are unable to meet the total need despite their best efforts. While we continue to give privately and work at the community level, we ought to advocate for a societal effort that matches our values as we do in every other area of public policy. If we argue that the sanctity of life and value of the family should be supported by public policy, shouldn’t we advocate just as strongly for a public effort to alleviate poverty when we have failed to eradicate it without a public mandate? For those who worry that we are handing our personal responsibility to the government, I can assure you there will always be ways to individually care for those around us even with a guaranteed universal income. There will be those beyond the reach of such a policy, those facing disasters or personal struggles, and myriad other ways to exercise charity to a fuller extent even if the US official poverty rate was zero. 

For those who think this looks like some failed form of communism, please recognize that no one is advocating for the state to control private assets, allocate resources, or distribute wealth equally – policies which have led to economic failures. There were still be a distribution from the fantastically rich to those hovering at the poverty line, there will still be privately property, incentive to innovate, and opportunity to make unending profit. I am just advocating that since we live in such an economically blessed society, perhaps we can take Jesus’s instructions seriously and put a floor on how poor we allow those among us to be. Perhaps we can agree that a small portion of income from the fantastically rich of the future ought to be used to make sure we meet the basic needs of all those among us.

Moving on to the more practical rather than moral or philosophical arguments against social welfare, many contend that the risk of failure is necessary for progress, that the availability of unearned income will reduce our incentive to work, or more generally that a generous social insurance system will reduce our total output and ability to provide for the poor in the future. I address some of these issues in my companion article, but the conclusion is that we just don’t know how such a policy would affect behavior and macroeconomic outcomes. There are theories and evidence to support the opposing ideas that guaranteed income will improve or deteriorate outcomes, and we just don’t know what will happen. My practical answer to this is that we should test and try to more fully understand the total costs and benefits. However, since this is a faith-based blog let me give you my heart-felt, but maybe not politically appropriate answer. What should we do when our moral responsibility, sense of charity, and the Savior Himself tells us to have no poor among us? What should we do when we know we could achieve this goal, but are hesitant or afraid because we don’t know the consequences of that choice? Perhaps faith is the answer. Jesus didn’t say there should be no poor among us unless we were worried some will get lazy, or to give to the poor unless we are worried some will make bad decisions, or to impart of our substance unless we were concerned about our gdp growth, so perhaps we ought to just do what He says, or at least vote for doing so in a democratic society, rather than finding reasons not to. Perhaps those of us who base our world view on our faith can choose to believe that lifting up others will make the world a better place, even if our Econ 101 teacher, political pundit of choice, or some other philosophy of men told us the scriptural mandate was a bad idea. So why don’t we choose to have no poor among us?