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NOTE What, If Any, Social Services Should the Public Sector Provide?

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Now, this was advertised as a debate, and the question was put, what, if any, social services should the public sector provide and or deliver?

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And I did a little subsequent research on debate, and that's not a debating question. We can't affirm we gave that question, but it is a question that we wanted answered.

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And so we're just going to explore the minds of these two persons who represent, we assume, diverging and perhaps antagonistic opinions on that question.

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There's going to be, however, some elements of what a formal debate would be and that we keep in time in order to have it fairly represent both viewpoints.

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There will be a 20-minute presentation of each position, and then opportunity for each to have a 10-minute return.

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You can see the rebuttal, if that's the way you wish.

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Followed by a 40-minute approximately, depending on how much time you actually do have in an open forum, and we'll discuss open forum when it comes.

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So, please welcome these two gentlemen. Thank you very much.

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I'd like to begin by commenting on the introduction where it was mentioned that we might have diverging or antagonistic views.

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I expect that we might, but my view is that if we do, it will not be on the goals, it will be only on the means.

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I think I share with my opponent and with all people of good will the idea that the poor should be helped.

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And the debate is not whether the poor should be helped or not, but how best can the poor be helped.

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And the means that some people adopt for helping the poor is the welfare state, and in my view, this is just about the diametric opposite of the best means for that goal that we hold in common, namely to help the poor.

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In my view, ideally, there should be no welfare state at all. It's demeaning to the recipients, it creates dependency, it reduces self-reliance, and it's suspect morally because it's based on force.

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What it does is it forces people against their will to pay taxes, and then these taxes are given to the poor.

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With that introduction, let me just pause for a commercial break, as is consistent with my political philosophy,

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and mention that I've put my name and address on the board there,

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and I would invite you, if you're interested, in any of the citations I give or any further information to just drop me a note and if you do, I will make you a gift of a free four-month subscription to Fraser Forum, which is a publication of the Fraser Institute.

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Okay, back from the commercial. I suppose I should have done a jingle, but I assume I have your attention at least this early on.

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A large part of the perceived need for the welfare state, I contend, is created by excessive government itself.

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In other words, the reason people think we need a welfare state is because of poverty,

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and yet it's excessive government in my view that creates poverty in the first place.

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So if we just got rid of government or eliminated as much of it as possible,

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we would eliminate the poverty and with it the felt need for the welfare state in the first place.

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For example, the minimum wage law, beloved of all progressive people and right-thinking people,

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I think is a sham and a disgrace because it boomerangs.

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I think many people that advocate the minimum wage law do so in order to elevate wages,

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to put a floor under wages and raise that floor.

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But the findings of economics indicate that what this does is just about the opposite.

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Namely, it makes unemployable people at the bottom of the economic pyramid.

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Other legislative enactments which have the same effect, namely creating poverty, creating

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The very need for the government welfare state in the first place would be occupational licensure, taxi medallions, things like that, marketing boards, unions, rent control, tariffs.

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The poor are frozen out in all of these cases and they are victimized.

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So I think the first step in a humane, sensible welfare system would be to get rid of government programs which cause the problem in the first place.

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However, even if all of this is corrected, and I've only touched on the very tip of the iceberg,

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there were just hundreds of legislative enactments which create poverty,

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still there would be handicapped people, blind people,

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quadriplegics, women with infant children,

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so I think still we would have to have some sort of welfare.

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Given this, I have created or concocted three principles

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which should guide us in our choices in this area.

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The first one is that private charity is vastly preferable to government welfare.

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First of all, on the moral ground, the money that is dispersed by private charities is given to them voluntarily, not coercively, as is money given to the government.

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Second, when you have government getting involved in it, most of the money goes to the rich.

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We have that very famous statement, I think it was by Tommy Douglas, one of the older NDP people, he said, corporate welfare bums.

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And to my way of thinking, this captures it just perfectly.

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For every penny given in welfare to poor people,

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thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars

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are given to large corporations owned by very wealthy people

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in the form of bailouts and subsidies.

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So I think the poor get shortchanged through the government

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in a way that they do not

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through private charitable organizations.

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And third of all is the efficiency question.

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So we have a, this is one of the monthly publications in the series that I was offering for free.

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It's by General Arnold Brown of the Salvation Army, and I'll send you this if you're interested,

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who says that the cost of raising the funds that the Salvation Army disperses is between 2 and 7 percent.

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This is minuscule compared to the rake-off that the government takes for all sorts of money handling charges.

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Even more important, the emphasis on the part of the church or other charitable organizations is to get people back on their feet.

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It is to breed responsibility in them and not dependency.

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And I think it's dependency that is the main result of government welfare programs.

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Traditionally, private charity was run by the churches, the Mormons, the Hutterites, the Catholic Church, synagogues, Christian churches of all denominations.

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And yet the main objection to the thesis that I am now putting forth, paradoxically, comes from religious spokespersons.

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Let me read an article I once wrote that's a very short one that's relevant to this.

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In virtually every case where private citizens compete with government or try to, they do so wholeheartedly.

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They are anxious to show that they can do a better job at a lower cost.

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This applies, for example, to private sanitation, private bus lines,

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and even to private competitors for mail delivery and police and fire protection,

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where such private alternatives have arisen.

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But there is one glaring exception to this rule.

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The ideological new class run private poverty centers,

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which are in the business of providing food for the needy.

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They are, however, highly ambivalent about their role.

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According to the spokespersons from such groups as the Vancouver Food Bank, the Richmond Food Bank, the First United Church in Vancouver,

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the New Westminster Unemployment Action Center, the Federated Anti-Poverty Groups of B.C.,

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giving food to the poor should really be a government enterprise.

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In the good society and the view of these people, there would be little scope for private initiatives such as their own.

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The public sector should do the job.

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The Reverend Alan Bush of the St. Albans Richmond Food Bank even goes so far as to claim that the B.C. government,

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during its cutback several years ago, was taking advantage of the kindly and loving people administering to the poor, such as he.

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And according to Sylvia Russell of the Vancouver Food Bank, they have no intention of expanding their base of operation

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to take up the slack left by the government, as was proposed by Premier Bennett when he cut back on government services.

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All this is in sharp contrast to the views of the old-time, long-term private groups in B.C. which have been on the scene for decades.

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Groups such as the Salvation Army, Harbor Light Center, the United Union Gospel Mission and the Sisters of Entombment Mission

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says a spokesman for the Union Gospel, quote,

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Our main purpose is to feed the hungry and spread the gospel. That's what Jesus Christ was all about.

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It doesn't depend upon what government does or does not do.

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But suppose needs are so high, even with the free enterprise system,

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unlikely as that will appear to most people,

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and with the government not causing any problems of the sort that I've mentioned.

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And even with an unstinting private, mainly religious, although non-religious, to effort.

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And suppose still that needs are unmet. Then we come to my principle, too,

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that we should have limited state welfare. We should have state welfare as a last resort, not as a first resort.

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And it should not be generous to a fault as it is now.

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It should be as little as possible consistent with maintaining adequate financial support,

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Otherwise, it retards incentives.

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One great example of the deleterious effects of Welfareism run amok occurs with the black

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family in the United States.

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And I'd like to read a few quotes about the black family from a commentator, William Tucker,

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on this problem.

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He says, quote, The facts about the black family are brutal.

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More than half of the black children born in the U.S. today are illegitimate.

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Most half of these are born to unwed teenage mothers.

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Every year, more black girls drop out of high school to have a baby than graduate from college.

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Over 50% of all black children are now being raised in single-parent households, meaning

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by unmarried black women.

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And he goes on and on making the case, which I don't think I have to make in this audience

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that the black family and the black situation is very bad.

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The welfare system makes an irresistible offer to every eligible female over the age of 16.

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It says George Gilder, who he's quoting, another expert in this free enterprise view on welfare.

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It says to every black female teenager, you may be poor, you may have family problems,

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you may be discouraged about your future, but if you have a baby right now,

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we will give you your own apartment, free medical care, food stamps and a regular income over the next 20 years.

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If you have another baby soon after, we will increase your allotment.

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How many black men, poor or affluent, can match that offer?

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How many teenage girls anywhere, black or white, poor or affluent, can afford their own apartment and pay for their own medical expenses at age 16?

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Of course, this is relevant to the United States, not so much to Canada, the medical expenses part.

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These teenage girls who drop out of school and have babies are not ignorant, they are not morally weak, and they are not sexually loose.

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They are simply rational human beings making the most intelligent choice of how to improve their economic condition.

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Skipping along here, black families are not really breaking up at all. Instead, black families are no longer forming.

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When women start families, they no longer look for a husband, they simply marry the state.

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Now he contends with the argument that the black family was always dissolute and weak.

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On the contrary, the black family was more than strong enough to survive the ordeal of slavery.

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There were cases of black men and women walking up and down the countryside after the Civil War,

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searching for wives, husbands or children from whom they had become separated during the chaos of the conflict.

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Advertisements for lost spouses and children were still appearing in black newspapers as late as the 1880s.

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This survival continued right through the 1930s.

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One study of ethnic groups in Boston in the early part of the century revealed that the rate of broken families among blacks was actually lower than among other ethnic groups, only about 10% at a time when illegitimacy in Irish families was running over 30%.

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Black social patterns were ruined only when liberals arrived on the scene in the 1930s with their aid to families with dependent children and other blandishments to let the state do for people what they aren't capable of doing for themselves.

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The tragedy occurred because blacks trusted the system.

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They didn't have the inherent suspicions to resist government assistance and avoid sympathetic bureaucrats like the plague,

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as many ethnic groups did then and still do today.

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No, the black family was more than strong enough to survive slavery.

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It was just not strong enough to survive the welfare state.

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Principle 3. Money welfare or welfare in money is vastly preferable to gifts in kind.

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Now, during the Bennett years, 82, 83, I forget the exact years, when he had all these cutbacks,

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there was a ewing cry from the welfare establishment with regard to the closing of the Janus Child Care Center,

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the Consumer Association of B.C., Planned Parenthood, Health Collective, Rape Relief, Rape Crisis Center, Family Places,

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Vancouver Transition House, Legal Aid, Postpartum Depression Center, the list goes on and on.

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It was contended that the people hurt by the closures were really the beneficiaries of the program, namely the poor.

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I contend just the very opposite.

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I contend that the people that were really hurt by this and the people that were protesting vociferously against this

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This were the white-collar, highly-educated, articulate new class led by Marxist leftist

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intellectuals.

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Let me give you a quote on this, which says that it's not the poor, it's this group that

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I was discussing.

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The poor are in the minority.

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This is a quote from Dwight Lee in an article, The Politics of Poverty.

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The poor are in the minority and less likely to vote than the more affluent citizens on

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a seldom organized into politically focused groups.

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It is unlikely, then, that the poor will be very effective in the competition for political influence.

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Indeed, if the poor had the skills and attributes that are necessary for effective political action, they would not be poor.

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So while the political demands of the poor will no doubt push in the direction of increasing the funding for poverty programs,

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the magnitude of this influence will be small.

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A more effectively organized and politically potent group with a vested interest in expanding government programs to aid the disadvantaged

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is made up of those whose employment depends upon these programs.

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These people include the several million people who are employed either directly by government welfare agencies

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or as private contractors and academic researchers assist in develop and advise these agencies.

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With the job security and income of these people tied to the funding of poverty and poverty related programs,

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they have a common and dominant interest in the continuation and expansion of this funding.

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When this focused interest is coupled with the relative ease with which people can organize for political action through their employee organizations,

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poverty professionals become much more effective at obtaining political funding for political poverty programs than the poor themselves.

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Let me give you an example, a survey that I've offered in talks of this nature.

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Take those services that were closed, that I mentioned, the Janus and the Rape Leaf and this and that and the other, post-partum depression.

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Assume that the total costs for this were umpteen million, and assume that the beneficiaries of this were several hundred people.

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And when we divide this on a per capita basis, assume that the cost per person served was ten thousand bucks.

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Now, we have two possible systems.

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The system as it was, namely the umpteen million

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for the several hundred people at the rate of $10,000

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per person per year.

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Or we could just say to these poor people,

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hey, poor person, we'll give you 10,000 bucks.

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Do with it as you will.

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Buy a new hat, buy a car, buy a TV, a VCR,

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or you can spend it exactly as it has been spent

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in your behalf on the rape relief and the crisis

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and this and that and the other.

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Now, I ask you to estimate in your own mind what proportion of these monies would have been spent in these crisis centers.

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How many people think 80% or more would have been spent in that way?

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Nobody.

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How many people think more than half would have been spent that way?

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Nobody again.

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How many people think less than a quarter?

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Well, are you all holding out for between 25% and 50% or are you not with me or am I jibbering here?

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In most surveys of this sort, I think the honest answer is, you know, 5% or 10% or 15% or something.

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Which means then that in the eyes of the recipients, they only value a dollar given to them through the intermediation of people such as yourselves at the rate of 15 cents on the dollar.

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The point is to underscore this principle that I'm holding forth here that it's much more efficient to give people the money than to spend it in their behalf by offering them free services because they don't value those free services at the full value.

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It's only paternalism.

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It's only the view that we know better for these heathen, or whatever they are, that motivates a system such as exists.

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And it's the same thing with welfare on the international scale. I refer to foreign aid.

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Mainly what this does is it props up foreign dictators. The aphorism I like to leave people with is the three M's. M is in Mary.

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And they stand for Mercedes, monuments and machine guns, which is what a lot of this, or virtually all of this money goes for.

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We find that the people that are starving in the world are the ones that are receiving this government-to-government transfers of aid.

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We see the Ethiopian situation where they take this foreign aid, which doesn't go to those poor people in the little ads or the little girl who's starving.

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Marxist dictatorship, 20th anniversary celebration of Marxism in Ethiopia, new buildings in downtown capital city and not food for the poor.

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Whereas those countries that used to be very poor, such as Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, which went the free enterprise route,

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which even now they're considering going in the Soviet Union and China,

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those countries have elevated the welfare of their poor,

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namely underscoring the point that I made at the beginning,

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that what we're debating about here is not whether the poor should be helped,

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but what is the best means of doing so.

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So, to conclude, to answer a little bit more directly the question,

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what if any social services should public sector provide and or deliver?

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My answer is little or none. The classical liberal tradition, the tradition of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill and David Hume, was that government was mainly for defense, judiciary, and when it tries to act in the public good, it actually worsens the situation of the people that it is acting in behalf of.

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The Fraser Institute would certainly advocate the government as a safety net of last resort, but not one of first resort, as is all too popular in this province and in this country. Thank you.

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Okay. You say we have ten minutes to deal with things, but we'll do that at the end, is that correct?

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Yes, we have twenty minutes of presentation.

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Okay. Well, I'll just all present my ideas first and then we'll come back, I guess, to have a discussion on different issues.

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Okay, I'll try to answer the same question, oddly enough, probably, just so that you understand where I'm coming from.

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I probably don't have too much difficulty, in some respects, with Walter Block's principle two and three.

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I'm not so sure about one. But the question, I guess, are the nuances and the criteria that one uses to apply two and three

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I'll try to make three arguments for why there should be collective provision of social services.

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I use the word collective rather than public for reasons I hope that will become clear.

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I think that there are three conditions under which collective provision of social services makes some sense.

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One, that is generally accepted by economists, although they dispute amongst themselves just exactly what that should be,

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would be when there's some sort of market failure.

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Two, on equity grounds, and those are the sorts of, I think, issues that social workers particularly appeal to, or appeal to social workers because there is a perception that to some degree the distribution of resources in a capitalist society in some ways are, for some people at least, inequitable and therefore have to be offset, and therefore equity criteria tend to be invoked.

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And the third, I think perhaps the most important one, the one that tends to be, I think, ignored the most, except, well, I shouldn't say ignored, but I think the one that perhaps is the most compelling, is that social services in some way tend to generate solidarity in a society and enhance the rights of citizenship.

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Now, in talking about that, I think one also has to keep in mind that when one talks about

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collective intervention, there are three forms of it.

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At the minimum level are forms of regulation, where either one is simply regulating the

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market itself to make sure that it operates within certain rules, and you get that for

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example to some extent in Europe, where a lot of the social services would be offered

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The Theory of Money and Credit

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The second form of intervention is the level of finance, which can either be in the form of cash transfers, as Walter was suggesting, or in relation to cost-sharing for services themselves, for example, child welfare, and the third, and the one that

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There are three reasons for this. One is that the market is, in a sense, more efficient because of competition and because the profit is an indication to both the producer of the services and the consumer of the services of the benefit that they're getting at a reasonable cost.

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Secondly, that there is a type of consumer sovereignty, namely that the consumer of that service drives the use of it and determines what amount of money he or she will allocate to it, as a consequence of that, that consumer not only maximizes his or her own welfare, but presumably the welfare of society as a whole, and perhaps most importantly, and Walter alluded to this at the very beginning, that the market is in a sense non-coercive, that people engage in the market in a form of voluntary exchange.

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Collective provision is inefficient, bureaucratically determined, it's a queuing process and coercive.

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Coming back then to the market, if there are market failures, one has to understand to some extent the limiting conditions under which the market operates itself.

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There's always the assumption that there are many suppliers, therefore you can't have a monopoly, otherwise the market would tend to break down,

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or you can't have major barriers to supply as you would in times of war and so forth and the market breaks down.

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Other than kind of things like that, there would be an assumption that there would be many suppliers and the potential for that.

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Secondly, that information is already available to the consumer because the assumption of a market, of course, is that people are intelligent when they make choices voluntarily and that they're not coerced.

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In order not to be coerced, they have to be rational the way they do it and have to have information available to them.

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Thirdly, that there are no externalities, that in fact the benefit is basically a private benefit, that when I buy an orange, I'm the basic beneficiary of the orange.

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and that when there are certain services where if I use that service I also benefit you or you in taking a service or not taking a service benefit or disbenefit me there's an externality in other words there's something shared between us that isn't captured so to speak by the voluntary exchange and therefore there might be some grounds for government intervention and that fourthly there's certainly about the type of service that's going to be used. Now do these limiting conditions in other words those are the kind of conditions

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For example, the question of externalities has tended to be used as an argument for public intervention and public health.

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Because public health is very important. Communicable diseases are not something you can contain between a buyer and a seller or between two people.

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That once I get vaccinated, I not only benefit myself but benefit others.

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Equally, if I don't get vaccinated, I disbenefit not only myself but others and so forth.

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are grounds then or assumptions that the market wouldn't necessarily be the best possible way of dealing with that issue and then some form of government intervention would be required.

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Equally, one can talk about consumer ignorance. One talks about health care. It is difficult, particularly in the health field, for the average person, co-patient, to be very clear about what information to make a kind of a rational judgment.

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One tends to be very dependent upon professional people, and professional people themselves, depending upon technology and so forth, so you get derivative kinds of information.

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Certainly in times of urgency, emergencies, that becomes even more the case, where you're not in the position to kind of shop around and decide where you're going to go, what's the most sensible place to do.

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and often times of course breakdowns in health and certainly before the age of 75 tend to be not terribly repetitive and therefore you don't get the kind of experience you would in the normal market so consumer ignorance is kind of an argument similarly the business of uncertainty in relation to health care the difficult to predict the degree and the duration of health care you might need so in terms of setting aside the amount of money do you need ten thousand or hundred thousand or whatever now sometimes the insurance is used

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One can make the same kind of argument in relation to child care in relation to the current debate, for example, in Canada.

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Now, generally, that kind of analysis, in the sense that we're looking at market failure, can be looked at a whole host of social services.

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If you wanted, you know, around the question of incompetence or consumer ignorance, I think, for example, one can think in terms of services for psychiatric patients or the developmentally handicapped would fall into that kind of approach.

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The business of conventional externalities, as I mentioned, that I think has a lot of bearing in terms of, say, anti-smoking laws or bylaws and so forth are increasingly being introduced because there is the understanding that whether you smoke and I don't and so forth, that I'm affected one way or the other, even if I don't.

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And the other issue, of course, is the business of donor preference, which has sometimes been recently argued.

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And things like child welfare and alcoholism and substance abuse, those are areas where donor preference does perhaps play a role in the sense that if I'm giving money, I not only want to give it in a way that it's going to be given in the form of cash, but that it will be directed in a particular way that if somebody's abusing a child, I don't want simply to have a cash transfer, knowing that they'll only use a proportion of that to deal with treatment for themselves. But in fact, I want that money to be used for the treatment of child abuse.

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Those kinds of issues in terms of market failure I think are also backed up by arguments of equity, the fairness, in other words, some sense that the market distribution that's out there is in some sense has to be corrected.

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And when one looks at it, the market failure might be an argument, so to speak, for some sort of collective provision, but not necessarily directly for public provision.

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Social Provisions, and I make a distinction there because one can talk about public administration, as I've mentioned,

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or one can talk about public funding of voluntary agencies, or one can simply talk about subsidizing private agencies,

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and we have all three, of course, in the social services, and they also have to deal with the questions of user charges.

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And those, I think, oftentimes tend to be argued more around equity grounds.

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And let me just give you a couple of examples in relation to public provision.

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If we want direct public provision or public administration of a social service, we tend

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to argue it on grounds of universality.

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The health care field is an example of that because there is a perception you want one

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class system, you want equal treatment for everybody, you want probably common high standards

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and you want to have universal accessibility.

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If you're arguing for public funds for voluntary agencies, as has been the case for example

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in the child care field, the equity principles tend to be a little different in the sense

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Equality is an argument that has been used so that men and women have equal chances and women are treated in the same way.

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And while you want high standards in child care, you don't necessarily want kind of uniform standards, isn't it, in the health care field, because there isn't that kind of scientific knowledge in the same way, and therefore a lot of cultural values influence the outcome, and therefore you want a little more diversity, and the voluntary sector usually can generate that.

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If you're going towards subsidized funds for commercial agencies or private sector, examples would be, I think, counseling or employment trading programs.

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Program. Very often here you're dealing with targeting or relatively small groups

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where there isn't the kind of infrastructure out there and where

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government might simply want to subsidize established organizations so

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that they can experiment with those things and see which is the most

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efficient way of operating them. User charges are difficult in principle to

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deal with, not in difficult in principle, difficult sometimes because you have to

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make a judgment on individual cases, but various arguments have been put as to

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when there should be user charges in social services.

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For example, Derek Hum has made the argument

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that generally the more a benefit is primarily

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a private benefit, in other words,

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to the extent that I benefit primarily myself

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and it doesn't have any externality,

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the more the charge makes sense.

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I would take examples of family and marriage counseling

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as coming close to that, because basically

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the beneficiaries are the partners to the relationship,

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although sometimes there will be offsetting benefits,

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on the other hand, the more a service is mandatory or intended to modify behavior, as for example child welfare or institutionalized child care and certainly the corrections field, the more likely public provision.

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Now, Michael Krasinski, whom some of you might know, has kind of made the argument for cash user charges in the face of inability, in other words, the greater the inability to use a certain level of income and the more difficult to measure exactly what amount of income people will need,

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the more likely to have a public provision and then for the lower the user charge as a kind of a general principle and I think it's one that makes some sense and he uses of course the disabled as an example of that where it's very difficult and very costly to determine on a case by case basis and one runs into those administrative costs that Mr. Block was referring to. So generally in terms of user charges there's the targeting for the most needy tends to be kind of a way of trying to deal with on equity grounds or if you're trying

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In terms of collective provision, equity principles and market failure are only two issues. The real important issue, of course, is around the nature of the society we want. There are two general views.

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The rationale for expansion stems in part from a distinction made by T. H. Marshall in the early post-war period between the rights of citizens and the right to freedom.

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The rationale for expansion stems in part from a distinction made by T.H. Marshall in the early post-war period between the rights of citizenship, where he talked about civil rights, like association, free speech and so forth, things we tend to take for granted and have evolved over a period of time, political rights, where there's universal suffrage, and social rights, which are the guarantees of basic minimum, education, health and so forth. And it's the latter, the concept of social rights, of course, that is the most contentious from

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The State is a threat to liberty and freedoms. It is undefineable. It is unlimited. It can

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expand like a snowball, grow and grow until it overtakes us. It is an indefinite growth

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of the State, therefore an indefinite growth of coercion.

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Secondly, there is, by implication, gradual infringement of freedom, because even if you have 80% of the people agreeing that there should be a health care system, it still is coercive for the other 20%.

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And the whole notion that there's a gradual infringement of freedom because of the extension of social rights is a very real one.

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By contrast, of course, as I indicated, the market is perceived as being a form of voluntary exchange.

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And those who prefer a minimalist government are certainly associated at base with civil rights and political rights that I think Mr. Block mentioned at the beginning.

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Although there are some recognition of social rights in a broad sense of the term, that people like Friedman and Hayek have made it clear that Friedman of course refers to his classic terms of mad men and children requiring some sort of state intervention.

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and that Hayek, who's much broader in his definition of recognizing that those who somehow are disserviced or disadvantaged by the market probably should have some sort of basic social security,

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although he doesn't necessarily mean the government itself should provide that, but that the state might have to intervene to assure that it happens.

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Now, the problem with the minimalist position, as I see it, is that this notion of voluntary exchange recurring the market is true,

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The State itself was both a determinant of, and in some respects, a maintainer of, of the market system.

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Historically, it certainly was involved with the creation of the market.

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It wasn't in any sense neutral, so the market didn't come about itself by voluntary exchanges.

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The Elizabethan Poor Laws were labor laws, primarily to help labor or force labor to be free, to move away from medieval and feudal customs and traditions.

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So you get a situation where, in fact, the state then became a determinant of the market and also, of course, is very important to its maintenance, even though there's no necessary consensus that the market itself should continue or prevail.

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Now, what's, however, more important from the positive point of view is that liberal democratic tradition involves two claims, okay?

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One is the maximization of individual preferences, which the market to some extent can realize.

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The other one is the maximization of uniquely human attributes, okay, what C. B. McPherson calls the developmental powers of people.

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Are there rational understanding? Two minutes? Rational understanding, moral action, aesthetic creation, and so forth.

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And one has to balance these two. And in order to create the capacities for people's developmental attributes to develop, there have to be a certain kind of basic minima.

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So, put another way, there is that distinction which people like Hayek don't like, of course,

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namely between the idea of some sort of formal equality under the law and some sort of distributional

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justice by which, in fact, we deal with the inequalities in society.

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Now, that debate goes back as far as Aristotle, so it certainly predates the development of

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the market itself.

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But the essential thing is the notion that the liberal democratic society, to remain

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to remain democratic and to remain liberal has to maintain a delicate balance between the individual preferences or what McPherson calls the extractive power out of the market and the developmental capacity of people, more kind of humanistic ends of the society in some sort of tension.

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In a sense, in a free society it seems to me the tension between the two is what's key.

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So that liberty then, from that perspective, from the McPherson perspective, from what I guess would be called the liberal perspective, implies that rational human beings can create social solidarity through things like the social services.

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That it doesn't simply presuppose that prior ethical harmony emanating from the market itself.

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Somehow the market will generate all these kind of nice things.

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That it really takes the conscious rational effort of human beings to do it.

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Secondly, that collective forms of action are not necessarily coercive, providing individuals are free to generate private services as alternatives.

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We see that in the school system, we see that in social services and so forth.

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That the just role of the state is not to provide relief from poverty, but to provide the conditions which keep the individuals away from falling into poverty.

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I would quite agree. Welfare is a loss of liberty. It's an enslavement. It was intended as enslavement, and there to be a period on.

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The just role, then, of the state is to assure minimum claims to general rights of property,

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and the notion that property is something which is not only individual, but it basically is a social creation of the state and of the society,

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and therefore all of us are entitled to some part in it as a basic minima.

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Social Services, therefore, and the able to be more able, help us to meet common needs, help us to foster community, and help us to foster individual security and independence.

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Well, let me say to begin with my rebuttal, it's not so much a rebuttal as a congratulation.

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My own coloring of social work, I guess, has been prejudiced or something beyond belief.

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It's usually my experience of social work professionals has been sort of do-gooders,

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you know, crying all over my shoulder, and that's about the end of their sophisticated

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intellectual argument.

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In very great contrast, I'm just delighted with Glenn's presentation.

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I think it was witty, articulate, it took into account very many important points and I'm just delighted to be part of this conference or seminar with him.

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Having said all these nice things and exhausted my niceness for the moment, let me try to differ with him on certain points.

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But again, it will be sort of, I think we really share the same goal of helping the poor. It's just that we see different means toward it.

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I don't see him as an enemy or anything like that, but as sort of a fellow traveler or fellow person seeking at the same goal.

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I think he's mistaken in some ways, but I am very much impressed with his statement.

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on the question of collective I resist the idea of saying that collective could

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be either private or public it seems that there's an equivocation here I'm

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much more comfortable with a tripart distinction it seems to make more sense

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to me one you have the the public and the other you have the private and under

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the private you can have two subcategories one is individual and one

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I would call them both private. I would claim both from my side.

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I am as much a socialist as anyone else is, as long as the socialism is of the voluntary collective nature, as in a kibbutz or a monastery or a how-to-write community.

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What I oppose on moral and practical grounds is not collectivism but coercivism.

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So if we have a voluntary collective of the sort that I've mentioned, I mean even the family is a voluntary collective.

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I'm very much in favor of that. Indeed, I see one of the main problems with the welfare state is ruining the family, which is a voluntary collective.

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So I reject the distinction or the way that he puts it, and I think that this has implications for other disagreements.

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Let's consider the question of externalities for a moment and the healthcare system.

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I distinguish, and most economists distinguish, between positive and negative externalities and I lack, or I find a lack of that distinction in Glenn's presentation.

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By negative externalities, I mean things like infecting people or raping them or murdering them, spillover effects that are negative.

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And I think that the case of communicable diseases is just that sort of an instance.

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There was recently a case here where two people had some disease.

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Anyone remember what it was?

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TB, and they refused to take treatment, and they said, well, you know, we're free, you know, let's go out and mix with the people.

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Well, in my way of looking at that, that's akin to murder.

364
00:46:03.020 --> 00:46:07.020
I mean, maybe not purposeful, maybe not first degree, but that's, you know, that's bad stuff.

365
00:46:07.020 --> 00:46:11.020
You just can't let people with TB running around loose infecting other people.

366
00:46:11.020 --> 00:46:15.020
The effect on them is as if you took a knife to them and plunged it in.

367
00:46:15.020 --> 00:46:21.020
I think a sharp distinction has to be made between such negative externalities and positive ones.

368
00:46:21.020 --> 00:46:24.020
Unfortunately, in the case of negative externalities,

369
00:46:24.020 --> 00:46:29.020
I personally favor the death penalty as a means of reducing some of these things.

370
00:46:29.020 --> 00:46:33.020
Instead of this parole system where people just go off and kill other people,

371
00:46:33.020 --> 00:46:39.020
I think it's a shame and a disgrace what's going on with negative externalities and certainly with child abuse.

372
00:46:39.020 --> 00:46:43.020
It seems that a lot of the social work answer to child abuse is giving them more of a subsidy,

373
00:46:43.020 --> 00:46:50.020
whereas to my way of thinking, very severe penalties should be visited on people who abuse children.

374
00:46:50.020 --> 00:46:52.020
These are negative externalities.

375
00:46:52.020 --> 00:46:58.020
Now, in case of positive externalities, I think you can justify government intervention in any area.

376
00:46:58.020 --> 00:47:01.020
Food, clothing and shelter all have positive externalities.

377
00:47:01.020 --> 00:47:19.020
If I use soap, it benefits you. If you learn something, it benefits me. So if you're going to use that as a justification for government action, we'll have the system of which the Soviets are now trying to wrestle their way out from under.

378
00:47:19.020 --> 00:47:31.020
A system which has meant death for millions of people, and to not go in accordance with the points presented, to skip now to the third point, and I'll skip back.

379
00:47:31.020 --> 00:47:38.020
Glenn says that harmony is created from this kind of a situation. To me, that's the exact opposite of the truth.

380
00:47:38.020 --> 00:47:44.020
You've had millions of people killed in the Soviet and Chinese experiment with coercive collectivism.

381
00:47:44.020 --> 00:47:48.300
In the third world, before foreign aid, it's relatively peaceful.

382
00:47:48.300 --> 00:47:50.780
Once the foreign aid comes, you get tribalism,

383
00:47:50.780 --> 00:47:52.540
where the tribes start murdering each other

384
00:47:52.540 --> 00:47:54.580
and having genocidal operations,

385
00:47:54.580 --> 00:47:56.340
mainly to get those foreign aid bucks,

386
00:47:56.340 --> 00:47:58.620
which isn't much from a Canadian context,

387
00:47:58.620 --> 00:48:01.540
but in their context, this is, you know,

388
00:48:01.540 --> 00:48:04.180
monuments, Mercedes and machine guns are worth fighting over

389
00:48:04.180 --> 00:48:06.660
and you've got millions of people killed over that.

390
00:48:06.660 --> 00:48:09.980
And even in our western democratic liberal societies,

391
00:48:09.980 --> 00:48:14.060
I think these are forces for disharmony, not harmony.

392
00:48:14.060 --> 00:48:16.260
Now with regard to the healthcare system,

393
00:48:16.260 --> 00:48:17.920
I think that socialized medicine,

394
00:48:17.920 --> 00:48:20.280
that is coercively socialized medicine,

395
00:48:20.280 --> 00:48:22.360
like rent control, it takes decades

396
00:48:22.360 --> 00:48:24.220
for the problems to come about.

397
00:48:24.220 --> 00:48:26.300
We don't yet see the problems in Canada,

398
00:48:26.300 --> 00:48:28.580
but in Great Britain where they've had socialized medicine

399
00:48:28.580 --> 00:48:30.380
a lot longer than we've had,

400
00:48:30.380 --> 00:48:34.080
they've got this triage stuff where people over 55

401
00:48:34.080 --> 00:48:36.460
just can't get operations for love or money

402
00:48:36.460 --> 00:48:38.960
or anything else because they're triaged out of it.

403
00:48:39.980 --> 00:48:45.660
You've got situations where unions are now stipulating in their employment contracts,

404
00:48:45.660 --> 00:48:49.620
and unions are among the most ideologically susceptible to this argument,

405
00:48:49.620 --> 00:48:56.140
they're now stipulating that they want private services because the public services have become unraveled.

406
00:48:56.140 --> 00:48:59.260
It just makes no economic sense to do this.

407
00:48:59.260 --> 00:49:05.180
Suppose we had the same system we have for socialized medicine, only we did it for milk.

408
00:49:05.180 --> 00:49:07.740
Milk is important, milk for babies.

409
00:49:07.740 --> 00:49:14.140
What this would mean would be we'd collect money from everybody for milk, extra taxes,

410
00:49:14.140 --> 00:49:19.840
and then we'd say, well, now you can have all the milk you wanted for free, no user charges.

411
00:49:19.840 --> 00:49:23.640
Well, kids, instead of having water gun fights, would start having milk gun fights,

412
00:49:23.640 --> 00:49:26.640
or people would take baths in milk instead of in water.

413
00:49:26.640 --> 00:49:32.940
They'd waste it. They would treat it at a zero price, as is rational economically for them to do so.

414
00:49:32.940 --> 00:49:36.640
Well, that's what's happening, and more so with Great Britain.

415
00:49:36.640 --> 00:49:46.880
What people do is they waste these services, and then when they really want an important service, they have to go down to the United States, because they have to be on a three-year waiting period here in Canada.

416
00:49:46.880 --> 00:49:56.000
Well, in Great Britain, it's more than three years, so the system is very inefficient. It boomerangs against the well-intentioned who are trying to help the poor.

417
00:49:56.000 --> 00:50:04.960
In terms of ignorance, we're all ignorant about auto repair. I mean, the thing breaks and we go to an auto mechanic, we don't know what's under that hood.

418
00:50:04.960 --> 00:50:08.360
Well, according to the argument put forth here, we should nationalize these things.

419
00:50:08.360 --> 00:50:12.680
I mean, anything about which there's ignorance of, we have to have the government do.

420
00:50:12.680 --> 00:50:18.240
But this is a contradiction, because under democratic ethic, we're assuming that people are smart enough to vote.

421
00:50:18.240 --> 00:50:22.440
Well, if they're so bloody stupid they can't pick a doctor or they can't pick a mechanic,

422
00:50:22.440 --> 00:50:25.840
how are they going to pick a prime minister?

423
00:50:25.840 --> 00:50:28.880
I think that this argument reeks of paternalism.

424
00:50:28.880 --> 00:50:31.480
And certainly, uncertainty is the same kind of an argument.

425
00:50:31.480 --> 00:50:36.320
I mean, oil wells are uncertain, Broadway shows are uncertain, everything is uncertain.

426
00:50:36.320 --> 00:50:39.560
Well, if anything that's uncertain should be providence of government,

427
00:50:39.560 --> 00:50:43.480
well, we're back to government doing everything.

428
00:50:43.480 --> 00:50:47.600
With smoking, there is such a thing called internalization of externalities,

429
00:50:47.600 --> 00:50:52.120
which Glenn seems not to be fully cognizant of.

430
00:50:52.120 --> 00:50:57.400
This is the idea that the marketplace can internalize the externalities through property rights.

431
00:50:57.400 --> 00:51:00.080
For example, take restaurants.

432
00:51:00.080 --> 00:51:03.320
Some restaurants in a free society would allow smoking anywhere.

433
00:51:03.320 --> 00:51:07.840
Other restaurants, maybe natural foods restaurants, would prohibit it.

434
00:51:07.840 --> 00:51:13.240
And third ones would have smoking sections or smoking times or smoking days or whatever.

435
00:51:13.240 --> 00:51:15.840
And in that way, people would sort themselves out,

436
00:51:15.840 --> 00:51:20.480
and no one would have to sit idly by while someone else smoked in his presence

437
00:51:20.480 --> 00:51:23.400
if he didn't want to, because he wouldn't go to that kind of a restaurant.

438
00:51:23.400 --> 00:51:26.880
Instead, we have a government which has one rule for everybody,

439
00:51:26.880 --> 00:51:29.920
and it just violates the liberty of people to smoke,

440
00:51:29.920 --> 00:51:32.880
which is our new minority.

441
00:51:32.880 --> 00:51:34.280
In terms of employment equity,

442
00:51:34.280 --> 00:51:36.600
the Fraser Institute has done two books.

443
00:51:36.600 --> 00:51:37.880
One was an attack

444
00:51:37.880 --> 00:51:40.560
on the Abela Royal Commission report on this.

445
00:51:40.560 --> 00:51:43.080
And the finding here is that the reason we have

446
00:51:43.080 --> 00:51:47.280
the female male income ratio of some 65%

447
00:51:47.280 --> 00:51:50.080
has got nothing to do with employer discrimination.

448
00:51:50.080 --> 00:51:53.420
Rather, and this is to summarize a vast amount of research,

449
00:51:53.420 --> 00:51:55.840
it has to do with the institution of marriage.

450
00:51:55.840 --> 00:51:59.240
Marriage enhances male income and reduces female income.

451
00:51:59.240 --> 00:52:06.560
such that when you take people who have never been married, you aren't able to find any wage gap virtually at all.

452
00:52:06.560 --> 00:52:15.520
In terms of what kind of society we want, and Friedman and Hayek and Nozick and people in the minimalist tradition,

453
00:52:15.520 --> 00:52:22.920
I'm delighted that Glenn is aware of this and is making coherent, rational objections to this.

454
00:52:22.920 --> 00:52:27.360
Actually, I had a big debate with Friedman on the very point, and I took the point that Glenn took,

455
00:52:27.360 --> 00:52:32.060
and I'll be sending him a book there to show him that he and I are on the same side of that one.

456
00:52:32.060 --> 00:52:35.560
It has to do with his point of the prior distribution of income and property

457
00:52:35.560 --> 00:52:38.260
and with that point I fully agree with him.

458
00:52:40.760 --> 00:52:42.260
Okay.

459
00:52:42.260 --> 00:52:48.960
I just want to go back to some of the initial comments made by Walter at the beginning.

460
00:52:48.960 --> 00:52:54.160
First of all, in terms of government creating poverty, he made references to unemployment insurance

461
00:52:54.160 --> 00:53:24.160
And the argument there, I'm sure you're aware of, is the notion that, or also the minimum wage, I should say, particularly in unemployment insurance, I guess, is part of that, particularly the minimum wage, the notion as you move the wage up, then you tend to create unemployment because it has a disincentive effect for people to invest in other kinds of things if the wage rates are beyond that, which they can legitimately produce a service. And the studies that have been done primarily in North America tend to substantiate that on the margin. And one can argue higher that you have to tolerate that to some extent and compensate

462
00:53:24.160 --> 00:53:54.160
for it or you can look at other societies where they don't seem to have had the problem to the same extent in Sweden with for example a much higher minimum wages than we have and also much lower unemployment than we have one of the reasons why that kind of negative effect hasn't occurred is because of other structures in society particularly the business of wage negotiations which tend to be tied to productivity levels and so forth so that while it is in part true I think that government programs

463
00:54:24.160 --> 00:54:37.160
Transfers going to the rich, that of course is true. Some government transfers, for example, family allowance even, tends to be a transfer not between rich and poor, but between men and women.

464
00:54:37.160 --> 00:54:48.160
Or other transfers are intergenerational. They're between working people and non-working people who are retired and so forth. And therefore, again, they're not intentional, the transfers from the rich to the poor.

465
00:54:48.160 --> 00:55:18.160
Transfers to business, I was just kind of looking at the data, as a matter of fact, and it is true that there has been an increase, so I was struck, however, that the actual increase of transfers to business has been much greater with the provincial governments than it has been with the federal government in recent years, but that is a factor and certainly the debate and the people in the social policy area has been a concern about the growth of that and some attempt to rationalize it. Cost administration is higher in the public sector, kind of a

466
00:55:18.160 --> 00:55:21.840
and Assumption. Well, it may or may not be. Michael Mendelssohn and Walter knows

467
00:55:21.840 --> 00:55:25.760
and studies in this were some public sector programs are very high

468
00:55:25.760 --> 00:55:30.080
costs administratively, others are relatively low cost. In any case,

469
00:55:30.080 --> 00:55:33.800
I'm not convinced frankly that public administration has to be a simple part of

470
00:55:33.800 --> 00:55:38.640
what I still call collective provision. I'll explain myself in a moment.

471
00:55:38.640 --> 00:55:42.520
But the issue here, it seems to me in fact, is whether government provides

472
00:55:42.520 --> 00:55:44.000
regulation and funding,

473
00:55:44.000 --> 00:55:47.280
whether it's directly administered by government or administered by voluntary

474
00:56:17.280 --> 00:56:22.480
100. It will astonish you. 100 people for the whole country. That's there. He says,

475
00:56:22.480 --> 00:56:26.040
we can see our minister every day. No wonder, with 100 people, that they can see their minister

476
00:56:26.040 --> 00:56:31.040
every day. But it's because, in fact, administration of social service is not a responsibility

477
00:56:31.040 --> 00:56:37.320
directly of government in Sweden. So that, in fact, one can offset that, and if one is

478
00:56:37.320 --> 00:56:40.200
really concerned about cutting administrative costs and so forth, there are ways, it seems

479
00:56:40.200 --> 00:56:44.320
to me, in which public funding can allocate that to deal with that. But it isn't necessarily

480
00:56:44.320 --> 00:56:52.320
The welfare system in the United States is disastrous. The welfare system in Europe, in Sweden, is disastrous, okay?

481
00:56:52.320 --> 00:57:00.320
The reason why the Swedes basically minimize their welfare system is because they know welfare, once people get there, tend to be at the bottom, okay?

482
00:57:00.320 --> 00:57:05.320
And very, very difficult for them to get out. And that's a common experience in the United States.

483
00:57:05.320 --> 00:57:15.320
The reason why they minimize their welfare system is because they know welfare, once people get there, tend to be at the bottom, and very, very difficult for them to get out, and that's a common experience in most countries.

484
00:57:15.320 --> 00:57:18.320
Frank, it's also a common experience in the Soviet Union and other countries.

485
00:57:18.320 --> 00:57:22.320
The issue then is really where you have other programs to prevent that from happening.

486
00:57:22.320 --> 00:57:32.320
I was struck, for example, when I did some work on employment training for single parents, mostly women, that when I looked at the system here, as you well know,

487
00:57:32.320 --> 00:57:35.440
up to about 50% of single women over a period of time,

488
00:57:35.440 --> 00:57:36.720
not at any given point in time,

489
00:57:36.720 --> 00:57:40.600
it's only about 30% will be on welfare.

490
00:57:40.600 --> 00:57:43.280
In Sweden, it's less than 10% ever get on welfare

491
00:57:43.280 --> 00:57:44.640
because they have a whole set of programs

492
00:57:44.640 --> 00:57:46.240
that prevent that from happening.

493
00:57:48.660 --> 00:57:50.640
Collective versus public.

494
00:57:50.640 --> 00:57:52.400
I mean, I agree conceptually with the distinction

495
00:57:52.400 --> 00:57:53.240
that Walter is making,

496
00:57:53.240 --> 00:57:56.120
if one simply associates collective with voluntary.

497
00:57:56.120 --> 00:57:58.000
I was using the word collective in the sense

498
00:57:58.000 --> 00:57:59.560
that I think in a democratic society,

499
00:57:59.560 --> 00:58:00.660
a liberal democratic society,

500
00:58:00.660 --> 00:58:18.260
There is a process of collective decision-making that comes about, that does involve an element of coercion, I don't think there's any question of that, and that I was using a collective as to distinguish that from public administration where government itself, and maybe a better distinction, is government administration versus public provision.

501
00:58:18.260 --> 00:58:24.800
I'll time up? Oh, okay. Harmony. That's an interesting one because he made the

502
00:58:24.800 --> 00:58:28.980
example reference to the kind of coercive pressures within the USSR.

503
00:58:28.980 --> 00:58:35.020
Interestingly enough, the USSR collective provisions of social services are in

504
00:58:35.020 --> 00:58:38.060
some respects, and maybe that's the point he's making, not very different from

505
00:58:38.060 --> 00:58:42.900
capitalist societies, even though I don't think capitalist societies set out to model

506
00:58:42.900 --> 00:58:47.620
themselves after the USSR. But I don't think there's necessary correlation

507
00:58:47.620 --> 00:58:53.260
between collective revision of social services and Stalinist death camps.

508
00:58:53.260 --> 00:58:58.420
In fact, we have quite a few deaths taking place in relatively free capitalist societies

509
00:58:58.420 --> 00:59:04.260
throughout the world that would not be accused of having the same kind of collectivist mentality

510
00:59:04.260 --> 00:59:06.380
of the Soviet Union.

511
00:59:06.380 --> 00:59:10.020
And I think that if one takes either South Africa or certainly the many countries in

512
00:59:10.020 --> 00:59:14.100
South America, their records are not exactly idyllic in these areas.

513
00:59:14.100 --> 00:59:18.400
Well, I don't have the comparative data of death rates between the various countries.

514
00:59:18.400 --> 00:59:20.600
I suspect they're relatively high in both areas.

515
00:59:20.600 --> 00:59:25.300
The point being that harmony and other things come about not simply because of the market, per se,

516
00:59:25.300 --> 00:59:32.300
or the lack of a market, but because of a whole set of values in society that treasure liberal democratic traditions.

517
00:59:32.300 --> 00:59:35.900
And that's my very point that I was trying to make at the end of my presentation,

518
00:59:35.900 --> 00:59:39.300
is that's a delicate balance between the maximization of individual preferences

519
00:59:39.300 --> 00:59:46.300
and the Maximization of Human Attributes, Other Humanistic Attributes.

520
00:59:46.300 --> 00:59:54.300
A reference was made to the UK. I agree, it's a bad healthcare system. I've experienced it. I've lived with it. I know the system there. I know the system here.

521
00:59:54.300 --> 01:00:01.300
As a matter of fact, it wasn't one of the first set up. Others were set up in Europe that I think were historically provided precedence.

522
01:00:01.300 --> 01:00:08.300
The British typically were stubborn minded, didn't follow the Europeans, and set up their own kind of centrally administrative system,

523
01:00:08.300 --> 01:00:13.500
Which for a while worked, but I don't think we have to go to the UK to see where we'll go down the road.

524
01:00:13.500 --> 01:00:20.060
The Europeans have had some of their systems established long before the British, still are established, still seem to be doing quite well,

525
01:00:20.060 --> 01:00:22.940
and I think relatively speaking represent better models.

526
01:00:22.940 --> 01:00:26.500
I think frankly even the Canadian model represents a much better model than the UK.

527
01:00:26.500 --> 01:00:32.060
And equally, when one goes to the US, it might be true that one can run down to a Texas clinic if one has dough,

528
01:00:32.060 --> 01:00:35.140
or one can depend upon a healthcare system here to pay for it,

529
01:00:35.140 --> 01:00:45.140
But it's a good number of people, let me tell you, in the United States, and I'm sure Walter knows that, who would have no chance of queuing up anywhere in Texas, except in the welfare goal.

530
01:00:45.140 --> 01:01:01.140
And the issue, I think, around the child care and employment equity, yes, I wasn't trying to make simply the argument that child care will deal with all employment equity problems and that any discrimination is simply due to the lack of child care or other things.

531
01:01:01.140 --> 01:01:31.140
Murray Gunderson's book that I'm sure you're familiar with has tried to discriminate, using regression analysis, the amount of, you know, in terms of the average differential between rage, race of men and women, how much of it is directly due to discrimination, how much due to other factors, and has broken that down, so I'm aware of that, but even Gunderson tends to argue that at least child care provides, and he has provided some statistical evidence for that, some advantage to women to give them a choices in the first place, and secondly then to be treated roughly equal

532
01:01:31.140 --> 01:01:35.860
to men in terms of the way they benefit from government.

533
01:01:35.860 --> 01:01:37.100
Now, this would be not an example

534
01:01:37.100 --> 01:01:38.500
that Walter would necessarily accept,

535
01:01:38.500 --> 01:01:41.020
but one of the realities example is that males

536
01:01:41.020 --> 01:01:43.220
get a lot more employment relief

537
01:01:43.220 --> 01:01:45.460
out of the tax system than women.

538
01:01:45.460 --> 01:01:47.540
And women are simply saying, that might be bad or good,

539
01:01:47.540 --> 01:01:49.420
but let's have it as equal.

540
01:01:49.420 --> 01:01:51.020
So whether you like it or whether you don't,

541
01:01:51.020 --> 01:01:53.780
there's plenty to argue for equity on those grounds as well.

542
01:01:53.780 --> 01:01:54.780
I'll just talk to him.

543
01:01:54.780 --> 01:02:06.780
Thank you both very much. Now we go up to the floor. I'm sure you'll just be here to hear a few questions.

544
01:02:06.780 --> 01:02:13.780
And that's primarily what we're after, is questions. So I'm going to stand here and recognize the fans.

545
01:02:13.780 --> 01:02:19.780
And if I don't know your name, please give me a name, and if there's a word of explanation,

546
01:02:19.780 --> 01:02:44.780
If you are going to give a statement of your position, a response to either Glenn or Walter,

547
01:02:44.780 --> 01:02:52.780
Then I'm going to limit you to three minutes, okay, but you have unlimited access by question.

548
01:02:52.780 --> 01:03:03.780
Also, if you address your question to one and the other wishes to respond, they're free to do that, of course.

549
01:03:03.780 --> 01:03:05.780
So, who's going to go first?

550
01:03:05.780 --> 01:03:08.780
I was just saying, I'll answer both sides, since you're here.

551
01:03:14.780 --> 01:03:15.780
Yes?

552
01:03:15.780 --> 01:03:19.780
My name is Betty Kaelin, and I'm a social worker at the Ministry of Social Services and Housing.

553
01:03:19.780 --> 01:03:27.780
And I just want to comment on Walter's statement that government is always the first resort instead of the last.

554
01:03:27.780 --> 01:03:32.780
And I just agree with that, because usually when we do get clients come in too,

555
01:03:32.780 --> 01:03:36.380
is we are the last resort in terms of inconsistence.

556
01:03:36.380 --> 01:03:40.380
They have exhausted all their other resources before they come to us.

557
01:03:40.380 --> 01:03:44.980
And it's all, it's due to being human, I mean, you have set the price, et cetera,

558
01:03:44.980 --> 01:03:51.980
and you don't, you know, you don't come begging until you're really desperate.

559
01:03:51.980 --> 01:03:54.180
Well, I have no reason to disagree with that,

560
01:03:54.180 --> 01:03:57.180
but I think we're speaking on slightly different points.

561
01:03:57.180 --> 01:04:01.180
I have no reason to disagree that many people,

562
01:04:01.180 --> 01:04:09.180
... individuals who need help would first seek other places and then only later go to government, although some might seek it first.

563
01:04:09.180 --> 01:04:17.180
I was addressing my point to a slightly different issue, namely as a philosophy or as a public policy.

564
01:04:17.180 --> 01:04:27.180
How much of a role do we see for government? Is it minimal and as a last resort, or is it larger and larger and as a first resort?

565
01:04:27.180 --> 01:04:28.180
The First Resort

566
01:04:28.180 --> 01:04:33.460
Now, some of the people who I read quotes of, the Vancouver Food Bank, people like that,

567
01:04:33.460 --> 01:04:39.420
when Premier Bennett cut back government services and said, well, he hopes that the private

568
01:04:39.420 --> 01:04:43.940
sector will take up the slack, and by private sector he meant collective sectors such as

569
01:04:43.940 --> 01:04:48.900
food banks, and they were saying, not on your life, if I could paraphrase that, that this

570
01:04:48.900 --> 01:04:51.220
is the responsibility of government.

571
01:04:51.220 --> 01:04:55.980
What they were in effect saying is that government should be the first resort, the first and

572
01:04:55.980 --> 01:05:01.980
is an only resort, and that we shouldn't have a Vancouver Food Bank financed by voluntary contributions.

573
01:05:01.980 --> 01:05:04.980
And that was what I was opposing, that philosophy.

574
01:05:04.980 --> 01:05:13.980
So I don't think that that's incompatible with your correct acknowledgement of the fact that some people will have pride

575
01:05:13.980 --> 01:05:18.980
and not go to government until all other avenues are exhausted.

576
01:05:18.980 --> 01:05:42.980
Are you not concerned about the stigmatization that goes along with forcing people to go around looking for charity, rather than having a system whereby when you have a legitimate need, you are entitled to help?

577
01:05:48.980 --> 01:05:53.500
And that's one of the problems that I have with universality, that there is no stigma.

578
01:05:53.500 --> 01:05:58.020
I think that if people say, well, you know, I've got a problem, I'll just go get money

579
01:05:58.020 --> 01:06:02.940
forcibly taken from other people through the tax system, and everyone starts doing this.

580
01:06:02.940 --> 01:06:07.540
You know, it's sort of like that little red hen who said, well, I'm going to, first I'm

581
01:06:07.540 --> 01:06:10.380
going to sow the wheat or plant the wheat.

582
01:06:10.380 --> 01:06:12.180
Any of you other farm animals want to do it?

583
01:06:12.180 --> 01:06:13.180
No, forget it.

584
01:06:13.180 --> 01:06:14.540
Now I'm going to bake.

585
01:06:14.540 --> 01:06:15.540
Anyone want to help me bake?

586
01:06:15.540 --> 01:06:16.540
No.

587
01:06:16.540 --> 01:06:31.540
Well, a system like that, everyone is going to be stent, or not everyone, but the incentives will be for people to put their hands out like this for relief instead of to roll up their sleeves and go and produce.

588
01:06:31.540 --> 01:06:32.540
I think that's one of the problems.

589
01:06:32.540 --> 01:06:50.540
One of the problems and one of the benefits of the private sector, private collective sector vis-a-vis the government sector, is that it doesn't give people a fish, it gives them a fishing rod, or the wherewithal, and says go out and fish, or go thou and fish, if I can put it in biblical terms.

590
01:06:50.540 --> 01:07:00.540
So I think that this stigma is a positive, not a negative, for the goal that we presumably both share, namely the betterment of people.

591
01:07:00.540 --> 01:07:06.540
Let me ask you this, suppose you were dying and you had a young child, age five or something,

592
01:07:06.540 --> 01:07:14.540
would you want to leave him in the hands of a system where you knew he'd have enough food and clothing and shelter,

593
01:07:14.540 --> 01:07:19.540
but there'd be a diminution of his incentive to produce for himself,

594
01:07:19.540 --> 01:07:28.540
or would you rather some other system where there were more, sometimes more difficulties, more challenges,

595
01:07:28.540 --> 01:07:47.540
I know that I would entrust my children more to a system, a productive system of that sort than to this welfare state where welfare is the first, last, and only alternative for everyone, and everyone is encouraged to get that by lack of stigma.

596
01:07:47.540 --> 01:07:57.620
Since Walter corrected me conceptually, I want to correct him conceptually.

597
01:07:57.620 --> 01:08:03.280
I think that it is important to make a distinction between stigma and deterrents, and the way

598
01:08:03.280 --> 01:08:07.300
you describe that, I would take it that you are concerned about certain deterrents, so

599
01:08:07.300 --> 01:08:12.260
that because of the zero cost associated with a lot of public services, there have to be

600
01:08:12.260 --> 01:08:16.820
kind of very clear about who gets, who doesn't and so forth, and if there are costs attached

601
01:08:46.820 --> 01:08:51.820
not only with disincentives to people but the putting down of people.

602
01:08:51.820 --> 01:08:57.820
It is a psychological notion which implies that people are demeaned in some fashion.

603
01:08:57.820 --> 01:09:00.820
So that it's much more than a deterrent.

604
01:09:00.820 --> 01:09:04.820
It is psychologically a form of alienation.

605
01:09:04.820 --> 01:09:07.820
And I think that there is a legitimate distinction being made between those two.

606
01:09:07.820 --> 01:09:12.820
Having said that, I think one can also argue that there are various forms...

607
01:09:12.820 --> 01:09:27.820
There are various forms, and maybe having said that, I'll give you an example, I think, of something where there is a stigma, well, to put it the other way around, that programs can create deterrence without being necessarily stigmatizing.

608
01:09:27.820 --> 01:09:40.820
If one looks at welfare, it is both certainly a deterrent in the sense that people are discouraged for a whole host of reasons from using it, not only administratively and mechanically through the administrative process, but through the values of society.

609
01:09:40.820 --> 01:09:53.820
and the other is once they get into that system of how they are put down so that once they're in it for any length of time, it's incredibly difficult for them to get the self-confidence to get out of it.

610
01:09:53.820 --> 01:09:56.820
That's the stigmatizing process for me.

611
01:09:56.820 --> 01:10:06.820
GINs, the guaranteed income supplement, is a good example where I think there's a clear deterrence in the sense that it's very clear that certain people are eligible, certain aren't, so that it is income tested

612
01:10:06.820 --> 01:10:19.820
It is related to people who presumably have some sort of perceived income need, but I don't think on the whole GIS by the average elderly person is perceived as stigmatizing. So I just think that's worthwhile keeping in mind.

613
01:10:19.820 --> 01:10:31.820
It's interesting also that when one talks about social programs, and maybe this is not really tied to stigma and deterrence, but it is an issue that, once you've made it, I've forgotten the point.

614
01:10:31.820 --> 01:10:41.820
Well, anyway, I'll raise it my own way, maybe you'll respond to it, is that one has to be very clear about when there should be public provision, what form it should take, and so forth.

615
01:10:41.820 --> 01:10:45.820
In other words, I wasn't simply saying carte blanche, there should be a range of everything.

616
01:10:45.820 --> 01:10:52.820
That one has to ration, very rational in terms of what should be provided through the public sector.

617
01:10:52.820 --> 01:10:57.820
Education is a good example of a universal service that most of us have benefited from in some respects,

618
01:11:27.820 --> 01:11:41.820
and what you get in the system and that's of course where the private sector would discriminate because it would tend to respond to certain demands and neglect others or allow other organizations to develop those services to accommodate those demands.

619
01:11:41.820 --> 01:11:51.820
But in the educational system we have basically a multi-disciplinary, multi-family problem kind of social service, the worst kind of system development.

620
01:11:51.820 --> 01:12:03.820
So to me it is a good example of where lack of clarity and lack of focus as to what a service should be, how it should be funded and so forth, where you can get deterioration in the public sector.

621
01:12:03.820 --> 01:12:15.820
I'd like to make two points. One on this topic that this person mentioned, another on a point that Glenn mentioned, with regard to South Africa and deaths in South Africa.

622
01:12:15.820 --> 01:12:28.820
One way economists tell where there are deaths and where there aren't and where the benefits and where the losses are is people voting with their feet.

623
01:12:28.820 --> 01:12:37.820
We think that this is a lot more credible than statistics that are put out by UN or other groups such as that.

624
01:12:37.820 --> 01:12:45.980
The blatant fact in the South African situation is the immigration and emigration of blacks.

625
01:12:45.980 --> 01:12:50.620
There is no emigration of blacks from South Africa, horrendous though that system might be.

626
01:12:50.620 --> 01:12:56.620
On the contrary, there is emigration of blacks from the surrounding countries into South Africa.

627
01:12:56.620 --> 01:13:01.860
This is in sharp contrast to, say, East and West Germany, where the emigration is virtually all Western.

628
01:13:01.860 --> 01:13:03.260
I mean, it's sort of ludicrous.

629
01:13:03.260 --> 01:13:06.660
It's almost as if saying that the Jews were trying to get into Nazi Germany.

630
01:13:06.660 --> 01:13:13.660
They were trying to get out, and from the fact that they were voting with their feet to get out, we deduced that things weren't so great.

631
01:13:13.660 --> 01:13:18.660
Well, in the South African situation, I mean, take the Soviet situation, they're trying to get out.

632
01:13:18.660 --> 01:13:26.660
Nobody's, you know, queuing up to get into the Soviet Union. They're queuing up to get into South Africa. Blacks, that is.

633
01:13:26.660 --> 01:13:31.660
With regard to the stigma versus deterrence, I guess I'm in favor of both.

634
01:13:31.660 --> 01:13:42.160
There are certain communities, ethnic communities, Hungarians, Jews, Albanians, Polish people, for whom welfare is an out and out disgrace.

635
01:13:42.160 --> 01:13:47.660
You get welfare, you're a disgrace. It's a disgrace to the individual and it's a disgrace to the community.

636
01:13:47.660 --> 01:13:59.160
And those communities are growing in vibrant and vital, compared to the blacks and other groups where we have this welfare rights philosophy and they're in disarray.

637
01:13:59.160 --> 01:14:05.760
It's pathetic what's happening to these people that depend on welfare and welfare rights and have that philosophy.

638
01:14:05.760 --> 01:14:23.760
Take the experience of the Chinese boat people, immigrants, Vietnamese, that come to this country and the parents work, you know, 92 hours a day and they put their kids through school and their kids are working too and when they're not working they've got a book open behind the counter.

639
01:14:23.760 --> 01:14:53.760
Now that, I think, is the kind of a situation I would want my kid to be in, if I died and had to leave him to someone I'd like to leave him to a Vietnamese family that was working like that, and not to a family or a society or a subgroup that had this welfare rights philosophy and said, well, you know, it's our right, we've got to have welfare and, you know, let's have more welfare. I want a stigma. It's a disgrace in the Chinese or these ethnic communities to have welfare, and that's very vital for the well-being of those people.

640
01:14:53.760 --> 01:15:06.640
I think there are two things. One is talking about welfare rights. One of the reasons why

641
01:15:06.640 --> 01:15:12.080
I think we, way back in the 30s, decided not to go the welfare route the way the Americans

642
01:15:12.080 --> 01:15:17.240
did, they went the work route. They said what you need in a society is the right to work.

643
01:15:17.240 --> 01:15:20.040
That's the first right that people should have, and they made that a condition there

644
01:15:20.040 --> 01:15:23.720
for their public policies. That's influenced, I think, the direction that they've taken.

645
01:15:23.720 --> 01:15:38.720
The second is, I honestly, I don't have the data, and maybe Walter does, but I honestly doubt that there's much difference in terms of elderly Jews, elderly Hungarians, and elderly, well we don't have a large black population in Canada, but the other amorphous group presumably, in terms of the uptake of GIS.

646
01:15:38.720 --> 01:15:48.720
And that would be an example I was trying to make, that it really depends. The welfare system is structured and in North America it's modeled itself after Britain, the Americans basically modeled itself after Britain.

647
01:15:48.720 --> 01:15:51.720
Generally in this area, as in the healthcare system, it's lousy.

648
01:15:51.720 --> 01:15:54.720
We haven't been raised to that. The question is how to change it.

649
01:15:54.720 --> 01:15:58.720
But in fact, that has not been the experience, the European experience.

650
01:15:58.720 --> 01:16:02.720
Any questions?

651
01:16:02.720 --> 01:16:08.720
Yes, I wanted to address a question to Walter.

652
01:16:08.720 --> 01:16:17.720
The last year or so in banking, there's been a fair amount of publicity and concern about hungry children in schools.

653
01:16:17.720 --> 01:16:26.720
And that led the Bank for School Board to try and establish a practice program for the school.

654
01:16:26.720 --> 01:16:30.720
It needed the cooperation of the city of Vancouver.

655
01:16:30.720 --> 01:16:33.720
I think if I'm not today, the city turned it down once.

656
01:16:33.720 --> 01:16:36.720
I'm not sure it's turned down again.

657
01:16:36.720 --> 01:16:42.720
At the time that that was being debated and discussed in some public forum,

658
01:16:42.720 --> 01:17:10.720
The Ministry of Social Services and the Minister for Collaboration has steadfastly refused the public knowledge to go to such a program and stated that social workers would be assigned to interview individual children from families where there was everyday life in schools to determine if there was a need to provide assistance.

659
01:17:10.720 --> 01:17:23.720
Given that there's a couple of different points of view, the minister taking one direction, the Vancouver School Board taking another, presumably the city of Vancouver will take another.

660
01:17:23.720 --> 01:17:30.720
I wonder if you'd like to comment on, say, what the view, what your view would be, what the view of Fraser Institute would be,

661
01:17:30.720 --> 01:17:40.720
since emerging social issue and they obviously seem to have fairly broad concern in the public model.

662
01:18:30.720 --> 01:18:39.720
And that's the way it's been in my family and I'm sure in your family and in every family which is not in disarray. The kids come first.

663
01:18:39.720 --> 01:18:48.720
And for a parent to take money and spend it on whatever and not to feed the kid is just an instance of child abuse.

664
01:18:48.720 --> 01:18:57.720
And what should be done? This is a negative. It's worse than raping an adult. I mean, these are kids. These are helpless kids.

665
01:18:57.720 --> 01:19:23.240
So, in a situation of sort of respecting the autonomy of the family versus the intervention of the state,

666
01:19:23.240 --> 01:19:28.240
In fact, this kind of situation would stand for greater intervention of the state.

667
01:19:53.240 --> 01:20:05.240
Are you not aware that foster care is a very separate system to keeping families together and providing services that will increase their parenting skills?

668
01:20:23.240 --> 01:20:26.240
Let alone forming and then being undermined.

669
01:20:26.240 --> 01:20:32.240
Yes, foster care has got problems too, but we're talking about actual cases of child abuse.

670
01:20:32.240 --> 01:20:34.240
I mean, starving a child is child abuse.

671
01:20:34.240 --> 01:20:38.240
It might not be putting a cigarette out into the child's skin,

672
01:20:38.240 --> 01:20:43.240
but starving a child, if it occurs, is certainly a very abusive thing.

673
01:20:43.240 --> 01:20:48.240
And I would certainly favor anything but that, practically anything but that.

674
01:20:48.240 --> 01:20:54.240
I mean, I suppose there are worse things than that, but you'd have to go pretty far.

675
01:20:54.240 --> 01:21:24.240
Thank you, God, I have worked as a social worker, such as at St. Helens, and I've had about 14 years of experience from a problem which has been with rejection cases, and most of them have been on inconsistence, and I've been to their homes, and I'm wondering whether you're aware of any amount of money we're talking about when we're talking about family and inconsistence, and I have consistently challenged musicians that I can

676
01:21:24.240 --> 01:21:40.240
to give and leave a breakdown without it, and leave, and we can't do it, the money can be there.

677
01:21:40.240 --> 01:21:48.240
Well, they must take money from us every time we visit, because I have seen them, and I wonder how often other religious does.

678
01:21:54.240 --> 01:22:04.240
George Stigler, Nobel Prize-winning economist and a buddy of Friedman and Hayek and Matt Ilk

679
01:22:24.240 --> 01:22:38.240
The point he was making is that if you're just talking basic nutrition and keeping body and soul together, it's very, very, very, very cheap.

680
01:22:38.240 --> 01:22:43.240
And what we're talking about here is not nutritional food requirements.

681
01:22:43.240 --> 01:22:52.240
What we're talking about is, I don't know, choice in food and preparation and fancy sauces

682
01:22:52.240 --> 01:22:55.240
What do you mean by costless?

683
01:23:22.240 --> 01:23:32.240
The amount of money given to welfare is so high that it is competitive with low-wage employment.

684
01:23:32.240 --> 01:23:40.240
People who are on the margin of accepting low-wage employment, on the one hand, which would lead them out of the poverty trap,

685
01:23:40.240 --> 01:23:48.240
and on the other hand taking what really is 40 hours a week of leisure and staying in the poverty trap, are tempted.

686
01:23:48.240 --> 01:23:55.240
Even, as Glenn said, elderly Jews and Hungarians also, there's a bit of family disarray there.

687
01:23:55.240 --> 01:24:01.240
Why should the Jewish family, say, give money to grandma when the state will give money to grandma?

688
01:24:01.240 --> 01:24:10.240
So you have the rise of nursing homes, whereas in a bygone era grandma would have got the back bedroom or something and been with the kids.

689
01:24:10.240 --> 01:24:12.240
There would have been more of this extended family.

690
01:24:12.240 --> 01:24:19.240
So, this is pernicious. I mean, I don't think the Jewish community is anywhere near the disarray of the black community.

691
01:24:19.240 --> 01:24:26.240
But even in a strong community such as that, there are great dangers.

692
01:24:26.240 --> 01:24:32.240
Yeah, I just, you know, the difficulty with the welfare, I mean, there are two or three comments here I guess I'd like to make.

693
01:24:32.240 --> 01:24:40.240
A general comment about the welfare field is that the nice part about the welfare field,

694
01:24:40.240 --> 01:24:44.320
that whatever our biases or views are, we can state them, because there's so little

695
01:24:44.320 --> 01:24:50.280
research that's systematically or empirically based, that it's hard to either substantiate

696
01:24:50.280 --> 01:24:53.040
or the opposite any judgement made.

697
01:24:53.040 --> 01:24:57.600
The second about the welfare field, I think that one has to note, is that it isn't a homogeneous

698
01:24:57.600 --> 01:24:58.600
whole.

699
01:24:58.600 --> 01:25:02.600
Okay, in fact, when we talk about welfare, we're talking about a whole range of people,

700
01:25:02.600 --> 01:25:08.600
all the way from, in fact, the kind of classic welfare syndrome person who represents, I think, a minority,

701
01:25:08.600 --> 01:25:13.600
in fact, I'm sure represents a minority, because the studies that have been done tend to point that out,

702
01:25:13.600 --> 01:25:18.600
to a whole range of people, the single parents, the young employables, etc.

703
01:25:18.600 --> 01:25:21.600
And you know the categories, I don't have to go into that.

704
01:25:21.600 --> 01:25:24.600
I guess there are about 18 categories in the welfare field.

705
01:25:24.600 --> 01:25:33.600
So that one, I think, has to disaggregate that and seriously study it if one wants to know what incentives work, what incentives don't, what are the behavior patterns and so forth.

706
01:25:33.600 --> 01:25:43.600
The third is that the studies, as limited as they are, that have been done, for example, we always get the, almost predictably, before any elections or in this province, the whole problem of welfare fraud.

707
01:25:43.600 --> 01:25:49.600
Okay, every study that's been done in this province or anywhere else always shows that the amount of welfare fraud portion is very, very small.

708
01:25:49.600 --> 01:25:52.600
And yet it's a favorite of politicians and it comes out every time.

709
01:25:52.600 --> 01:25:56.280
One doesn't talk about tax fraud, which probably in terms of the millions of dollars lost to

710
01:25:56.280 --> 01:25:59.600
the government is much more important, but certainly one tells about welfare fraud.

711
01:25:59.600 --> 01:26:04.040
It's kind of like the old argument, Raymond Aaron, if you remember the United States,

712
01:26:04.040 --> 01:26:06.600
when they had the great debates in the United States about the billion dollars that were

713
01:26:06.600 --> 01:26:11.880
going in terms of public housing subsidies, which Hoover Institute and others were somewhat

714
01:26:11.880 --> 01:26:15.360
major contributors, until Aaron pointed out in fact something like eight billion dollars

715
01:26:15.360 --> 01:26:19.120
of subsidies were going to the middle class in terms of housing subsidies.

716
01:26:19.120 --> 01:26:22.400
Nobody talked about the eight billion, but they certainly talked about the one billion

717
01:26:22.400 --> 01:26:25.960
for the public sector which was going directly to the public sector so you get

718
01:26:25.960 --> 01:26:29.760
this phenomenon it seems to me in terms of the welfare sector which I think

719
01:26:29.760 --> 01:26:33.520
really if one wants to be serious about it the Fraser Institute and other groups have

720
01:26:33.520 --> 01:26:37.680
to do serious studies and really let's get the facts at least the the

721
01:26:37.680 --> 01:26:41.480
interesting feature is that some of you probably know the province of Ontario is

722
01:26:41.480 --> 01:26:46.200
coming out with a study which will be out I've actually seen the draft which

723
01:26:46.200 --> 01:26:48.560
will be out in September it's actually ready but won't be released until

724
01:26:48.560 --> 01:26:50.560
The Theory of Money and Credit

725
01:27:18.560 --> 01:27:48.560
The reality is that that's rational, but I'm always surprised when one looks at the studies how a few people in fact do it, and therefore that one gets these kinds of assessments all the time, this is happening, and I don't doubt on the margin it is happening, but again one has no sense of the magnitude of these things, and therefore I just kind of make a pitch for in the welfare area, backing up our debate, because it's one area that everybody loves to debate, everybody has opinions about, but it's the one area in public policy which is least substantiated by any serious study.

726
01:27:48.560 --> 01:27:52.560
I was just wondering if you realized that a lot of the money that people are going to get

727
01:27:52.560 --> 01:27:57.560
goes towards their housing costs, that it does send into the money that they're allowed for their food costs.

728
01:27:57.560 --> 01:27:59.560
It's not the fact that they spend money on other things,

729
01:27:59.560 --> 01:28:03.560
it's the fact that it's going out of their budget by costs that they cannot control,

730
01:28:03.560 --> 01:28:07.560
such as housing, which takes up a very large chunk of welfare versus money.

731
01:28:18.560 --> 01:28:29.560
and the government has enacted several bits of very pernicious legislation which escalate land costs.

732
01:28:29.560 --> 01:28:39.560
For example, we have zoning, we have the agricultural land reserve which takes land out of the area of development for people

733
01:28:39.560 --> 01:28:44.560
which would lower the prices of housing and puts it into vegetables or something.

734
01:28:44.560 --> 01:28:58.560
And the economics of it is that the market, that is the people, have valued this agricultural land at some 10,000 an acre for real top growing land.

735
01:28:58.560 --> 01:29:10.560
And some of this land could sell for a million bucks an acre for development, which shows the great disparity, which shows the almost criminal misallocation of resources.

736
01:29:10.560 --> 01:29:40.560
The people in the Fraser Valley or in Vancouver or the lower mainland are crying out in effect for more land because the housing costs are very high, as you put your finger on quite correctly, and yet the government in its other role is acting in a way to make it impossible for the land to be sold at a much more reasonable price, at which case the housing costs would be much lower.

737
01:29:40.560 --> 01:29:43.920
I wanted to reply to this point about the lack of research.

738
01:29:43.920 --> 01:29:46.960
I imagine you're all familiar with Charles Murray's book,

739
01:29:46.960 --> 01:29:51.440
Losing Ground, where he documents an awful lot of the points

740
01:29:51.440 --> 01:29:52.920
that I've been making.

741
01:29:52.920 --> 01:29:56.040
And I just can't resist getting into the minimum wage

742
01:29:56.040 --> 01:29:57.360
very briefly.

743
01:29:57.360 --> 01:30:00.440
When Van der Zand came in as premier,

744
01:30:00.440 --> 01:30:04.760
he publicly mused that he might get rid of the minimum wage

745
01:30:04.760 --> 01:30:07.320
law, that is, just repeal it instead.

746
01:30:07.320 --> 01:30:09.720
And in the event, what he did is he raised it from,

747
01:30:09.720 --> 01:30:25.720
I think it was $3.50 and now it's $4. And this has had a very deleterious effect on the unemployment rates of teenagers and unskilled persons whose unemployment rate is two to three times higher than the adult minimum wage law.

748
01:30:25.720 --> 01:30:34.520
Now, I'm not familiar with the Swedish minimum wage case, but I know from all the research on the minimum wage

749
01:30:34.520 --> 01:30:40.920
that it is a cause of unemployment of the least and the last and the lost among us.

750
01:30:40.920 --> 01:30:48.920
It's a mislabeled law. It should be called the unskilled unemployment law.

751
01:30:48.920 --> 01:30:55.520
Because what it does is it prices people out of the market. It prices unskilled workers out of the market.

752
01:30:55.520 --> 01:31:01.680
and it does so at the behest of unions because unions are collectives of very skilled workers

753
01:31:01.680 --> 01:31:07.280
are always competing with unskilled workers and the best way to get rid of your competition is

754
01:31:07.280 --> 01:31:12.400
to price them out of the market. It's too gruff to have to beat them up off with sticks and call

755
01:31:12.400 --> 01:31:18.000
them scabs and stuff like that. It's much easier, it's much cleaner, it's much more white-collarish

756
01:31:18.000 --> 01:31:24.160
to go to Victoria and get the minimum wage law raised which just un-employs teenagers and

757
01:31:54.160 --> 01:32:20.160
I just need to point out that in terms of dollars that are available to poor people,

758
01:32:20.160 --> 01:32:41.160
Your entire shelter cost, which is food, rent, hydro, telephone, probably cable vision, is $412 for a month or two people.

759
01:32:41.160 --> 01:32:54.160
$412, and I don't know anywhere that anybody has been able to do that, to get that kind of cut over the last three, four, five years.

760
01:32:54.160 --> 01:33:02.160
The cost of rent for the most mean of Basin or room is...

761
01:33:02.160 --> 01:33:10.160
Yes, but I think it's a correct analysis, but it's superficial because it ignores why is it that the cost is so high.

762
01:33:10.160 --> 01:33:20.660
The governments are now planning to more fully uphold the zoning laws, which would kick people out of basements and raise shelter prices.

763
01:33:20.660 --> 01:33:25.660
They follow zoning laws, they follow the agricultural land reserve, all of these.

764
01:33:25.660 --> 01:33:31.160
So again, this is the point I'm making. On the one hand, the government is raising the cost of housing.

765
01:33:31.160 --> 01:33:37.160
And on the other hand, people are saying, well, you know, the cost of housing is so high, government needs to do more.

766
01:33:37.160 --> 01:33:42.160
Yes, your darn tootin' government needs to do more, not to give people more money for shelter costs,

767
01:33:42.160 --> 01:33:46.160
but to stop raising shelter costs in the first place.

768
01:33:46.160 --> 01:33:52.160
What kind of a sensible program is one that allows government to raise the price of housing

769
01:33:52.160 --> 01:33:56.160
and then to come to the rescue with money to help people with housing?

770
01:33:56.160 --> 01:34:01.160
Wouldn't it be more sensible if they stopped causing the problem in the first place?

771
01:34:01.160 --> 01:34:05.160
And is it sensible that they keep raising the amount of money that's given to people

772
01:34:05.160 --> 01:34:10.880
to people which has these very negative impacts on family formation and incentives.

773
01:34:10.880 --> 01:34:18.380
Now look, we all share the same goal of helping people who are needy, who are impoverished,

774
01:34:18.380 --> 01:34:20.380
who are poor.

775
01:34:20.380 --> 01:34:24.160
Is this the way to help them, to have a system where government first hurts them and then

776
01:34:24.160 --> 01:34:27.880
hurts them again by giving them money ostensibly to help them?

777
01:34:27.880 --> 01:34:28.880
No.

778
01:34:28.880 --> 01:34:40.880
A much more sensible, coherent system is to rely to a much greater degree on private health and then to get the government off the backs of the poor in the first place to stop grinding them down.

779
01:34:40.880 --> 01:34:48.880
Now you people are ignoring all the instances where the government grinds down the poor, keeps them down, gets on their back, impoverishes them.

780
01:34:48.880 --> 01:34:56.880
You're accepting this as given, that somehow it's part of the free market, it's market failure or whatever, that we should have this poverty.

781
01:34:56.880 --> 01:34:59.380
And then you're saying, well, only the government can help them.

782
01:34:59.380 --> 01:35:02.380
But government is the cause of the problem in the first place.

783
01:35:04.380 --> 01:35:06.880
You say these things with such certainty,

784
01:35:07.880 --> 01:35:12.380
so that you're really pretty intimidating in the way you present your argument.

785
01:35:12.380 --> 01:35:18.880
And I don't know of any evidence that coding laws regarding housing, for example,

786
01:35:18.880 --> 01:35:25.880
or the lack of controls that you propose with lower rents, it makes no common sense to me.

787
01:35:25.880 --> 01:35:32.880
Now, I don't have any data, and I can't speak to the certainty you do, but I find you a most intimidating person.

788
01:35:32.880 --> 01:35:33.880
Oh, I'm sorry.

789
01:35:33.880 --> 01:35:36.880
If you could write down the line, which you stand for, I oppose.

790
01:35:36.880 --> 01:35:41.880
I didn't mean to be intimidating. I suppose I was being enthusiastic.

791
01:35:41.880 --> 01:35:48.880
But intimidating, if I did that, I'm sorry.

792
01:35:48.880 --> 01:35:52.880
Let me just, can I answer this very briefly?

793
01:35:52.880 --> 01:35:59.760
Just on the common sense, supply and demand, I suppose that's economists' common sense.

794
01:35:59.760 --> 01:36:06.360
The more supply there is of something, the lower the price, the less supply of something, the higher the price.

795
01:36:06.360 --> 01:36:14.520
Well, what is the effect of the agricultural land reserve and zoning on the supply of land and availability of housing?

796
01:36:14.520 --> 01:36:17.520
Are ecological issues known?

797
01:36:17.520 --> 01:36:19.980
where you have buildings all over the place.

798
01:36:19.980 --> 01:36:20.820
Well, ecological...

799
01:36:20.820 --> 01:36:23.820
Building developer, they need a power

800
01:36:23.820 --> 01:36:25.320
that we shouldn't bow down to.

801
01:36:25.320 --> 01:36:26.940
Well, I don't think we should bow down

802
01:36:26.940 --> 01:36:27.940
to the building developer.

803
01:36:27.940 --> 01:36:29.540
I think we should bow down to the people

804
01:36:29.540 --> 01:36:31.660
that these two ladies were talking about

805
01:36:31.660 --> 01:36:35.220
who are suffering under the burden of high housing costs.

806
01:36:35.220 --> 01:36:39.220
Yes, if we had more housing scattered around...

807
01:36:39.220 --> 01:36:41.620
You see, now, you're getting off on a different question.

808
01:36:41.620 --> 01:36:44.460
You said that there's no common sense in my assertions.

809
01:36:44.460 --> 01:36:47.260
I'm just all intimidation.

810
01:36:47.260 --> 01:36:49.700
Well, my point is that there is common sense.

811
01:36:49.700 --> 01:36:52.460
There's a strong core of common sense,

812
01:36:52.460 --> 01:36:56.300
namely that any law that prohibits or repeals

813
01:36:56.300 --> 01:36:58.940
or reduces the amount of land or housing

814
01:36:58.940 --> 01:37:00.820
coming onto the market will raise the price.

815
01:37:00.820 --> 01:37:03.620
I give you examples of laws that do this.

816
01:37:03.620 --> 01:37:05.820
And then you say, well, how about ecological problems?

817
01:37:05.820 --> 01:37:09.500
Well, if you want to address ecological problems

818
01:37:09.500 --> 01:37:12.380
exhaustively carefully, we need a long time.

819
01:37:12.380 --> 01:37:14.980
And I'm being given signals here that I have no time.

820
01:37:14.980 --> 01:37:20.980
So how can I address the... I mean, I'll come back and I'll give you a half hour lecture on ecological problems sometimes,

821
01:37:20.980 --> 01:37:26.980
but I think it's unfair to say that there's no common sense, and then when I give you the common sense, you say, well, how about this?

822
01:37:26.980 --> 01:37:28.980
We haven't even discussed ecology.

823
01:37:28.980 --> 01:37:43.980
Okay. Is there anyone out there who's familiar with the news report this morning about Ontario's legislation to ensure 25% of the market goes to low-income, accessible housing?

824
01:37:43.980 --> 01:37:49.980
I can't speak, but I'd sure like to have a point for that.

825
01:37:49.980 --> 01:37:54.980
Is anyone familiar with that? It's very relevant to this discussion.

826
01:37:54.980 --> 01:37:57.980
Okay, Tim, you were next.

827
01:37:57.980 --> 01:38:02.980
My name is Tim Bethel. I'm with the staff training for the Ministry.

828
01:38:02.980 --> 01:38:06.980
My experience in the field is dealing with the NUSAR organization,

829
01:38:06.980 --> 01:38:11.980
which was set up as a poverty research movement and was funded publicly.

830
01:38:11.980 --> 01:38:35.980
I have a question to both of you. You both seem supportive of private agencies in terms of distributing such funds as may be available. My comment on that is that private agencies are essentially anti-credit.

831
01:38:35.980 --> 01:38:49.980
I have no control as a voter or a member of a society over what some of the private agencies do and some of the private agencies are philosophically, fundamentally opposed to what we do.

832
01:38:49.980 --> 01:38:59.980
Everybody's familiar with people coming in to a food bank and before they can get their bowl of soup they must call out on the news and pay somebody.

833
01:38:59.980 --> 01:39:22.980
The other comment in terms of budget agencies is that the power groups in another sense will control the budget agencies and set the goals, and that is essentially the leadership of the anti-democrats.

834
01:39:29.980 --> 01:39:40.980
Well, I wanted to deal with, if I can, with your comment and also, I guess, around the earlier discussion in terms of private agencies.

835
01:39:40.980 --> 01:39:46.980
I mean, I don't inherently, I guess, share your judgment on private agencies per se.

836
01:39:46.980 --> 01:39:54.980
I think I'm not sure I would necessarily agree with the position taken by Walter because I'm not sure exactly what his position would be.

837
01:39:54.980 --> 01:39:56.980
Well, I'm pretty sure what his position would be in that.

838
01:39:56.980 --> 01:40:06.980
My point being that, in fact, one cannot simply kind of say that government subsidies of private agencies is necessarily bad.

839
01:40:06.980 --> 01:40:13.980
One has to be careful in terms of what goals you're trying to achieve as to whether it's appropriate to have public administration,

840
01:40:13.980 --> 01:40:18.980
voluntary organizations or use of private agencies or whatever.

841
01:40:18.980 --> 01:40:20.980
Private agencies will always have their...

842
01:40:20.980 --> 01:40:23.980
Private being commercial, by the way, is what I mean by private. Pardon?

843
01:40:23.980 --> 01:40:39.980
See, private agencies will always have their own goals. For instance, the church is always, their primary goal is not to assist the poor, but to recruit, to recruit, and to enlighten, you know, the Pakistanis.

844
01:40:39.980 --> 01:40:41.980
Oh, I see, I see, I see.

845
01:40:41.980 --> 01:40:46.980
And just give us an example of an agency that's widespread throughout.

846
01:40:46.980 --> 01:40:52.980
Okay, you're using private as encompassing basically partisan groups and other things.

847
01:40:52.980 --> 01:40:56.980
Yeah, in that case, obviously one has to be somewhat careful.

848
01:40:56.980 --> 01:41:03.980
I think that if you're talking about government subsidies of a range of religious organizations

849
01:41:03.980 --> 01:41:11.980
whose ostensible purpose is to proselytize, but whose more informal purpose is to take care of children or whatever,

850
01:41:11.980 --> 01:41:15.980
I think that one has to scrutinize very closely government subsidies at that kind of thing.

851
01:41:15.980 --> 01:41:26.980
When I was talking about private agencies, I was talking more about the commercial agencies, the for-profit sector, and making a distinction between them and non-profit groups.

852
01:41:26.980 --> 01:41:38.980
But in that sense, anybody that's in the business of running a private agency is in the business of making a profit from a private agency.

853
01:41:38.980 --> 01:42:03.980
I personally don't see that in the sense that profit after all is some measure of efficiency. I think that you can't ignore the fact that profit is a way of trying to measure what the efficiency is of the service provided.

854
01:42:03.980 --> 01:42:09.980
People won't necessarily make a problem. Let's take child care, because I think one can be more precise if one uses an example.

855
01:42:09.980 --> 01:42:15.980
We know that in the United States, for example, there are large chains of child care.

856
01:42:15.980 --> 01:42:20.980
Most Canadians, including myself, wouldn't be terribly happy to see those chains up here.

857
01:42:20.980 --> 01:42:28.980
Nevertheless, I think that if one looks at our own child care system, there are various commercial agencies involved.

858
01:42:28.980 --> 01:42:48.980
The study that was done again by Michael Krasinski for the Parliamentary Committee on Child Care showed in fact that the change, which most people are concerned about, provided relatively average care for children. They were neither very good or very outstanding.

859
01:42:48.980 --> 01:43:01.980
The private organizations that varied all over the lot were the mum and pop shops, which varied from very good to very, very bad, in terms of standard, and they were measured against about 17 variables.

860
01:43:01.980 --> 01:43:08.980
The public agencies tended to be, again, hovered toward the middle, they tended to be good to very good, very few of them were very bad.

861
01:43:08.980 --> 01:43:15.980
So if one looks at it in terms of the range, one can't carte blanche say that because they were private they were necessarily bad, because that didn't show up.

862
01:43:15.980 --> 01:43:26.980
And the logic of it is true that if a firm is investing in something, the last thing it wants is to develop a bad reputation because people are not terribly likely to use it.

863
01:43:26.980 --> 01:43:35.980
And so those firms that kind of moved in have tended to move toward the average because the average is what government sets up as the standard that they must meet.

864
01:43:35.980 --> 01:43:39.980
So the debate oftentimes centers then around whether those standards should be raised.

865
01:43:39.980 --> 01:43:42.980
In other words, if what we're really concerned is about the standard of care that children get,

866
01:43:42.980 --> 01:43:47.980
then just simply for government to raise the standards and say that whoever provides that service must meet those standards.

867
01:43:47.980 --> 01:43:50.980
Now the reality, of course, is that those standards go up.

868
01:43:50.980 --> 01:43:54.980
The private sector declines because most of them can't usually make much money,

869
01:43:54.980 --> 01:43:58.980
if the standards are very high, given competitive wage rates and other sorts of things.

870
01:43:58.980 --> 01:44:02.980
So then the trade-off then is really about the quality of care you want

871
01:44:02.980 --> 01:44:04.980
and what kind of standards you want to set in the public sector

872
01:44:04.980 --> 01:44:08.980
and what role the private sector is likely to play vis-à-vis that.

873
01:44:08.980 --> 01:44:17.980
And generally, the more you provide a service that the private sector can't provide at a competitive rate, the less likely they will be to move into it.

874
01:44:17.980 --> 01:44:25.980
But I have no inherent opposition personally to the fact that they might be involved if they can meet whatever standards are considered publicly acceptable.

875
01:44:25.980 --> 01:44:31.980
I want to come back to the other issue, the one about proselytizing and so forth, I think is a different kind of issue.

876
01:44:31.980 --> 01:44:33.980
I don't think it's because they're private per se.

877
01:44:33.980 --> 01:44:35.980
The Theory of Money and Credit

878
01:45:03.980 --> 01:45:09.980
Could I also reply to this, and then we can go on?

879
01:45:09.980 --> 01:45:14.980
It's past 12, and I don't know how long your commitment is going on.

880
01:45:14.980 --> 01:45:17.980
As long as we don't get off the ground.

881
01:45:17.980 --> 01:45:20.980
I wanted to get on his point also.

882
01:45:20.980 --> 01:45:23.980
I interpreted it a little differently, maybe perversely,

883
01:45:23.980 --> 01:45:28.980
but I'm not so interested in government subsidies to private agencies.

884
01:45:28.980 --> 01:45:31.980
It's just an area that doesn't interest me that much.

885
01:45:31.980 --> 01:45:35.980
I don't think that there should be the government involved in the first place.

886
01:45:35.980 --> 01:45:43.980
So for me the question is a private agency that is voluntarily financed, say the Salvation Army or the Catholic Church.

887
01:45:43.980 --> 01:45:49.980
And as you quite rightly say, although maybe not in these words, that they have to pray first and eat later.

888
01:45:49.980 --> 01:45:59.980
And you say, well, they're not really concerned with the poor, they have their own agenda, which is to save souls or recruit or whatever it is.

889
01:45:59.980 --> 01:46:21.980
I would say two things about that. First, if you don't like that agenda, let's say you're an atheist, you could set up the atheist's welfare society or the atheist's aid society and give people food only after they don't pray, or whatever your agenda is.

890
01:46:21.980 --> 01:46:30.980
What is appropriate for disadvantaged groups and small groups to compete against the hollow princesses of the Catholic Church?

891
01:46:30.980 --> 01:46:37.980
Well, but the Catholic Church, at one time, did wield coercion during the Inquisition.

892
01:46:37.980 --> 01:46:45.980
But lately, my understanding of the Catholic Church is that every penny they get, they get from voluntary contributions.

893
01:46:45.980 --> 01:47:00.980
Any Catholic building, any building that's owned by the Catholic Church, any part of Catholic that they want to get rid of, is promptly and immediately locked by very little money. Just instantly.

894
01:47:15.980 --> 01:47:17.980
The Constitutional Statement, by the way. The Almanzari part.

895
01:47:45.980 --> 01:48:15.980
about it. As we asked General Donald Brown when we had him down to a Frasier Institute luncheon and we published this booklet on the basis of it, he doesn't see it quite that way. He doesn't see that the purposes of the Salvation Army are to save souls and not the other. He sees the two as inextricably intertwined. He sees the one as a means toward the other. He sees body and soul as two wings on a bird. You can't fly with one wing. You can't fly either without the one

896
01:48:15.980 --> 01:48:32.980
He sees the way to help the poor is through a religious way, and I think there is at least some evidence in support of that view, that when people adopt this religious attitude and forswear drugs or booze or whatever it is, they improve their lives.

897
01:48:32.980 --> 01:48:43.980
The third reaction I would offer to you is this sort of knee-jerk democracy, democracy uberalis. As far as I'm concerned, I'm very suspicious of democracy as an institution.

898
01:48:43.980 --> 01:48:50.780
of the Constitution. I mean, Hitler came to power in a democratic election. And I mean,

899
01:48:50.780 --> 01:48:56.020
what more can you say, except that democracy represents the modal view or the majority

900
01:48:56.020 --> 01:49:02.420
view if you have only two parties. And that can be good or bad. It need not necessarily

901
01:49:02.420 --> 01:49:07.520
be good. And therefore, if it's non-democratic, it need not necessarily be bad. Now, what's

902
01:49:07.520 --> 01:49:23.520
Tom Hayden has got this thing, the League for Industrial Democracy or something, and his argument sounds very similar to yours, that the problem with private property is that it's undemocratic.

903
01:49:23.520 --> 01:49:30.520
We don't all vote on what General Motors does, only the stockholders do, and that's unfair since we ought to vote on everything.

904
01:49:30.520 --> 01:49:35.520
And I think that that is a philosophy that is very much in variance with my own.

905
01:49:35.520 --> 01:49:38.520
I think it's a denigration of private property.

906
01:49:38.520 --> 01:49:42.520
And the ultimate extreme of that is that we don't even own ourselves,

907
01:49:42.520 --> 01:49:46.520
because there is no difference in principle between cars and people.

908
01:49:46.520 --> 01:49:52.520
If we all have to vote, if we want to take democracy to what I would consider ludicrous extremes,

909
01:49:52.520 --> 01:49:58.520
you might say, well, I shouldn't have the right to hold this pen unless we've had a vote for this.

910
01:49:58.520 --> 01:50:03.520
We all own each other, you know, we're all each other's brother's keepers or something,

911
01:50:03.520 --> 01:50:07.520
There are five billion of us, we each get one five billion to vote on everything.

912
01:50:07.520 --> 01:50:15.520
Well, that's one philosophical view and I say that people that subscribe to that and act on it will not long prosper.

913
01:50:15.520 --> 01:50:22.520
I would put forth a different model of individual initiative and private responsibility and private rights

914
01:50:22.520 --> 01:50:27.520
where we only vote on certain things. I'm for a limited democracy, not just an open-ended democracy

915
01:50:27.520 --> 01:50:32.520
where we vote on whether a Jew shall live or not or left-handed redheads shall do this or not.

916
01:50:32.520 --> 01:50:44.520
Let me make this one a general comment, a little less passionate when I talk to people about it.

917
01:50:44.520 --> 01:50:54.520
It has to do with how research arises. It arises out of theory, but the same open questions and any answers are acceptable.

918
01:50:54.520 --> 01:51:01.520
The kinds of documentation that Mr. Block gives for his ideological perspectives

919
01:51:01.520 --> 01:51:11.520
throws out an ideology where the answers are they all before the inquiry is done.

920
01:51:11.520 --> 01:51:21.520
I know the names of some of the people he has cited, and I don't see this as a way to find answers to questions about which one really is curious.

921
01:51:21.520 --> 01:51:26.520
And I think this is one of the dangers the ideological perspective presents.

922
01:51:26.520 --> 01:51:53.520
I just wanted to very briefly respond and say that this sounds to me like an ad hominem, and I don't think it is worthy of...

923
01:51:53.520 --> 01:51:59.520
I don't think that it is worthy of inclusion in a scholarly discussion.

924
01:51:59.520 --> 01:52:08.520
I just think it comes down to your basic belief of whether you feel that we're going to end up with a system that's going to be free,

925
01:52:08.520 --> 01:52:14.520
but it's going to be run on a profit basis, and feel that society is basically out for themselves,

926
01:52:14.520 --> 01:52:18.520
or whether you feel that private charities are going to spring up because you feel that society is altruistic.

927
01:52:18.520 --> 01:52:26.520
and the way our society and our culture is set up, that altruism is not an accepted way of dealing with things within our culture,

928
01:52:26.520 --> 01:52:37.520
that it stigmatizes and you get labeled as being without, not being productive, and without some means of getting altruism to work,

929
01:52:37.520 --> 01:52:43.520
that you get people to put their time and effort into things that already exist, that they're not going to be people,

930
01:52:43.520 --> 01:53:13.320
Okay, we're going to cut, and I have one final question. My question. From your separate,

931
01:53:13.320 --> 01:53:24.320
Ideological perspectives. What do you have to say to the 11 students here who are pursuing a career as a professional social worker?

932
01:53:24.320 --> 01:53:35.320
What is their role? What should they be doing? What's the guiding principle for their professional, their role in society?

933
01:53:35.320 --> 01:53:41.320
When you finish that, of course, you may answer, and then we're done.

934
01:53:41.320 --> 01:53:45.320
Go ahead.

935
01:53:45.320 --> 01:53:50.320
I'm just trying to be clear about what the question is. The question is, what are the guiding principles for social workers?

936
01:53:50.320 --> 01:53:52.320
If they go forth in society?

937
01:53:52.320 --> 01:53:56.320
Out of your ideology, what is the role of the professional social worker in society?

938
01:53:56.320 --> 01:53:58.320
Oh, I see.

939
01:53:58.320 --> 01:54:01.320
Well, it seems to be two issues there.

940
01:54:01.320 --> 01:54:07.920
Historically, social work has responded in part because with the development of market-oriented societies,

941
01:54:07.920 --> 01:54:12.920
a lot of the kind of supports, historically and so on, family and church and so forth,

942
01:54:12.920 --> 01:54:16.520
have become more formalized through institutional structures.

943
01:54:16.520 --> 01:54:20.120
And therefore, social workers, like people in medicine or law in some sense,

944
01:54:20.120 --> 01:54:23.720
have evolved to serve those institutional structures.

945
01:54:23.720 --> 01:54:26.520
The debate seems to me not about social work per se,

946
01:54:26.520 --> 01:54:30.120
but the legitimacy of those institutional structures.

947
01:54:30.120 --> 01:54:41.120
And if one accepts that legitimacy, which I do, then social workers play a very pivotal and important role in the quality, then, of the social work and the quality of the social worker becomes very key to the quality of the service.

948
01:54:41.120 --> 01:54:45.120
I see that, for example, in the research, for example, in child care.

949
01:54:45.120 --> 01:54:52.120
When one looks at the research in child care in the United States, it tends to show that child care isn't necessarily worse than family care.

950
01:54:52.120 --> 01:54:55.120
That's because child care in the United States on the whole is pretty lousy.

951
01:54:55.120 --> 01:55:10.120
The research tends to show in some respects that children actually do better outside the family, which is kind of contradictory to what perhaps people would like to see than they do in the family.

952
01:55:10.120 --> 01:55:18.120
The only point I'm trying to make there is that they have, because they've attached importance to these institutions, they've attached importance to the people who service those institutions.

953
01:55:18.120 --> 01:55:26.120
So I would see, as a guiding principle, quality of care, quality of education, quality of inquiry as being very important for social workers.

954
01:55:26.120 --> 01:55:37.120
I think in terms of the ideological stuff, I would only, I think, come back to Henry's comment that one has to read and provide as much, not only an informed point of view on these kinds of issues,

955
01:55:37.120 --> 01:55:44.120
but much more importantly, frankly, empirically based substantive research focus to these kinds of things.

956
01:55:44.120 --> 01:55:53.120
I would answer a little differently. I would say that the role of the social worker is to help poor people or disadvantaged people.

957
01:55:53.120 --> 01:56:02.120
And in that sense, I guess I would like to be included as a social worker because my analysis is aimed, at least in part, at helping poor people.

958
01:56:02.120 --> 01:56:10.120
Maybe helping poor or disadvantaged people in a different way, but still I think the similarity is more important than the difference.

959
01:56:10.120 --> 01:56:16.120
By analyzing economically what causes the poverty, I think I am making a contribution.

960
01:56:16.120 --> 01:56:24.120
And I would say that the people in social work, or people of all people of good will,

961
01:56:24.120 --> 01:56:29.120
who want to help poor and disadvantaged people, should do it.

962
01:56:29.120 --> 01:56:32.120
And they should do it in a sophisticated way.

963
01:56:32.120 --> 01:56:36.120
They should realize that just throwing money at them

964
01:56:36.120 --> 01:56:39.120
need not necessarily be the best way to help them.

965
01:56:41.120 --> 01:56:44.120
And I guess that would be my message.

966
01:56:44.120 --> 01:56:46.120
Thank you all very much.