MISCmedia for 3/22/01
Giving 'Em the Business

AS THE ECONOMY CHURNS, influenced partly by wave after wave of dot-comeuppance, more of you are likely to suffer the humiliations and guilt-trips associated with America's social-services system.

All the hassles, the short office hours, the long lines, the complicated forms, all the miserable eligibility requirements presumably designed to appease politicians who want poor people who feel awful about themselves.

Don't think for a minute that our appointed President's idea to turn whole chunks of the system over to churches (oops, "faith-based initiatives") will make this situation any better. American religion is one whole history of guilt trips.

So, why not privatize welfare, unemployment, et al.?

If local governments can hire companies to handle everything from operating school buses to operating prisons, they could surely contract out the customer-service aspects of benefit disbursement (and their union-contracted staffs) to bidders promising to treat the needy less like suspects and more like valued customers.

Of course, just saying this brings potential problems to mind.

For one thing, what if the politicians and bureaucrats choose contractors to do just what the current civil-service staffs have done--treat the clientele with disdain? And what if the companies are chosen by the lowest bid, encouraging them to slash operating costs by making the application processes even more inconvenient and humiliating?

No, on third or fourth thought, the social-services system is corrupt from the top. Putting a different set of middlemen in charge of day-to-day operations likely won't change it for the better.

Perhaps the system really needs to be reinvented from the top down. I don't mean that "ending welfare as we know it" crap that just puts people through more humiliation loops and leaves some of the neediest all washed up.

No, I mean a top-down reinvention of the system of qualifying for and receiving benefits, based on service rather than shame. And to do that properly, we'll need to keep the whole system, or at least most of it, under fully-accountable public authority.

Some improved customer-service manners, though, could at least be a good start.

NEXT: Could you be turning into a hippie without knowing it?

ELSEWHERE:

• Sorry to say, I've only seen 10 of the Internet Movie Database's current list of the 100 worst films of all time (and why isn't 10 to Midnight or At Long Last Love on it?)....

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ARCHIVES:

• 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, 1995, and 1986-94 columns
• Reviews of literature & art, nonfiction & culture criticism, movies & videos, and music & noise
• Longer articles and essays
• Some slightly weird little fiction pieces
• X-Word crossword puzzles, now with on-screen solving
• Cyber Stuff, links to cool and/or useful sites
• A listing of many Things I Like (and a few things I hate)
• The origin and future of MISCmedia