Should the notion and belief of fairness be of more importance than people getting things they don’t require?
In short, Yes.
Why give something to someone they have no use for, a socialist ideal should be exactly that, for the people that require and not universal.
Agree. The first thing I would means test is Child Support Agency payments. They do not take into account the financial situation of the wife, just the father and his family. My ex married a guy who is loaded and earns a fortune. They also have a 4 bed detached house and rent out a three bed flat. Me and Mrs SOG were both public workers on relatively low pay but I have to pay according to what we earn, with no consideration to my exes situation at all. Means testing = fairness.
Not so fast, Bazza. The correct socialist formulation is that distribution by need may occur only after the full flowering of communist society. Here’s the authority: Karl Marx (in 1875):
In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!
Now can you honestly say, up there amidst the perfumed air wafting in from Ellesmere Port, that labour is life’s prime want?
My in-laws are comfortable and working/middle class Labour voters, they froth at the mouth at the prosepct of losing a benefit/money when I suggest its fair to give things to the needy, why should we give to those who don’t need it and in my opinon you can’t be a true socialist until you believe a society comes before your own needs, especially when you don’t need a £300 heating allowance or whatever it is.
Okay, you’re not buying the Marxist justification. Here’s the reformist-lackey version:
Universal benefits gain their legitimacy precisely because they are universal. The more they are restricted to the lumpen-poor the more stigmatised those benefits become. And the more stigmatised they become the more targeted they are by your friends and mine, the Nasty Party.
So child benefit, which was universal, is now means-tested, and will be cut down incrementally by ‘austerity’ reasoning. And once means-testing is applied to one benefit it’ll be applied to another, and then another, in a domino effect that will eventually apply even to access to health care. So the NHS will be ever more restircted to means-tested, can’t-pay patients, and political support for the NHS will by the same token wither on the vine.
Universalism remains a strong argument in my view. It’s not only a good test of the value of a benefit - it’s a measure of what kind of society we want.
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Stop all benefits to everybody do not pay tax get the government out (all of them) pay for what you need and work for what you need.
It sounds harsh but I payed all my tax’s as required when I requested help from the government they told me I was not entitltled as I could stay with a relative I had 2 kids to look after at the time. and they now have the termerity to send me a tax bill when I am earning money out of the country not living there at all and not getting any assistance from them although my ex wife who also does not live in the uk is claiming child benefit for two kids that she does not look after or has spent a penny on in the last 13 years.
Bitter and twisted you bet the fuck I am.
Why should people who don’t need something receive it? The money saved could be better spent elsewhere, is it morally right to even receive it if it was not designed for that? The fuel allowance and tv license?
I don’t agree with means testing. I agree with Furball on universal benefits, and there have been studies that suggest that simply giving everyone a basic citizens payment may be cheaper than trying to work out who should actually receive it.
Long term, the solution cannot be to chip away at the state benefits we have left. We’ve had five years of stick and very little carrot. Certain parts of the equation, such as landlords and the money that needs to be repaid to banks, are presented as immutable constants. We’re asking single parents to go out to work for 40 hours, for little or no financial benefit because those constants can’t be changed. All at a time when meaningful jobs are being shipped overseas.
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The easiest way to kibosh the heating allowance is to say any pensioner who completes a tax return and declares incom over x, or has pension income of x gets the allowance clawed back through their tax code. Quite simple really.
The bus pass is an interesting one - god help any government who dicks around with this. The oldies bloody love it. Cruising around all day knowing that all the other poor sods on the bus are having to subsidise there trip to the beach. We would have the “blue rinse riots” if this was taken away.
Originally posted by @Barry-Sanchez
Why should people who don’t need something receive it?
Congratulations. You’ve just described wants-based-consumerism. Take the government-facilitated monopolies out of the equation, and that’s our entire system.
Why does that make it fair though? Why should a wealthy duke receive the same as a common pauper? That maybe universal but its also ridiculous.
How about 20p per journey for the over 60’s on buses, abolish tv license for the over 75’s (what a bizarre and crap benefit) and the fuel allowance going to the most needy, seems socialist rational and fair to me, fairter than the current system and that’s my point.
Should a principle be of more value than a universal benefit that’s wholly unfair in its purpose.
I’ve just why, Barry. Here’s another example. When I was at primary school, quite a long time ago now, there were three benefits. Two of them were free milk and free travel to school, and the third was free lunches (dinners as was) which was means-tested.
Now when Thatcher snatched the milk benefit it caused uproar because it had widespread support as a basic supplement for all children regardless of need. But all the while the means-tested free dinners we all knew it was only for the poorest kids in the school, who were stigmatised as a result.
Sometimes, as with child benefit (when it was universal) and health care, universalism is essential to our sense of who we are (and how we’re different to social-Darwinist countries like the US).
Free TV licences and fuel allowance are not actually universal benefits - there is an age qualififcation. So there is a second order of questions and values attached to these.
In principle, though, I’d support truly universal benefits because what follows in their abolition is a nightmare. but more than that, it is a social cohesion thing: these benefits really are a way of saying we’re all in this together, contrary to the nonsensical apopropriation of this slogan by the Bullingdon Boys.
And why not mention other supposedly ‘universal’ benefits? Like the new rules on inheritance. To benefit from these rules, you have to be (a) an asset millionaire and (b) have children to hand the money down to. Why is no one squealing about this? They should be. I’d say it’s a measure of what we’re becoming that while we erode truly universal benfits we find ways of distributing more and more wealth to the wealthy under the false guise of ‘universalism’.
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Barry, you seem to be proceeding from the assumption that these needs are going to be met directly. It’s all monetary relief, which means that any relief that the state provides leaves more money to spend in the economy. If we were talking about the winter fuel allowance being a big pile of logs, and those logs being delivered to pensioners on central heating, then you’d have a point. However, we’re talking about highly transferable assets which, with the amount of regressive taxation we have, have a good chance of ending up back in government coffers.
That doesn’t answer the question though does it, socialism is not a charity its fairness.
Socialism isn’t fairness Barry. That’s liberalism. Socialism is equality. Hence universalism.
I thought this was meant to be about testing the people that required state aid and not giving it to the people that had enough to support themselves and there dependents its turned into a debate on socialism and the political system. Which is a completely sepeate debate.
If you go by the rules as they stand now Rothchild him that lives /used to in Exbury gets state aid for a variety of reasons but he gets it.
Does he need it to live no he does not, his land is sometimes farmed sometimes not subsidised again. more money to him. who voted in these rules the Government the EU the house of lords oh the Rothchilds family.
surely that is wrong ?
Doesn’t liberialism mean equality?