“Welfare isn’t taking care of the Poor but Creating Jobs for the Useless”

 

I remember in one of my many discussions over beer with the Old Rogue, he would often state that America started having issues when it implemented a “welfare system.” He argued that the problem with the welfare system was the fact it was not designed to help the poor but to create jobs for “useless” people who would be incentivized to keep the poor that way so that they would always have a job.

OK, I get that his comments aren’t politically correct. However, I believe that he has a point. The next time you need to swim through paper work in an office, ask yourself if that paper work actually leads to anything productive or if it’s designed to create work for the sake of creating work. You need to ask yourself who benefits from this. Inevitably, you’ll find that “work process” aren’t actually processes to get a job completed but a means of keeping parasites busy.

This became very apparent when I attended a talk at a law firm on “Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States” (“CFIUS”). The talk was moderated by a friend and former customer at the Bistrot. One of the main speakers was an American lawyer who dialled in from one of the American offices and the other was from a consultancy. The later had actually worked at the Department of Justice and Homeland Affairs and had played an active role in making CFIUS what it is.

 

 What struck me about the entire situation was the fact that the moderator had made the point that America was the world leader in opening up the world. However, America had recently reserved its position and become a leader in closing up the world and the only real beneficiaries were lawyers and consultants (the moderator being a high-powered lawyer himself).

Now, I get that the world cannot be totally open. Just as a lot of good things came about when countries opened up, a lot of bad things also crossed borders. In an ideal situation most, places should be open enough for goods and services to cross borders but closed enough so that nasty things like terrorist and crooks stay out.

I get that in the case of America, there are genuine concerns about national security, where you don’t want potential adversaries getting hold of sensitive military information. So, in world where Russia is openly aggressive and China is increasingly more assertive, it is understandable that the USA would want a certain amount of control over what goes on in its borders. So, I get that there is a rationale behind CFIUS and I can understand why other countries are following the American example and implementing CFIUS.

However, while I do get the need for controls on certain things, we have to ask ourselves if we are creating a situation where the people you are creating complications for the sake of creating complications so that lawyers and consultants can stay in a job rather than achieving an objective.

The speaker made the point that certain definitions were kept vague so that CFIUS could come down on businesses and it made negotiations all the more interesting. The speaker gave an example of a French company that he once worked for that bought an American subsidiary in a “sensitive” industry. In order to get the deal approved by CFIUS, the French parent company had to agree that only natural born US citizens could work in the American subsidiary (everyone from the CEO to the janitor). As the speaker stated, this violated a bunch of American laws but the issue of “national security” overrode enabled these laws to be overridden. This is despite the fact that there is “NO PROOF” that naturalised citizens are less loyal than native born citizens (let’s remember that the 2005 London Bombers were native born).

This is, unfortunately not the only example of governments trying to keep lawyers and consultants in a job. I recently had to fill out the American ESTA form. Now, the last time I filled out the ESTA was a decade ago when I went to the USA to see my stepdad for his 80^th birthday. That experience was painless. This time, it wasn’t. They went as far as to ask me for my various social media accounts. Erm, what was that supposed to achieve other than to give someone who had never done a day of honest work a sense of superiority?

To be fair to the Americans, they aren’t the only nation where governments feel obliged to create problems for productive people, I think of Singapore where we insist on looking for useless information about people – just think of the way the government needs to know which primary school you went to and what your Primary School Leavers Exam (PSLE) results were, whenever you apply for a government job. Who exactly does this benefit except some worm sitting in an office?

Yes, I do get that you can throw things wide open. However, we need to stop creating useless work for useless people and encourage them to be productive rather than parasitic. Society can only progress if its citizens are used for work that benefits people rather than paper pushers and worms in cubicles.