Today I was told there was no welfare system in pre-industrial times. I pointed out that in England the Elizabethan Poor Law required parishes to tax and provide assistance to the poor - the aged, the unemployed, widows and deserted wives.
But, according to another person, I am confusing charity and welfare.
From this I gather that because the church (parish) was involved the welfare provided was deemed "charity".
But the church, at that time, was very much part of the state machinery. The law required tax to be collected and redistributed through the parish. This is "public" welfare. Charity is "private" welfare. It is a matter of private individuals giving to a cause voluntarily either of their time or from their pocket (although there is some blurring today with many organisations classed as charities also getting govt grants.)
I am going to use the words of author David Thomson to briefly describe the Britain most of our settlers came out of.
There had been a long "historical cycle of alternation between personal and public responsibilities in welfare matters."
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries "dependence on public support (was) a signal part of the English way of Life".
But the nineteenth century saw a turn against public assistance. During the early 1800's there were, "Repeated government investigations of work and poor relief through those years, which stressed the failure of employemnt subsidy in the stagnating and impoverished south, while free-market progress was booming in the north...there were also increased penalties against those who refuse to work or who failed to maintain their children....during the late 1860's...arguments against public assistance and in favour of the individual and family responsibility reached a new crusading pitch....self-help, independence, opposition to compulsory public support, and the lauding of voluntary effort were all standard features of the later-nineteenth century in western Europe and North America, as well as Australasia."
Unfortunately intergenerational memory is weak and during the twentieth century most western nations began to rebuild their public assistance programmes. This is what people now commonly refer to as the "welfare state". But it's not new.
And now we are once more out on the extreme of the pendulum trajectory, with state or public support having run to its useful and sustainable limits.
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3 comments:
Whatever laws the Elizabethans may have passed, it's a simple fact that throughout northern Europe in pre-Industrial times, for most people there was no guarantee that they'd survive the winter. Bad weather wasn't just a matter of whether you made a profit or not, but whether you lived or not. Under those circumstances, it doesn't come as any surprise to find infanticide was more common then than it is now.
James was trying to make the case that publicly funded welfare leads to infanticide, through some means apparent only to his confused mind. History suggests the reverse is in fact the case.
"James was trying to make the case that publicly funded welfare leads to infanticide"
I was making the point that welfarism destroys values ie: responsibility,effort,honesty etc...Government handing out other peoples money as an incentive to breed CAN and has lead to people who are in no fit emotional or financial state to raise children having them and making a shocking mess of it.Abuse and violence against children by iresponsilbe,frustrated people mentally not much more than children themselves is a given.Ask Lindsay for the stats ...
In other words, you were making a point so vague as to be meaningless. Even if you can find stats to correlate "loss of values" (and good luck defining how that would be measured) with the rise of the welfare state, any decent social scientist could find a bunch of competing things to correlate it with.
The problem is, having a very strong personal belief that a particular correlation does equal causation is not an argument, it's a statement of faith.
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