Handouts

Welcome friends!

Can we talk about handouts?  I was reading some online comments the other day to just remind myself how conservatives talk about economic issues and one recurring theme or perhaps more accurately meme involved the idea of opposing “handouts” as for example in the phrase “the reason I consider myself a conservative is that I don’t like handouts.”  Seems reasonable.  Who likes handouts?  Maybe I should be a conservative.  However, it then occurred to me that like much of conservative ideology the proposition as stated is empty rhetoric with all the substance existing only in the unstated details.  It’s rather like people who defend their ethical beliefs on the grounds they believe in supporting “goodness” misleadingly implying those who disagree with them must support “badness” and leaving it up to critical readers to take the logical and necessary next step of asking what exactly they mean by goodness.  Because of course real ethical debates are never or seldom about supporting or not supporting goodness in the abstract are they?  They’re about differences in how one defines what is good, what behaviors one considers good.  That’s what creates the problems.  Seems similar to what we have with this concept of a handout.  One isn’t really saying anything at all when one proclaims one’s opposition to handouts unless one takes the next step and explains what one has in mind and why one opposes them.  Absent that it’s really just an empty gesture, a bold stand against all the straw men supporting handouts.

So let’s get a bit into the details of what we might be talking about when we talk about handouts shall we?  For me the word “handout” has a pejorative ring to it that suggests something that is not ethically justified.  As such, I would suggest it’s impossible to separate the concept of a “handout” from one’s thoughts on distributional issues.  That is to say, I think the most reasonable interpretation of a handout is a distributional result that one feels does not have proper ethical justification.  As such I would suggest a generally market-based system of the sort we have here in the USA is rife with handouts.  Assuming one believes the distribution of economic power should have something to do with the behavior of the individuals in question the biggest handout of all would have to be our traditional system of inheritance.  By setting up a legal system in which one’s economic power depends on parentage rather than personal merit we’re basically setting up a system based on handouts to arguably undeserving people.  Another common sort of handout would be the sort of nepotism one sees in family owned companies in which owners install their offspring in management positions no matter their relative merit.  Again, it certainly appears to be a system of handouts allocating economic power in a way that has no convincing justification in terms of individual merit.  Another sort of handout would be tax codes that favor the wealthy both indirectly by giving them a tax bill smaller in terms of practical hardship or disutility than the tax bill for the less well off and also directly by allowing them various deductions and write-offs that can reduce their tax bill to zero as was apparently and famously the case for our resident billionaire president Mr. Trump.  More expansively I have to wonder if distributional results based on anything beyond individual effort are entirely justified on an ethical basis and hence a form of handout.  Let’s take inborn talents or abilities like intelligence.  Although they presumably allow one to contribute more per unit of effort one needn’t do anything particularly noteworthy or laudable to receive such gifts of nature so why exactly should they be rewarded by our distributional system?  Perhaps even the returns on inborn talents and abilities are in the nature of a handout when considered in terms of individual merit as opposed to contribution to society?  So, yes, like many online conservatives I suppose I also consider myself to oppose handouts, which is simply to say I think our distributional system should have some ethical justification although the exact principles may be open to discussion.  But in my case my opposition to handouts leads me to reject rather than endorse conservatism.  Odd isn’t it?

Now of course one suspects although one can never be certain many conservatives would disagree with my examples of handouts.  Presumably they believe those distributional mechanisms and results are entirely justified in ethical terms.  What they tend to have in mind is an entirely different category of distributional policies typically departing from either our existing distributional arrangements or some favored subset of those mechanisms typically what they consider market arrangements.  So for example if we as a society vote to provide a poor person with publicly funded medical care then many conservatives likely believe that person has received a handout of exactly the sort they oppose.  Although I can see some reasonable ethical debate might be involved I would suggest health care may be something we might consider a public good and available to all so in this example I would oppose classifying such results as handouts and see them instead as perfectly justified distributional policy.

I’ve tried to think a bit about other definitions of the word “handout” that don’t involve the thorny ethical component.  The only real alternative I was able to come up with is that despite the pejorative ring one may interpret the word “handout” to refer to anything that alters what would otherwise happen under whatever distributional arrangements we have in place.  For example let’s say we set up a system whereby all profits from more efficient production go to CEOs and stockholders, but some workers organize and demand and receive a share.  I suppose in that case one might say workers managed to get a “handout” not in the sense they did something devoid of possible ethical justification but simply that they ended up with more than they would normally have gotten under existing distributional arrangements.  In that case, opposing “handouts” would translate to opposing any alteration of the existing distributional patterns no matter how ethically justified or unjustified those arrangements may be.  That’s fine.  In that case what I just described as handouts from my perspective would not be handouts and the non-handouts I hypothesized might be considered handouts from a conservative prospective would be handouts.  So it solves that problem.  But of course in that case the sentiment that one “opposes handouts” seems oddly amoral.  One is saying one supports the results of current distributional arrangement regardless of whether they’re ethically justified or not.  Seems a bit odd.  Indeed, it’s hard for me to interpret such a statement without inferring some implication that supporting whatever distributional arrangement one happens to have has its own ethical significance in the sense that regardless of whether it’s good or bad or ethical or not it’s what we have and the most important overriding ethical principle is to not alter whatever we have.  But honestly I can’t imagine anyone taking such an ethical principle seriously.

So let’s summarize.  Everyone with ethical beliefs relating to distributions, so let’s just say everyone, will naturally dislike handouts defined as distributional changes having no ethical justification, so expressing one’s disdain for handouts is essentially expressing nothing at all.  The real difference between liberals and conservatives does not involve how they feel about handouts in the abstract but what they feel constitute handouts, and getting to that issue involves discussing distributional issues.  In other words, what we have with the conservative complaint against handouts is basically yet another instance of conservatives wanting to argue in favor of their distributional beliefs without doing the hard work of actually presenting relevant arguments.  As such it’s rather similar to the standard misinterpretation of economic theory I’m always banging on about by which economic theory is made to appear to address or even resolve distributional issues it never really could.  Indeed, it’s hard to avoid the feeling one of the founding ideas behind conservative ideology is to always avoid discussing distributional issues plainly and honestly.  That to me is reason enough to fight against conservative ideology.  We can discuss any distributional issues we like but let’s hold the line against any dishonest and manipulative ideology that tries to argue about distributional issues in indirect and misleading ways rather than honestly and honorably after the fashion of liberals and leftists.