Depravity as "welfare reform"

Cross-posted from The Daily Slander

As someone who generally supports "mutual obligation", I don't see any problem with insisting that people who receive welfare should actively seek work, or at least assist with community projects. Nor should it be particularly controversial that those who are offered work, particularly the long-term unemployed, should face some form of sanction if they turn down an offer.

Yet, via Troppo Armadillo, we see this principle being taken to the nth degree in oh-so-civilised Old Europe:

A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing "sexual services" at
a brothel in Berlin faces cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced
this year.

Prostitution was legalised in Germany two years ago and brothel owners
- who must pay tax and employee health insurance - were granted access to
official databases of job seekers.

The waitress, an unemployed information technology professional, was
willing to work in a bar at night and had worked in a cafe. She received a
letter from the job centre telling her that an employer was interested in her
"profile" and that she should ring them. Only on doing so did she realise she
was calling a brothel.


The usual rationale for insisting that people enter work, as opposed to welfare, is that paid work gives people a sense of moral worth and collective responsibility. Ironically, by insisting that people take control of their own affairs, they will necessarily become more interdependent with their fellow citizens, providing services in the marketplace that people demand, strengthening collective relationships in the process.

In fact, welfare encourages less collectivism and more individualism, as it de-emphasises relationships between citizens and communities, and emphasises individual citizen-state transactions. A guaranteed income therefore moves people away from their fellow citizens. It necessarily follows that welfare has the potential to undermine personal morality, implying that governments should encourage welfare-recipients to actively seek employment and participate in community work.

What Germany has done is to force young women into a grossly immoral serfdom far worse than any long-term dependancy on the state. Cutting benefits to young women who do not wish to become prostitutes would have to be one of the most abominable social policies I have ever heard of; one that should be condemned in the strongest possible terms.

This stands the entire theory of welfare reform on its head, and demonstrates that liberalism has an occasional (some would argue frequent) tendency to devour itself entirely by applying ideology to a level that no community could long survive.

It remains to be seen whether Germany will legalise heroin and cut benefits to any school-leaver who refuses "work" as a drug pusher, but if they wish to lower themselves to these unprecedented barbarities they might as well go the whole hog.

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