Chapter 22

 Creating  and demonstrating a charity-based welfare system

for the world

Almost by definition, it is nearly impossible to set up a theoretical system to tell a group of people possessing religious, economic, and political freedom how they should define and set up a system to offer social insurance to their religious or other cohesive group. The very definition of freedom mostly precludes that. However, there should still be some basic items of general information and some basic principles and parameters which should be applicable and operating in almost every situation

Top-down

There should be some definable and quantifiable features of a particular nation or world society which helps describe what is going on currently, and what any glaring deficiencies might be. That original analysis will then let someone offer a suggestion as to where everything should be moving to make improvements. The ideological statists of the world have essentially taken over the entire globe, so that it is difficult to even find examples of how things might be done a different way. Perhaps some obscure tribes have a different system, but we don't know about it, and it may have its own objectionable aspects. There are numerous successful historical examples, but, naturally, everyone's memory is extremely short, so that no matter how appropriate or successful some system might have been in the past, it has been blown away by progressive/socialist ideology and activism until it has now mostly disappeared down the "memory hole."

It should be useful just to begin with where and how the nations of the world spend the resources they have as relates to classically charitable or welfare functions. Those functions which were previously taken care of privately or by religious organizations have now been aggressively taken over by the new atheist religion as a part of the progressive/socialist war against religion. That also furthers the progressive/socialist/communist goal of getting rid of all competing functions and loyalties so that one can gradually create an absolute dictatorship.

I will begin by using US data from 2019. "In FY 2019, total US government spending, federal, state, and local, is "guesstimated" to be 35.8% GDP."

That figure of 35.8% of the nation's GDP being spent by governments at some level is a staggering amount and surely could be improved upon. We read in the Book of Mormon that people felt extremely repressed when they had to pay 10% or 20% of their income to their conquerors and enslavers. Under the Israelite kings the tax burden probably reached about 50%. In all of these cases, the people felt extremely persecuted. On this scale, we see that we are not so bad off as some have been, but we still have allowed ourselves to become greatly persecuted and our personal freedom greatly restricted. In our technological age there may actually be some justification for centralizing a higher level of technical functions such as communication systems, road building, justice systems, and armies, but beyond that, there is really "nothing new under the sun."

We start out with a 2019 US Gross Domestic Product of $21.5 trillion. That is the largest national GDP on the globe, and it sounds very good by itself. However, we have to notice that we also have a total government debt, including all levels, of about $25.8 trillion, noticeably larger than our GDP, and growing by at least $1.09 trillion a year just at the federal level, indicating that whatever we are doing is seriously out of balance, with no obvious way to correct that imbalance.

It should be useful to get an idea of which levels of government spend how much money, as shown in the next table.

Fiscal Year	Federal Spending	State Spending	Local Spending	Total Spending
2019	$4.53 trillion	$1.89 trillion	$1.95 trillion	$7.63 trillion

The next table shows the expenditures by category for all government types. For our purposes here, we want to separate the classically charitable or welfare functions which have been handled by religious organizations in the past, from the strictly nondenominational secular governmental operations which were the real purpose for forming these governments in the first place. Governments at various levels, especially at the federal level, have been aggressively using tax-and-spend principles to take over the functions which were traditionally allocated to religious organizations. Of course, this is the atheist religion using force to restrict the scope of the Christian religions, so it is still a "religious" function at the state level, it is just that that religion is statism/humanism/atheism instead of Christianity. Obviously, the rules applied and the goals sought are immensely different under the two systems of ideology or religion.

I calculate the classical charitable/welfare functions which have been taken over by secular/atheist governments as representing 22% of GDP under current arrangements. These functions include the government takeover of portions of pensions, healthcare, and education, and some separate and smaller categories of "government welfare" that cover different government programs than are used for the major three of pensions, healthcare, and education.

2019 US GDP $21.5 trillion	New
All gov now uses 35.8% of GDP	Category
		%	$
Pensions	Religious	7	1.51
Health Care	Religious	8	1.72
Education	Religious	5	1.08
Defense	Gov't	4	0.86
Welfare	Religious	2	0.43
Interest	Gov't	3	0.65
Other	Gov't	7	1.51
		36	7.74
Keep in government accounts			2.58
Move outside government			*5.16
				use to get same result	use for extra projects
Religious aspects of gov. now	Religious	22	*4.73	1.58	3.15
	*Some of these costs just disappear, as with ending the interest on the national debt which now becomes nonexistent because it has been mostly based on having to borrow extra money to deliver all the many entitlements unwisely promised. That drops costs at least from $5.16T to $4.73T.

Based on the typical waste, fraud, and abuse patterns that go on in all government programs, I'm going to say that a properly administered charity-based social insurance system could operate for one third of that 22% which is now being spent at the various levels of government. The big categories of pensions, healthcare, education, and the smaller and strangely separately-named "government welfare" (since all the categories are government welfare) represent 22% out of the 35.8%. All of those categories could be moved into the much more efficient sphere of a charity-based social insurance system. That would move $4.73 trillion out of the government tax-and-spend system into the charity-based system. I believe that the same important services could be done for one third of that cost, or $1.57 trillion, and the rest of the money, $3.15 trillion, could simply be returned to the working populace as extra income to improve their lives, or that extra money could be spent to go far beyond the current levels of charitable services and social insurance to improve things. That would especially be useful in the area of education, so that the information and behavior of the populace could be much more wise and more Christian.

To mention some of the gross inefficiencies and other waste, fraud, and abuse, we have to realize that in order to operate these government money transfer systems, we have to have a huge and expensive bureaucracy which determines the taxation level and then collects the taxes. Then there is the group of people, another huge and expensive bureaucracy, who actually distribute that collected tax money. If this were all done voluntarily and spontaneously, then these current bureaucracies could be cut to just a few percent of the size of current government tax-and-spend systems.

And finally, we have a clientele who cling to "entitlements" and lobby for increases, whether they are needed or not. Each of these organizations has their own "labor union" or pressure group, which adds to the inefficiency and endless pressure to increase taxes and increase payouts, regardless of actual need. Very often, those who get the most money are the least worthy of it and will use it the least efficiently. All of these problems can be resolved using a proper charity-based system, where honesty and wisdom prevail, and it is easy to imagine the whole system being at least three times as efficient and effective as current systems. There may even be cases where a charity-based system could be five times as effective as current systems, as far as efficiently using the funds available.

A charity-based system would also avoid all of the extreme rigidities and bureaucracies that are built into these mammoth military-style tax-and-spend welfare systems. A charity-based system would never do anything that did not make sense in the moment, adjusting everything as conditions changed in the nation and at the individual or family level. No federal, state, or local program can have that kind of flexibility, with the largest problems naturally being at the most general federal level, and therefore must allow for everything, which means that there are enormous structural problems which grow to staggering levels without being corrected, most likely eventually bringing about the collapse of the whole system because of these rigidities.

Bottom-up

Continuing with the national statistics, we see that the Federal Poverty Level (FPL) has been set in 2019 at $12,490 for a single adult and $4420 for each additional family member, whether adult or child. This "poverty level" number is a key parameter and index in deciding which benefits or entitlements are available to whom. This is as close as the government gets to individualizing the delivery of welfare resources as opposed to the nearly completely personal level that is implied in a charity-based system.

For a family of five with an FPL amount of $30,170, that ($30,170 / 5 =) $6034 per person.

Presumably these are considered survival level parameters. On top of those figures come the costs of schooling and healthcare and pensions, which may all be paid for by the federal government without costs to poor people. So the societal cost for these family groups can be very large indeed if they are completely supported by the public treasury as opposed to being independent or nearly independent themselves. One of the great problems with these mechanical systems is that they invite manipulation and exploitation so that so-called "welfare queens" may end up with as high an income as any middleclass person without doing anything more than just manipulating the system, without actually doing their part to meet their own economic needs.

I assume that a charity-based system would very quickly both help and put some major pressures on these kinds of people so that the amount of irresponsibility and fraud would be greatly reduced. That alone might cut the cost in half of the current welfare benefits paid out.

Overall, for people living in normal families, the system-specified level of minimum income might make sense. But it's not hard to see how someone would immediately start to try to game the system even at this low level. For example, a single person gets $12,490, but each additional person counted as part of the family only gets $4,420 dollars. This presents an immediate incentive to try to break up the family into separate parts, since they could get nearly 3 times as much money that way than if they present themselves as a family. For poor people in a ghetto, this could present overwhelming incentives to never have any groups of people that could be appear to be functioning as a family group. It may be hard for a mother to present her children as not being hers, so that each could be qualified for their own $12,490, but it would be easy to keep husbands away so that they get their separate $12,490 instead of just the $4,420. One might hope that this kind of petty calculation would not be important, but I suspect that it happens all the time.

Counted separately, the family members are worth 5 x $12,490 = $62,450, while together as a visible and functioning family unit they are only worth $30,170. They would thus get an extra $32,280, more than doubling their income, if they can just scam the system a little bit by avoiding looking and acting like a family unit. That FPL rate translates into $34.21 a day for each person if they are all counted separately, or $12.11 a day if they are counted as children or spouses. I don't know the actual effect in practice, but it has to be perverse.

Tables (see sample) such as the FPL amounts would have almost no use in a charity-based system, since true individuality would usually prevail, although it is useful to know what the government legislators and administrators think makes sense. Their political and economic calculations might be interesting information.

The two systems would naturally be compared rather often, and someone would have to work out some simple metrics to aid in comparisons. Getting the education part of life right would probably have the greatest long-term effect, so that both self-reliance and concern for others would become much more common traits.

The government only cares about harvesting votes in general for the typical pro-Marxist government parties. That was nearly always the original reason for inventing these government systems, often with the goal of gaining political control of specific districts. Individual needs are specifically ignored if that policy will increase the number of votes through emphasizing victimhood, identity politics, and intergroup conflict, as seems to be the usual case.

The goal of the new project would be to at least cut in half the number of able-bodied people on welfare, if not almost completely eliminating them. This leaves open the possibility of cutting the welfare rolls and costs by 90% down to 10% of what they are now ("[an irreducible number of] the poor are always with you") and at the same time increase the size of the economy to improve everyone's life.

One of the other major goals would be to greatly lower taxes, since the government would no longer have any ideological excuse for collecting this huge amount of money. Keeping that extra money in people's pockets would improve the economy and also improve the desire and willingness and ability to take care of charity needs as they arise, or to prevent them from arising.

There are major ideological and political ramifications of these suggested economic changes, and the new programs of religious, economic, and political freedom and all their good effects need to be preached and sold and demonstrated vigorously. The Marxist, elitist, dictatorial crowd will have to be directly challenged and beaten back in a major propaganda war. But that is what is necessary to establish the church as a major proponent of freedom of every kind and to greatly weaken the modern day Gadiantons that now have nearly complete power worldwide.

With far more money available for charity-based assistance, a much better job can be done in each individual case. In fact, the new concern might gradually become the risk of being too generous and creating a new class of parasites living off the fat of the land and hurting themselves and everyone else with their irresponsibility.

More Details

The interest on debt at the federal, state, and local levels might be removed from the list of costs of things that are done outside of the government tax-and-spend systems, and there would therefore be no need for any borrowing, especially if the costs are kept to a third of the current size.

It may prove useful to avoid any kind of tax-and-spend mechanisms, and also avoid any questions about investments that relate to minimum charitable pensions, if all of the basic functions of a social welfare of system are done on a strictly current basis. There would certainly be room for larger personal pension plans if people wish to manage that money themselves and place it into the economy, but all of that sort of thing would be done outside of the minimal safety net of a charity-based social welfare system.

I am guessing that there are many problems with organizations taking money from workers supposedly for pension purposes, and then simply using up that money or investing it poorly so that the promises made can never be kept. In most cases, people should have the ability to manage that money themselves, something like the 401(k) or IRA systems of today. That gets rid of that exploitative and irresponsible layer that puts itself between a worker and their pensions, which almost always causes things to turn out poorly for the worker.

It is difficult to figure out what would be the best way to handle general social principles at the lower levels. It is clear that individuals have a responsibility to care for themselves and their families, and if they are unable, then they naturally look to their families to help them. The next level up might be a religious organization such as a ward or a stake, and the next level up from that might be something even larger, although I cannot predict what that would be.

One of the main principles of the new systems would be to get the insurance companies out of the system, since it is their purpose to extract as much profit as possible from supplying these social insurance services. Essentially all of the functions of these insurance companies could be replaced by some charity-based system or set of charity-based systems. I won't even attempt to expand on what those organizations might be, but I'm sure that with a general change in attitude among the public, other far better systems could be devised.

One simple change would be to avoid building unnecessary office and meeting structures which may absorb enormous amounts of capital which could be used to deliver actual social services. This would be analogous to the early church members having no chapels and no temples for 300 years, making it possible for them to devote nearly all their extra resources to effective charity. We now have an amazing technical ability to cooperate without building huge office complexes and all traveling there repeatedly to meet together. Our "fingers can do the walking" so that there is much less need for masses of people to travel to meet together, and the world's work can still be done.

It would be valuable to get rid of these rigid, wasteful, government tax-and-spend "pseudo-religious welfare" systems simply because they are so inflexible. Once they have been started, they can't be stopped until they collapse. Our systems are indeed on the way to collapse, with promises they can't possibly keep. It would be very wise to find a way to phase out these systems before they collapse on their own, perhaps starting out new generations of workers using new systems.

Some private systems

As an example of private systems being more efficient than government systems, we have the famous case of the three Texas counties that took the option of an alternate Social Security system, back when it was easy to do so. In one simple case, that private system produced 2.4 times as much retirement revenue for the participants.  But it is really worth much more than that because the participants actually own their retirement funds and receive them no matter how long that person lives. In contrast, the government system only pays a set amount as long as the participant lives. A private system pays it out no matter how long the person lives, so that his children can collect the money as heirs.  In some cases, the person and his family may actually collect up to five times the government amount.

Cultural suicide

People don't seem to realize that adopting any of these centralized Marxist welfare schemes means adopting a culture of death. In every case observable today, the socialist countries of Europe and Eastern Europe, without fail, are gradually committing suicide as they shrink with every new generation, some of them dropping by half at each new generation, until that society implodes and is replaced by another society, usually hostile to the original society. This is happening in Europe in the form of the millions of Muslims being allowed into Europe. These people have been taught from birth to hate Christians and white people so that they delight in terrorizing and replacing the already dying ancient inhabitants.

There are numerous other important society-wide benefits from the new charity-based system that go beyond pure economics.  A government system quietly and implicitly convinces people that since the government promises to take care of them forever, cradle to grave, then there is no need for them to have any children who can take care of them when they are old.  Instead, the implicit argument is that one can plan on everyone else's children taking care of them when they are old.  But, of course, all those other people also have no obvious economic incentives to have children of their own, so that the whole society is incentivized to collapse by having no children.  This is demonstrated by all the European countries which are shrinking out of existence as, in the case of Italy, where each subsequent generation is only about half the size of the previous generation.

This gradually has meant that where there were 30 workers to support each retiree when the system started, now there are only two or three workers to support the retirees, meaning that the burden is simply too great and the whole system collapses under its own weight.  To adapt, the government borrows money to fulfill its promises, but that only hastens the collapse, as debts accumulate which can never be repaid, so that the collapse of the system, the whole Ponzi scheme, is both guaranteed and accelerated.

The various social security systems were probably not originally sold as a suicide pact, but that is the inevitable result. All the European countries are on the same path to oblivion, just at slightly different rates for each.

Some of the countries have also chosen an even faster path to self-destruction by allowing in millions of young people from hostile and incompatible countries.  Young Muslims who have been taught from birth to hate Christians and white people are invited into post-Christian Europe where they do not assimilate and instead stay separate while scorning their hosts and fomenting terrorism attacks on those hosts, which they explicitly hope to subdue and replace.  This is literally a terrifying way to end these societies, as we are seeing it play out before our very eyes.

Apparently, without freedom, especially freedom from huge taxes and "entitlement" systems, societies simply commit suicide since they cease to have any reason to exist.  Hedonism is apparently another way of describing a death wish for society. Having children becomes nothing more than an optional source of entertainment, a hobby, instead of a means to perpetuate a family, a tribe, and a nation.

There is also the partly historical attitude in the previously Communist countries of Eastern Europe that, ideally, no one should raise any children to feed and sustain the corrupt dictatorship, so that people choose a 0-child, 1-child, or 2-child attitude, (where 2.1 children per woman are needed for replacement, which means that the whole society quickly shrinks, including a drop in the life expectancy along with the much lower birth rate.  This is the effect of atheism and making corrupt, self-seeking human government the new god.

With its always implicit and often explicit atheism, the secular state has no way to convince people that there is any reason to live or reproduce, except to be good slaves available to their masters. The old traditional values of building families and tribes and societies simply because of commonly-held religious and social values are completely out of the reach of these strictly secular governments. These governments do not really hide very well their scorn for the masses they have conquered and their desire to control them and their children. It is certainly not irrational for active adults to want to deny the state the control of themselves and their children. There is also the more immediate trade-off and benefit of not having to sacrifice to raise a large number of children. People may choose to have one child just for the experience, but certainly more than two children is going to require some extra exertion which the self-centered person might want to avoid.

There is no sign of the idea that parents can bring in spirits from the other side as part of an extremely long-term plan of salvation. None of that thinking has any place in the self-centered mindset of the ruling elite. They are the only beings that matter in the eternities.

Through killing off "useless" old people and providing free abortions, public health services kill people in huge numbers and the whole society shrinks based on the new very negative incentives for life.

Life is low-quality and not worth living, so that making everything "free" means that it also makes life itself of no value.

On the issue of gun control, having no guns means no guarantee of freedom and thus less personal responsibility, which means the entire society shrinks many times more quickly than could ever happen from gun related homicides. In fact, society will grow, so that there is a net gain from having guns (and the resulting freedom).

On the issue of the "population bomb," one economist calculated that just the state of Rhode Island could feed the entire world if it resorted to the most intense forms of food growing possible today. This demonstrates that there is "enough and to spare" for many times more people than now exist on the planet, making it clear that any artificial limits have more to do with political parties and governments being more interested in controlling people than in helping them flourish. The typical dictatorial leftist attitude that "it is better rule in hell than serve in heaven" means the ultimate death of that society

Birth rates

In the United States there are about 10,800 births a day, or about 3,942,000 a year. That produces a rate of 1.87 children per woman. If women simply were willing to bear the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman, a 12.3% increase, that would mean another 1328 births each day for a total of about 484,720 extra births a year, for a new total of 4,429,720.

There would be a list other benefits as well, because the mere fact that people began to value life more highly and were willing to make some sacrifices to bring more children into the world, it would likely mean that the death rate would go down rather than up, leaving far more people living.

The number of intentional homicides in the United States total about 17,284 for a rate of 5.30 per 100,000 population. We may conclude that a culture of life would mean an extra 484,720 extra births a year, as opposed to the losses from homicides of 17,284. The ratio of gains to losses is at least (484,720 / 17,284 =) 28 times. That may seem like a strange comparison to make, but the extra freedom that comes from gun ownership and other features of a free society means that there is a huge net gain in life which completely overwhelms any potential loss from deaths to homicides. And, as I say, the new emphasis on life would probably also serve to greatly lower the homicide rate so that one comes out ahead on every metric.

Simply seeing this world and its inhabitants as God sees them would make huge changes in how things are done. Inviting souls here for an interesting experience, aided by those determined to help them have a good experience, would be enough of an influence to create a true Zion.