Beyond the Welfare State

As usual, the Guardian national newspaper here in the UK has failed to print one of my Letters to the Editor. As usual, it may well have been at least to some extent due to my penchant for prolixity. But in this case, it may well have been simply due to our fundamentally differing takes on things political.*

The subject had to do with a newly-announced policy of the new coalition government - led by the Tories (Conservatives) - for the state to stop automatically paying for those on welfare to have children. Shock! Horror! My letter:

"Dear Editor,

"At last, some common sense in this country around its benefits policies (Anger and alarm as Tory minister attacks benefit claimants who have large families, 8 October). 'The number of children that you have is a choice...It's not going to be the role of the state to finance those choices': Hear, hear. 'It's absolutely wrong to go down the line of saying only rich people or better-off people should be parents': No, no.

"No one has any business having children that they can't provide for properly. It is immoral in its unfairness to those children. The creation of generations of people on welfare is something that the state should never have entered into. The state can provide contraception information and even, in more straitened financial circumstances, materials to its citizenry. But it never should have put itself in the position of enticing females to have children on the taxpayers' shilling.

"Campaigners against child poverty need to reconsider their position, and realise the importance and value of the principle of an ounce of prevention being worth a pound of cure. To cause children to be born into poverty circumstances, and to force wage-earning families to pay for other people to have children when they often can't afford even to have their own is, and has been, a monstrous double-barrelled injustice. It's time and past that that affront to common sense was dealt with. And if it had to take a major economic crisis to bring it to a head, then at least the matter, and the opportunity to bite this particular bullet, is finally facing us.

"Yours sincerely, (etc)"

As should be obvious, I feel very strongly about this sort of thing. No socialist or communist, I. (The article went on to comment on this fundamental challenge to the idea of the state no longer being willing to meet its citizens' "needs". Little had I realised how far into socialism this welfare state had sunk - all the way into the full-blown communist territory of 'From each according to his ability, To each according to his need'.) My 'philosophy', such as it is: the state can certainly help individuals get on their feet, if they clearly have no family support; but not to the point of creating more poverty conditions, by assisting - in very effect, paying - young females in straitened economic circumstances to have babies, thus creating a dependent, welfare class. It is unfair to the child/children. It is unfair to the citizenry at large. It needs to stop.

But then, the whole system needs to stop.

And I don't mean the welfare-state system. I mean the market system.

I mean the capitalist system.

I mean the money system.

And now we start looking beyond the welfare state, and its various siblings.

Consider. The whole current system of social life on the planet hinges on consumption; on the creation of demand. I've got a better idea - especially now, when we need to look to preserve our planetary resources (not just live in greater harmony with the natural world). So does the Venus Project/Zeitgeist team; but there is a huge difference between our positions, even though they appear the same superficially. Those folks are secular humanists; they feel that people will create a viable moneyless system because, well, just because. Because it would be ever so much better if they did. Well; yes, and. That's what Marx thought, too. Missing piece to the equation: proper motivation.

If there is no 'God' - and all that that 'concept' implies; especially a Plan in and Purpose to 'the universe': to life, beyond just in and for itself only - then nothing really matters anyway, and one might as well live exclusively for oneself, independent of the effect of that pursuit on others, as not; for the end of the closed system of life can, then, as easily be seen as that as anything else, a presumed evolutionary advantage for acting cooperatively, or whatever. If there is, however, then certain things follow. For one thing, it follows - as touched on above - that life has meaning. And with meaning comes the intrinsic value of 'doing unto others as you would have them do unto you'. And there we have our principle, to live our lives by. Our principle, and our motivation, for giving of our best to one another, in the way of contributing goods and services and ingenuity to one another: out of gratitude to our Creator for life with meaning.

Out of, in a word, Love.


How short-sighted we are, not to see the ramifications of paying females to have babies on the taxpayers' shilling, and thus create a welfare class, in perpetual poverty. And how near-sighted we are, not to see the ramifications of being 'spiritual beings having a human experience'; whereby, blessed with clearer sight and vision, could we create a better way of living together on planet Earth, with that mentality. And all we have to do to get there is to do away with the one thing standing in our way, dividing us from one another: money.

However, we're getting there.

With Necessity being the Mother of Invention.



P.S. A further, more complete word on the communist model - which, like its other -ism buddies, has to do with all-powerful (or at the least, highly powerful) governments, and the citizenry having to toe the top-down line. I would put people first, in the sense of autonomous individuals responsible for their own spiritual development, via the concept of free will: each person responsible for their own soul's development. So: such extremes, such command-and-control mentalities, to be avoided. Although the communist concept - rather like the yin-yang 'concept' - contains the seeds of something of value, of its mirror opposite: the value of the sense of freely-given cooperation, not competition. Of all of us being One, not, in higher Truth, separate autonomous beings.
We are experiencing division - from each other, from our common Source - for a reason: for the learning, and subsequent consciousness-raising. But there comes a time when we are ready - have readied ourselves - to return home, in at least a sense, here on this physical level. To come back to Oneness; the richer for the experience of separation. Of free will occasioning further growth of the One of which we are all a part. Sparks of divinity returning to Source. With gratitude.
With - as I say - in a word: Love.
What did the poet say?
'We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.' (T.S. Eliot)
The First Time. The Zep Tepi of the Egyptians; and the Alchemists...It's a small world.

---


* Which doesn't answer why, some years ago - in 2005 - they failed even to acknowledge receipt of a detailed letter of mine, not to the Letters Editor but to the Editor of the paper himself, regarding that summer's 'terrorist' bombing primarily in the London Underground, wherein I outlined, with seven or eight clear bullet points, the case for serious questions regarding the event which were not being dealt with by the mainstream media. (One of which involved one of their own reporters, covering an eyewitness story indicating that in at least one of the subway trains involved, the explosion was reported as coming from underneath the carriage, not within it. Thus indicating advanced placement. And who would have had access to and for that planting? Well, well. The man in charge of the subway system at that time had come from New York City - and had a role to play in that city's confrontation with 'terrorists', on 9/11, as well. As I say: Well, well. And had a background in the U.S.'s intelligence agencies as well. Well, well, well.) And I got the same response when I followed it up some weeks later with a couple more serious questions regarding the attack. (The presumed suicide bombers couldn't have caught the particular commuter train they were said to have caught into London, because there was no such train that day; etc etc.) If I had taken the trouble to outline all these points in a letter to the London Times, for example, I might have expected such a response, or to say non-response; because the implication of it all was that the atrocity was not really the work of some Muslim extremists, bent on revenge for the West going into Muslim countries and causing mayhem, but was a false flag operation, by shadowy forces bent on creating police states in the West, depriving the citizenry of their civil liberties, etc etc. The Guardian was, and is, a left-wing publication, normally very ready to challenge the government on such issues; why would they not wish to follow up on this highly intriguing story?
Well; indeed. And the question still stands, even after all this time; hanging in the air, like a putrid smell. A smell of high skulduggery. Not the whiff of minor players in the drama.