An article about the history of welfare for single mothers caught my eye, all mildly interesting, which links through to the BBC's summary of The Poor Law 1601:
- The money was raised by taxes on middle and upper class people, causing resentment. They complained that money went to people who were lazy and did not want to work. (1)
- Critics also suggested that allowance systems made the situation worse because they encouraged poor people to have children that they could not afford to look after. (2)
- Another criticism of the old Poor Law was that it kept workers' wages low because employers knew that wages would be supplemented by money provided by the Poor Law. (3)
1) The tax was not on middle and upper classes per se, it was on the rental value of land, as anybody who has taken the time to look this up on Wiki knows:
The [1601] Act was criticised in later years for its distortion of the labour market, through the power given to parishes to let them remove 'undeserving' poor. Another criticism of the Act was that it applied to rated land not personal or movable wealth, therefore benefiting commercial and business interests.
Further, a tax on the rental value of land is a tax on people who are lazy and don't want to work, so I don't see the problem. You can see the Faux Lib's at work even then, trying to pretend that the rental value of land is 'just another asset' like personal or moveable wealth; if all this benefits commercial and business interests, I see that A Very Good Thing.
The BBC's next page then explains who was behind stirring up opposition to the tax on rental values:
Landowners, including Sir Robert Peel and the Duke of Wellington, supported the Act [of 1834 which restricted the tax and welfare payments].
2) Maybe it did, maybe it didn't, but the rule was that the authorities could go after the father and try and get the money back off him.
3) You can argue that welfare subsidises wages and so pushes them down; you can argue that welfare disincentivises work and thus pushes them up. The chances are, it makes no net difference and so the point is irrelevant.
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5 comments:
You can argue against your point (3) on the basis that all subsidies distort, but you may not know how they distort.
L, my point it is, the effects probably net off to nothing; but alleviating poverty is a net gain.
"Another criticism of the old Poor Law was that it kept workers' wages low because employers knew that wages would be supplemented by money provided by the Poor Law"
I think they are talking here about the Speenhamland System (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speenhamland_system), where local wages were topped up out of the poor rate. This had the not-too-surprising effect of allowing the farmers to pay less than subsistence wages. The Speenhamland System was an idea so bad that it has kept cropping up in one form or another ever since.
B, possibly. But the idea of taxing farmers to subsidise the self same farmers seem doubly daft, regardless of what you're trying to achieve.
M, yes, that is another aspect of its badness I hadn't thought of.
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