When Abraham Lincoln said of a hypothetical black woman that “in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands … she is my equal, and the equal of all others,” he expressed an economic proposition which is by no means commonplace or inevitable. Lincoln based the woman’s rights on what she earned, not what she needed, a departure from “subsistence theory” and an implicit acknowledgment that labor creates value — that is, a margin between the cost of the worker’s subsistence and the amount of wealth she creates — and that she has a right to share in this overplus. One learns from Adam Smith, Thomas Carlyle, E. G. Wakefield, and others that subsistence was assured to slaves as it was not to free workers. In Britain before the Second World War, employers still felt day laborers’ arms before they hired them, so that men who were frail or malnourished could be turned away. Under ordinary circumstances slaves would have had as much as economic theory, up to the time of Beveridge, promised or allowed fully employed working people in Britain — enough to maintain them in a condition of physical efficiency. Lincoln made the case, successfully, that in justice more was due anyone. If he had used Marx’s language, he would have declared the right to “self-earned private property.” Against a history in which vulnerability triggered the crudest abuse — the history of the British poor, into which Africans were swept up fairly late — so modest a statement as Lincoln’s sounds like beatitude.
The most difficult struggle of our civilization has been to find the means to create autonomy for ordinary lives, so that they might not be plundered or disposed of according to the whims of more powerful people. Ideas like civil rights and personal liberty come directly from this struggle, which is not terribly well advanced at best, and which is untried, failed, or abandoned in most of the world.
So very much depends on a poor man’s wage. At present there is a Youth Training Scheme in Britain to absorb the energies of unemployed school-leavers. Industries are encouraged to take on trainees in place of regular hiring. These youths are paid by the government at wages that about equal the dole. In other words, the government donates to industry the free use of unskilled labor. Without reference to the wealth these young people produce, their subsistence is counted as welfare spending, and they are thought of as the beneficiaries of this arrangement, from which it is hoped they will learn the value of honest work.
People in their teens are historically the most coveted workers in the British economy. They are relatively healthy, and from the government’s point of view, they are cheap, because they have no dependents and normally live with their families. This scheme merely reproduces the ancient pattern, severing work from pay, making the wage a charity, while reducing work to an escape from the opprobrium of idleness.
Britain invests more money abroad per capita than any other country, and invested more in absolute terms, until Japan surpassed it in this decade. Those who control capital, whether banks or industries or the government itself, have always had the means to punish or starve policies they disapprove of, or to crown with success policies friendlier to their interests, simply by leaving money at home or by siphoning it off to the United States, or to South Africa or elsewhere.
Mrs. Thatcher was described in an essay by Bernard D. Nossiter in The New York Times (June 15, 1988)7 as arguing to a church assembly “that abundance, the rich, were blessed while poverty, the poor, were not, and Creation proves it.”
She has her reward. Britain is experiencing economic growth, of the hectic, selective, up-market kind which does not threaten to drive upward the cost of industrial labor or the demand for social services. British economics is a game of keep-away. Whence all the jiggling of statistics — it is easy to get a big percentage increase from a very small base, as in calculating wages and pensions, and it is easy to take away with one hand what is given with the other, to raise wages a little and cut benefits more, and it is easy to increase rates of saving and contribution to private pension plans by reducing benefits for the elderly or cutting back on the administration needed to deliver them or adding to the obstacles involved in obtaining them or threatening to phase them out altogether, as the Thatcher government has done.
Ralf Dahrendorf, in his book On Britain, quotes respectfully as follows from a book titled Equality, coauthored by Keith Joseph, an important political figure in the Thatcher government: “Ultimately the capacity of any society to look after its poor is dependent on the total amount of its wealth, however distributed.” One might object that the way in which wealth is distributed determines, in a society, how numerous “its poor” will be. To distribute wealth away from employed people, as the British do, creates poverty, which must be looked after, perpetuating the ancient relation of those who work to those who employ, which has analogues, or cousins, in slavery and forced labor.
In the 1880s a philanthropic businessman named Charles Booth launched on a survey of the poor of London, with the purpose of refuting socialist assertions that a million Londoners, one fourth of the population, lived in deep poverty. He continued his project for seventeen years, in the course of it concluding that the extent of poverty had in fact been understated. His work, titled Life and Labour of the People in London, had a considerable significance for modern British socialism, in part because Beatrice Webb, the indefatigable propagandist and guiding spirit of Fabianism, cut her teeth in assisting these researches, and in part because Booth’s work stands in the direct line of descent of British social and economic thought, specifically identifying the institutions and functions of Poor Law as socialism. Booth and the Webbs were associates of William Beveridge in his early career. Booth, like Beveridge, was a Liberal, in Britain the name of a party of bare-knuckled laissez-faire-ists, without any trace of what Americans call liberalism. This is considered an irony of British history, the importance of such people in the emergence of the Welfare State. It is no irony. Like all reformers before them, they undertook to design a good and harmonious state based on stabilizing the poor in a salubrious poverty.
Booth was a man of conscience, an advocate of reform, a visionary of the kind with which British history has long been replete. He dreamed of a day when “the streets of our Jerusalem may sing with joy.”
Americans are often said to have a dream. It has never been clear to me just what I and my nation — Armenian dentists in San Diego, Norwegian Avon ladies in St. Paul, black nuns in New Orleans — fall to dreaming about so universally and persistently. The common wisdom is that we dream of personal success and prosperity. But we all know that those freshly arrived in this dreamy nation succeed and prosper at a rate that makes slouches of the rest of us, and that the naturalization of their children into our culture has no more striking feature than this tendency to drift downward from the heights of aspiration. So when these newcomers fall to dreaming along with the rest of us, what do they dream about? Personal sanctity, perfect crime, beautiful lovers, the admiration of their family, a house in the country, physical persons that mark them as vigorous, alert, temperate, and self-sufficient. It seems to me that people’s dreams lie along the grain of their expectations, in general, so that chefs dream of owning restaurants, rabbis of being highly esteemed rabbis — in other words, that in America goal-oriented dreaming is as diverse as individual circumstance.