Brillant article on the historic function of Masonic lodges and other fraternal associations in a pre-cheap oil/welfare state era which due to PO we will revert back to in the coming decades.
the shift from private relief funds to government welfare programs had certain definite advantages. The voluntary associations that handled relief in the pre-welfare era—fraternal orders such as the Freemasons and Odd Fellows, religious bodies such as churches and synagogues, and the like—had limited resources, and usually conserved them by limiting their relief payments to their members, or to other narrowly defined populations. To return to a point made earlier in these posts, the relief organizations of an earlier day had to treat their resources as a commons that could be destroyed by abuse, and so they put a variety of limits on access to those resources to make sure that the people who got help actually needed it, and weren’t simply trying to game the system.
The deep pockets of government in an era of national expansion made it possible, for a while, to ignore such factors. The new social welfare programs could reach out to everyone who needed them, or at least to everyone whose claim to need them advanced the agenda of one political faction or another. The resulting largesse was distributed in various amounts all over the class spectrum—welfare for the poor, a dizzying array of direct and indirect federal subsidies for the middle class, ample tax loopholes and corporate handouts to benefit the rich—and did a great deal to fund the lavish lifestyles Americans by and large enjoyed during their nation’s imperial zenith.
That’s the kind of thing a society can do when it can draw on half a billion years of stored sunlight to prop up its economy, not to mention a global empire that gives it privileged access to the energy, raw materials, and products of industry that a half a billion years of stored sunlight made possible. Whether or not it was a good idea isn’t a question I particularly want to discuss at this point. It’s far more important, it seems to me, to recognize that the welfare states of the late 20th century were the product of a vast but temporary abundance of energy and the products of energy; they did not exist before that glut of energy arrived, and it’s thus a safe bet that they won’t exist after the glut is gone.
I think it’s at least as safe a bet, mind you, that nobody in America will be willing to face that fact until long after the abundance of the recent past is a fading memory. The last decade or so of bickering in Washington DC is more than adequate evidence of the way the winds are blowing. Republicans talk about jobs, Democrats talk about justice, but in both cases what’s going on is best described as a bare-knuckle brawl over which party’s voting blocs get to keep their accustomed access to the federal feeding trough. Choose any point on the convoluted political landscape of modern America, and the people at that position eagerly criticize those handouts that don’t benefit them, but scream like irate wildcats if anything threatens their own access to government largesse.
I suspect, for what it’s worth, that the last US government handouts to be paid out will be those that prop up the lifestyles of the American middle class: the financial aid that keeps middle class families from having to shoulder the whole cost of a college education for their children, the social security and medicare that keeps them from having to foot the whole bill for their old age and that of their parents, the galaxy of programs intended to make it easier for them to afford homeownership, and all the rest of it. Programs that benefit the middle class disproportionately already make up the largest share of US federal entitlement programs, dwarfing the 2% or so of the federal budget that goes to the poor, or the 5% or so that counts as corporate welfare, and that figure is a fair measure of the political clout the middle class can wield in defense of its privileges.
It would be pleasant to suppose, as the United States slides down the trajectory of imperial decline and the number of Americans in serious trouble increases, that middle class voters would recognize the severity of the situation and support, say, means tests on middle-class welfare programs, so that those who don’t actually need help can be asked to step aside in favor of those who do. I hope none of my readers plan on holding their breath and waiting for this to happen, though. Quite the contrary: as economic contraction accelerates and energy and resource shortages bite harder, the fight around the feeding trough will just get worse. I doubt many of the combatants will take enough time from the struggle to notice that, in the long run, it’s a fight with no winners.
In the time of limits ahead of us, no country on earth will be able to afford a welfare state of the kind that was common in industrial societies over the last century or so. That’s one of the harsh realities of our predicament. National economies powered by diffuse renewable energy sources, bound by strict ecological limits, and forced to cope with the cascading instabilities of a damaged planetary biosphere, simply won’t be able to produce the surplus wealth needed to make that a possibility. Methods of providing for urgent social needs that worked in the days before the economy of abundance are another matter, and for this reason it makes sense to suggest a revival of the old American custom of forming voluntary associations to fund and manage public amenities.
