How to approach poverty?

Last week Florencia from our bloging network wrote a very interesting article on the criminalization of poverty in Argentina, and interestingly the attitudes towards poor people and people living on welfare are in some aspects very similar to the current discussion in Germany. Of course the political environment is decidedly more polarized in Argentina at the moment with the Kirchner dynasty fighting for political survival, but the arguments which are used on both sides of the Atlantic ocean to deny the necessity of social transfers are interchangeable. Check out Florencia's article (in Spanish) here.

Europe in general and especially Germany is very proud of their social welfare system that they praise as a civilizing accomplishment, particularly in comparison with the United States. The condition of the US welfare system, with about 46 million citizens without medical insurance, and the repeated failures to reform it, show that we are indeed lucky to have developed a network of social welfare institutions that is working reasonably well. Barack Obama's experience with his personal take on the welfare reform, his main campaign promise which is getting more difficult to deliver by the minute, shows how difficult it is to introduce such a system without the underlying historical consensus that has grown in Europe over the decades. But this consensus is increasingly endangered also in Europe.

Like in Argentina, there is a growing tendency in Germany to doubt if social transfers from the rich to the poor are justified. This summer Peter Sloterdijk, a philosopher from the southern German city of Karlsruhe, published an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, claiming that transferring money via income tax from the middle classes to the poor is a form of expropriation. His main argument was that the hard working middle classes are paying the bulk of social transfers and are such deprived of the fruits of their labor. He suggested that social transfers should be paid on a strictly voluntary basis. A series of agitated reactions and counter-reactions swept through the German feuilleton pages, some attacking others supporting Sloterdijk's argument. Many authors either understood his text as an Utopian vision, others as an insidious intent to abolish the social welfare system. Independently from Sloterdijk's true intentions his article definitely caused some damage to the idea of social solidarity since it voiced the common accusation that welfare transfers are some sort of appropriation. Of course he forgot to mention that the income tax is closely followed by the value-added tax, the second most important source of income of a modern state, that everybody, regardless of his income, is paying. The pool of funds from which the social transfers are paid is much more ample than just the reservoir of income tax funds.

Even more damaging was an article written by the prime minister of the German region of Hessia, who claimed that many people living of social welfare are doing so willingly because they are earning more money staying at home and not looking for a job than they would earn in a regular job. While the problem of unreasonably low wages in some jobs is a real problem and the option to accept any suitable job has to be made more attractive for unemployed, his rhetorics were again aiming at the growing resentment against social transfers in our society. He named the fact that unemployed gain as much, or even more, than working people "the perversion of the Social State Principle". Fueling these growing resentments is a dangerous game since the number of people who understand the ideas behind our social welfare system is slowly but constantly diminishing.

There are two main aims at the core of introducing a comprehensive social welfare system. First of all it is meant to ensure that every human being can lead a dignified life. An idea closely connected to our notion of human rights and democracy and as such one of the core values of our societies. Secondly social transfers ensure social peace and thus create the requirements for the advancement of the wealthy strata of society and establish an environment in which prosperous persons can put their wealth to use.

While nobody dares to contest the first aim directly, the second aim is consequently ignored by those well-off people who vilify social transfers as theft or expropriation. Europeans are dead wrong if they are only looking to other continents for social polarization. Growing economical competition on the global level and diminishing natural resources are eating away at the consensus of solidarity in our societies. The bitter irony about this development is that many well-off people condemning welfare transfers do not even realize that they were initially introduced in their own interest and are still serving them as much or even more than the poor.