In Praise of Pain; R. Bidinotto

Babies won't starve, because welfare pro grams aren't going to end: they're only going to be dumped by Washington in "block Mr. Bidinotto, a Staff Writerfor Reader'sDigest, is a longtime contributor to The Freemanand lecturer at FEE seminars. Criminal Justice? The Legal System Versus IndividualResponsibility,edited by Mr. Bidi notto and published by FEE, is available at $29.95 in cloth and $19.95 in paperback. by Robert James Bidinotto grants" onto state governments. School lunch subsidies are actually scheduled to rise, and likewise be sent to governors to administer. Ditto, spending on the elderly: all that will decline is the rate ofincrease in projected spending. As for public broadcast ing, the only portion of its budget targeted for trimming is the meager 14 percent sup plied by federal taxpayers. Clearly, Barney is in no danger of extinction. You'd never know this judging by the cries of impending doom echoing across the land. Yet despite the claims of the Compas sion Lobby, few redistributionist programs are on any politician's chopping block; even fewer will be gone when the political dust settles. As I anticipated in my January column, most of the modest reforms passed by the House are being bottled up in the Senate.

The block-grant approach symbolizes the weakness of the proposed reforms. Instead of ending programs that plunder Peter to pay Paul, Congress is proposing only that Paul receive the loot from his governor, rather than his congressman. The apparent' 'prin ciple" here is that robbery is more efficient if done at the local level. As revolutions go, this one is boringly bloodless. In fact, many self-styled revolu tionaries are trying to keep it absolutely painless-when a little pain is exactly what recipients of the unearned need to experi ence right now. Yes, you read that correctly. 311 312 THE FREEMAN • MAY 1995 Don't get me wrong. I'm not endorsing the Stoic view that pain builds character. Nor am I a Social Darwinist arguing for "survival of the fittest." Pain and suffer ing are not ends in themselves, nor is the collectivist goal of social purification a valid rationale for allowing harm to befall the weak.

But pain and suffering do have a vital purpose. They are invaluable signals to us, warnings that something is amiss-that we need to change course. Mistakes and irresponsible behavior un avoidably lead to destructive consequences. Yet if we could not feel their impact, we'd have no reason to alter harmful behavior. The experience ofpain warns us we're doing something injurious. Pain is nature's invalu able teacher; without it, we could not sur vive, because we'd never be deterred from self-destructive paths. A child learns not to put his hand on the stove, because it hurt the first time he did it. Capitalism is a profit and loss system, one that rewards those who successfully pro duce valued goods and services, while pun ishing those who fail to do so. If profits were guaranteed and automatic, and losses im possible, there would be no motive for anyone to produce the things we need.

Poverty and want soon would be everyone's fate. That's· precisely the impact of welfare statism. By trying to eliminate all suffering, it obliterates all incentives and motives to act wisely. It buffers people from the inju rious consequences of error and irresponsi bility, depriving them of the painful but vital lessons of life. It thus allows people to believe they can continue down destructive paths with impunity. But even if they are buffered from pain, the destruction they have caused doesn't disappear: it's merely transferred onto oth ers. To spare some people painful lessons, the welfare state forces innocent and re sponsible taxpayers to bear the pain and suffering instead. To protect an unwed teenage mother from experiencing any discomfort from her folly, her married, working neighbors must de prive their own children to support hers. To protect American bankers from stupid in vestments, American workers must raid their own savings and cover the losses. To protect "family farmers" from the reality of supply and demand, urban American familiesmust squeeze their own budgets and fund subsidies and supports.

Again, the welfare state doesn't eliminate pain and suffering: it merely transfers them from one person to another. It's a measure of modern corruption that this sordid policy is defended as embodying "compassion." But it's a curiously selective compassion: compassion only for the deserved suffer ing of the irresponsible and foolish, and simultaneous indifference toward the un deserved suffering of the responsible and wise. In truth, the Compassion Lobby's claim to moral concern is fraudulent. There's nothing compassionate in transferring pain and sufferingfrom those who caused it onto those who didn't. It is cruel injustice. Yet that's the operative moral premise of the welfare state. Because people make mistakes, pain is always unavoidable. The question is, who should bear it: those who cause it, or those who didn't? Likewise, the idea of a painless revolution is an oxymoron. Change is al ways painful; but keeping our present wel fare state is also causing pain. Whose pain should be our concern?

For too long, in order to spare some the hardships of self-responsibility, we have been willing to' batter and burden millions of decent, hardworking citizens. They are the real victims today, and their unjustified suffering must end. To salvage the moral initiative we must have the courage to look the Compassion Lobby directly in the eye, and refuse to blink. Rejecting their phony compassion, we must state bluntly: "It's high time you did feel some pain. Better you than those self-responsible peo ple who have been too long compelled to support you·in your irresponsibility." D TREmEEMAN IDEASON LIBERTY Bilingualby Choice by James M. McCaffery I n the summer of 1992, I was a guest lecturer in comparative law at a large private law school in Latin America. One morning before class, I read in a local newspaper that the newly appointed minis ter of education had decreed that Indian children (defined as children who spoke an Indian language at home), who had previ ously received all their public education in Spanish, would now be instructed in Indian languages through the sixth grade in order to preserve Indian culture and ease their transition to Spanish. Ominously, the article mentioned that bilingual and multicultural experts from the United States had been consulted in this matter; there was no men tion if anybody had asked the Indians for their opinion. I decided to do so myself.