The idea was to see that the least fortunate in society could meet their basic needs. But these systems brought along a set of perverse consequences.

Can We Have Welfare Without the Threat of Violence?

By Max Borders
If we think of compassion as an active practice instead of a duty or utilitarian redistribution, what would the world look like? What would we become?

Practicing mutual aid is the surest means for giving each other and to all the greatest safety, the best guarantee of existence and progress, bodily, intellectual, and moral.
–Pyotr Kropotkin, from Mutual Aid

I DREAM'D in a dream, I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth; I dream'd that was the new City of Friends; Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust love—it led the rest; It was seen every hour in the actions of the men of that city, And in all their looks and words.
—Walt Whitman

Most grownups don’t believe in magic anymore. Sometimes, though, it can be helpful to imagine it. A powerful ring turns the wearer invisible in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. That power means the wearer can act with relative impunity. (For that device, Tolkien had Plato to thank.)

We can also imagine characters with superhuman abilities. These thought experiments sometimes help us put ourselves and our societies into perspective. In Tolkien’s world, we wrestle with questions about the nature of power. In our own parallel world, we can explore the nature of peace.

Let’s imagine that wizards exist in our world, and one supremely powerful wizard has cast a spell over the realm.

The Spell of Nonviolence

The wizard’s spell is of nonviolence. Call it “The Spell of Ahimsa.” Under this spell, no one can threaten or commit any act that injures another person or their property. When a brigand tries to attack a caravan on the road, his fingers weaken, and his dagger falls from his grasp. When a tax collector tries to arrest a merchant in the town, the handcuffs slip from his fingers. When a bully tries to push another girl, she discovers an invisible wall of protection. It doesn’t matter whether the perpetrator thinks he is using violence to serve good or evil. The fact is, the spell ensures a condition of complete nonviolence in society.

What should we make of this? Would the realm be better off under the wizard’s spell?

Answers will vary. Nearly every society has laws against theft, fraud, and physical injury, which means something is justifiable about the spell. So, at least a fair number of people might agree intuitively that the world would be better without violence. As soon as we get into questions about the justification for authority’s threats of violence, though, answers start to diverge.

Differences are starkest when we think of the spell affecting government officials. Consider “The Spell of Nonviolence” as it relates to issues of government-issued welfare. In other words, how would authorities implement redistribution schemes if the wizard used magic such that officials had to abstain from violence? Specifically, how would authorities tax the rich to give to the poor?

Redistribution as Rooted in Violence

The modern redistributive state is relatively recent in history. The rapid advances of industry and enterprise made the welfare state affordable for a time. After about 1800, this advance—known as the “hockey stick ([link removed]) ” of prosperity—helped generate opportunities for people to create more value for one another. For maybe the first time in history, there were more people trading than raiding. People living in this Great Enrichment ([link removed]) rocketed out of poverty.

According to economic historian Dierdre McCloskey:

Earlier prosperities had intermittently increased real income per head by double or even triple, 100 or 200 percent or so, only for it to fall back to the miserable $3 a day typical of humans since the caves. But the Great Enrichment increased real income per head, in the face of a rise in the number of heads, by a factor of seven — by anything from 2,500 to 5,000 percent.

A few entrepreneurs got amazingly wealthy in the Great Enrichment, but a massive middle class emerged, too, as people figured out how to organize themselves into productive firms. These firms weren’t perfect, but they were responsible for unprecedented improvements in living standards. With such gains, even the poorest improved their lot.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, governments began instituting welfare programs and other centralized forms of social welfare. The idea was to see that the least fortunate in society could meet their basic needs. But these systems brought along a set of perverse consequences. And as these systems began to predominate, existing voluntary systems of civil society disappeared. Essential features of voluntary systems, such as the practice of compassion and community, not to mention the development of personal responsibility, slowly disappeared along with them.

The Spell of Ahimsa helps us see a feature of the redistributive welfare state that is frequently overlooked: its very existence depends on state-sanctioned violence. In other words, how would the system operate if authorities couldn’t threaten to imprison those who refused to pay for it?

Most people don’t think about matters this way, accustomed to the welfare state as a permanent fixture of life. But as we will see, it hasn’t always been this way. Human beings naturally organize themselves.

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Read the rest of this article and others like it on our website ([link removed]) .

Max Borders is a senior advisor to The Advocates. He also writes at Underthrow ([link removed]) .

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