Work Requirements

 The GOP is currently tying itself into knots over the new "work requirements" for Medicaid that it is trying to include in its budget deal. Now—in a morally sane party—this debate would be over whether or not to add such "work requirements" at all. But in today's Republican Party, the argument is instead over how soon they should kick in. 

The original draft of the bill starts the clock on the work requirements in 2029 (conveniently timed—from Mr. Trump's perspective; if not for the rest of his party—for right after he leaves office). But now, "hard-line" conservatives in the party are holding up passage of the bill because they want these requirements to kick in immediately. 

As my previous post indicated, I've been reading Thomas Carlyle's 1839 study of the "Condition of England question", Chartism. And his discussion of the "New Poor Law" at the time proves to be rather timely. The commissioners who developed the new rules for public charity—after all—were also focused on adding new "work requirements" of a kind. 

Specially, the New Poor Law of the age was characterized by the end of "outdoor relief," and its replacement by new "indoor relief." Which may sound innocuous enough. But it was really a euphemism for the centuries. What the "indoor relief" referred to was a system of bleak "workhouses." Poor Law "Bastilles"—as Carlyle calls them; i.e., prisons for the poor. 

Now, Carlyle did not disagree in principle with the idea that people should be expected to work, if they are able-bodied. Indeed, of all the Victorian writers, few rhapsodized as profoundly as Carlyle on the virtues of toil. "It is, after all, the one unhappiness of a man, That he cannot work;" as Carlyle put it in Past and Present (a most Victorian attitude). 

Carlyle's point—repeated time and again in his works—was that "happiness" will leave us one way or another in the grave. The only thing that could outlast our poor lives, then, is the work we leave behind. For the Victorians—standing on the brink of skepticism, where the "sea of faith" had receded, as Arnold put it—this was the only kind of immortality in which they could still believe. 

Hence, we find this emphasis on effort and delayed gratification throughout the Victorian age. Another great Victorian, Rossetti, put it profoundly: "Yet woe to thee if once thou yield / Unto the act of doing nought!" The Victorians, in other words, could conceive of no greater sin than deliberate idleness. And the New Poor Law was of a piece with this mentality. 

But Carlyle—though he shared (if not exceeded) his contemporaries' adoration of work—was also able to perceive a few of the ironies of the New Poor Law. He suggests, with delicate sarcasm, that it is perhaps noteworthy that the legislation begins by abolishing idleness among the poor, but does not pursue it among the more notoriously idle classes (such as the boastfully idle aristocracy). 

Most relevant to our contemporary purposes, however—he also asks whether the poor who are to be punished and imprisoned for their idleness under the new law were ever given the opportunity to work in the first place. Were there any jobs to be had, if they went seeking for them? "Work requirements" are fine, he suggests; so long as there is work when one asks for it. 

"Can the poor man that is willing to work, always find work, and live by his work?" asks Carlyle. "Legislation presupposes the answer—to be in the affirmative. A large postulate, which should have been made a proposition of; which should have been demonstrated, made indubitable to all persons! [...] Nay, what will a wise Legislature say, if it turn out he cannot find it?"

This is quite the situation we find ourselves in today. Even if one were to agree in principle with the idea of "requiring work"—what guarantee is there that the people who seek it in good faith will find it? The same party, after all, that seeks to impose new "work requirements" on Medicaid—is, as we speak, also proposing a tariff schedule that will put millions of Americans out of work. 

The situation is quite analogous indeed to the Victorian age—when "Corn Law" tariffs raised the cost of bread for the poor, in order to maintain the landed aristocracy in idleness; when the poor—put out of work and livelihood by these tariffs, were then punished and imprisoned in workhouse "Bastilles" for their inability to provide for themselves. 

This is the true irony of our political moment: Not only that the Republicans insist that all Americans must "work" in order to receive Medicaid—but that they do not even bother to ask—can they obtain work if they seek it in good faith? Have we any obligation to help them obtain it? Questions which—as Carlyle put it—ought to "have been demonstrated," rather than assumed. 

Toward the close of his short book, Carlyle turns his attention to a satirical "Modest Proposal" that had been circulating in Chartist circles as a means of criticizing the Benthamites. If the new poor law commissioners were so set on locking up the poor—the proposal went—why not go one better, and simply make away with them entirely? Would mass-murder not be more cost-effective? 

"[I]n some central locality," writes Carlyle, "instead of a Parish Clergyman, there might be established some Parish Exterminator; or say a Reservoir of Arsenic, kept up at the public expense, free to all parishioners; for which Church the rates probably would not be grudged." (Carlyle is humane enough to feel the need to add: "Ah, it is bitter jesting on such a subject.")

The point that this updated "modest proposal" was making, "bitter" or not, is that there is not such a great moral difference as may at first appear between killing to poor overtly and starving them to death through the withholding of life-giving aid. To kill a man by poisoning him or through depriving him of food may not be so many worlds apart after all. 

So too, today, our Medicaid "reformers" may not be proposing an "Arsenic Reservoir" to rid the world of idle beneficiaries. But they are proposing to deprive health insurance to millions of Americans if they cannot find work in an economy that they themselves are willfully driving into recession. And is depriving them of life-saving medical care in this way so different from killing them outright? 

Of course, the Medicaid cutters may repeat in their defense some version of the commandment (as Arthur Hugh Clough once sardonically put it): "Thou shalt not kill; but needst not strive/ Officiously to keep alive." Clough, however, was satirizing the indifference and moral apathy of the Victorian bourgeoisie that this dictum encapsulates—not endorsing it. 

Clough, like Carlyle, was using a satirical "modest proposal" to suggest that perhaps society really does have a moral obligation—not only to refrain from exterminating the poor—but also to actually help them live. And—one can add—this obligation becomes all the stronger when it is the policy choices of the rich that have made them poor and unemployed in the first place.