More Variation in State IQ Scores = A More Democratic State

As I debate with people about public health care as a specific, and about
giving assistance to the weak and ignorant as a general, I find myself
struggling with an ugly thought. It’s a thought I’ve had for a long time,
and one that has pushed me in the past toward libertarianism.

What if none of these social programs will ever work? What if the speed with
which the weak and ignorant become more weak and ignorant under
welfare-like programs simply outpaces the speed with which those programs
can do any good?

In other words, I worry often that giving money and food and healthcare to
those with no education is little more than the simplest way to create more
people with no education.

This would mean that the idea I cherish and use as the backbone to all my
arguments–i.e. the notion that offering all this aid will result in this
class of people suddenly realizing that education is important, and suddenly
start becoming responsible, quality parents–might just be a complete
fantasy.

It might be that the best solution is to simply save those who can be saved,
and to have a strict policy against allowing those who cannot from spoiling
the society as a whole.

I’m thinking on paper here.

What About Sweden?

I always come back, in my arguments with others, to the European countries
that have successfully taken the socialist path. They’re proof that it
works, right?

I’m not so sure anymore.

There’s no doubt that the system works. And I’d also argue that it’s the
best system for controlling the negative human impulses that erode a quality
society given our current human balance of reason vs. primal desires. But
this doesn’t necessarily equate to it being the best system for every
country or every population.

I think we might be missing a very simple variable in trying to apply the
Swedish ideal to the United States: the size of our underclass.

The feasibility of high-quality socialist government policies, like those in
Sweden that produce an excellent quality of life, depend on a critical
ratio: the ratio between the number of people producing between the number
of people who only consume. In a more general sense, however, the issue is
simply one of quality–as measured by intelligence, education, and
civic-mindedness.

Societies that have high marks in these areas can handle socialist systems
because the people involved are participating and aware. They understand
what they sacrifice in terms of freedoms, and what they get in return. And
it’s the same for a libertarian ideal like we have (had?) in the United
States, whereby each person is trusted with an inordinate amount of freedom
because it is assumed that he/she is a calm, intelligent, responsible
citizen.

But when this is not the case–when you have giant masses of functionally
illiterate, group-thinking people (who are doing all the reproducing, of
course) you not only give up the American ideal for government, but you also
give up the socialist ideal.

[ ** This is not where I was taking this post, by the way; the previous
paragraph is new to me, as of just a second ago. ]

What this means, unfortunately, is that you are left with very few
government options, and they all look like the Latin America, China, and
Africa. In other words, few people with all the resources, corruption on a
mass scale, and then a giant, uneducated underclass that makes up “the
people”.

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America is heading this direction; there is no doubt of this. The question
is how to stop it from arriving.

These seem to be our options:

1. Implement Policies to Raise the UnderclassThe problem with this approach
   is that it also simultaneously helps the underclass magnify its numbers.
   Unless strict policies are put in place to keep this from happening
   (which is highly unlikely to happen given America’s PC culture), this
   approach will fail–not because it’s not the right thing to do, but
   because it’s just not how humans and nature works. The path of least
   resistance will take over, and that path is to do as little as possible
   while taking in as much as possible.

2. Consider the Underclass a Lost CauseThis I find completely distasteful.
   I cannot see myself turning my back on millions of suffering people
   simply because I think the efforts to help them are likely to cause
   additional suffering. This is like not feeding a baby now because you
   think the baby might grow up and become an axe murderer. The axe
   murderer threat may be real, but it’s never as real as an immediate
   starving baby.

These seem to be the real options that all political conversations in terms
of government assistance reduce to. Either separate the good from the bad,
and keep the bad isolated from the good so as not to poison them (the
conservative route), or you integrate the entire population and dump
resources into the underclass to get them where they need to be.

I know which one sounds better; it’s the elevation option–option 1. But I’m
having serious doubts about whether it’s possible given our unwillingness to
condemn, as a society, behavior that will poison the whole. If we are
unwilling to do this–to make uneducated teenagers try very hard to avoid
reproducing, for example–then giving them additional resources to help them
once they have reproduced is precisely the best way to become a third-world
country within another one to two decades.

So, how does one support liberal, socialist policies aimed at helping the
disadvantaged when you have a sinking suspicion that they will simply
exacerbate the problem? And conversely, how do you support a more calloused,
elitist model when you know that fundamentally it’s immoral?

This is were I sit now–on a philosophical precipice. ::