Social security did not appear by accident. It was created because industrial capitalism exposed risks that individuals could not manage alone.
Every system, hunter-gatherer onwards, exposed people to risks they could not manage alone. The prey species disappear, weather changes, the crop fails. What then happens is that everyone dies.
Industrial capitalism produced sufficient surplus that some could be saved for a time of need, some could be redistributed in a time of need.
Devil’s Kitchen used to post occasionally on how the poor organised their own welfare and how it was in many cases better aligned to their own needs than the state monolithic welfare state. Shame he doesn’t still post I suspected he’d have torn Spud a new one on this subject.
Does Murphy not learn from events that have happened within his lifetime?
Pre-industrialization China in 1960 was a poor, peasant-based economy with ~85% living in the countryside. It’s estimated that 30-45 million people died of starvation in the Great Chinese Famine (1959–1961) .
As Tim says, industrialization is the savior from risk vastly more than the cause of it.
Spud is not in the habit of learning…
There’s ample evidence Murphy doesn’t learn from any events, no matter where they happen!
Curious wording this bit: “exposed risks that individuals could not manage alone”.
So, before Capitalism these risks were hidden? Or does he mean that pre-Capitalism there were no such risks?
Very odd
He’ll be writing about the golden age of the noble savage next, how they wanted for nothing, their children all survived to adulthood and lived to ripe old ages. Natural, see.
The Spudster seems to have forgotten the charitable works of the medieval monasteries and guilds, and the Elizathan Poor Law. The word “dole” – which comes from the Old English word dāl – referred to the charitable distribution of money or food to the poor. The organised relief of poverty and hunger existed before industrial capitalism.
A relatively large number of the guilds *were* industrial capitalism – both the development of it and the regulation (quality control) of it!
In the UK Social Security was all community-based until Asquith nationalised the Friendly Societies which had, in the previous century, established sick pay, pensions and widows’ pensions and a limited degree of unemployment insurance for all classes of worker (mostly by occupation but Oddfellows filled the gaps between the various occupational groups’ Friendly Societies). Charitable works were the duty of and carried out by Parish Priests as well as Monasteries and Convents (and were the duty of, but not always carried out by, other Christians).
Just a minor quibble to your excellent comment because Murphy and other “fellow-travellers” pretend to redefine “capitalism”.
Taking the opportunity of a quiet post to ask a related but OT question. I’ve just seen a youtube by Carl Benjamin ranting about remittances sent home by immigrants. He thinks it’s a massive problem, a drain on our prosperity. I think it’s deflationary here and inflationary there, and we are all free to do what we like with our money. If it’d from benefits, the problem is not that they send it but that they are given benefits in the first place. When I worked in the US I brought money home. So what? When I buy chinese junk from Temu that money goes to China. So what? dividends from stocks often leave their country of listing to go abroad. So what?
It’s trade, even if there is no imported good. Am I wrong?
It initially sounds deflationary in that it is effectively destroying money floating round the UK economy, however by sending that money overseas it negatively affects our exchange rates making real imports more expensive and therefore is inflationary.
To test this hypothesis to extreme, suppose the UK Government was to print and give a trillion pounds to foreign governments for say “slave trade reparations”. The result would be a crash in the value of sterling with no tangible benefit to the UK in terms of goods received. The cost of imports would soar and inflation would spike.
It’d be funny, though, seeing the recipients live in turbo-Weimar. It would make Zimbabwe look sane. These people need to be careful what they wish for.
You’re not wrong. It’s importing labour instead of goods. Some people think imported goods are bad because it means we send money abroad to pay for them. Such a view used to be quite popular, but we now understand that by importing goods we are making ourselves richer – not poorer. Similarly, importing labour makes us richer but is even more likely to raise objections because people who don’t care about the economics but are racist will also object.
Nothing wrong with importing labour, so long as that labour fucks off again when we no longer want or need it.
But it doesn’t, does it? And it also brings with it dozens of “close” family members to suckle on the state teat. Which makes us far poorer than if we had not imported that labour in the first place.
Lots of it doesn’t actually labour anyway. At least not for our common weal.
The problem (and in the US with the Somali scammers in particular) is if they are sending taxpayers money back home, not their own hard earned…..
If you look, you’ll find we’re importing people, Charles, not labour, and it turns out in aggregate that they consume more than they produce. We make up the shortfall from our own production, leaving us with less. Again, in aggregate.
Furthermore, the behaviour of those who refuse to integrate imposes costs and restrictions on the rest of us that we would not have were they not here. Obviously though there are some who benefit handsomely from all this, aren’t there, Charles?.
Ditto when I lived and worked in Hong Kong, I was sending money back to the UK monthly – initially to pay off my overdraft, then to pay my mortgage on the house I’d bought which was the point of working in the first place.
It exposed the risk that some rare people could outlive their savings and a politician saw the opportunity to buy votes. And other politicians saw the opportunity to buy votes and so expanded ‘entitlements’.
And here we are today. All the social bonds that people maintained in order to protect themselves destroyed. Everything leads to the state, nothing leads away from the state.
Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, null contro lo Stato.
Exactly as he wants.
Social Security was a power grab by the state. Supplanting distributed charitable actions into something that could be more easily skimmed from.