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.
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