Thread by @AlexandraErin

The idea that public assistance makes people dependent and destroys self-sufficiency is a myth, a cruel lie.

First, the idea of "self-sufficiency" is illusory and overrated. We are a social species and we THRIVE through cooperation and specialization.

https://twitter.com/ABCPolitics/status/1160916285946880000

So what we term self-sufficiency is socially constructed.

A person who starts their day by getting into a car that was engineered by... I mean, frankly, some of the expertise that goes into modern cars is literally rocket science, at this point. That's how good we are at cars.

This car was designed by many brains and built by many hands. The things that went into its engine, its fuel mix, its chassis took generations to perfect. A person gets into it and drives over public roads built and maintained and paid for by again, many hands.

And they go to a job where whatever tasks they do are just one part in a long chain of things, where any one of the steps would be impossible and meaningless without the other.

Then they drive home.

We call that "self-sufficient".

Now we've got another person who, say, has limited mobility in their neck and hand and who cannot operate that miraculous motor vehicle but can do everything else the person does.

This person takes a bus to work.

That, somehow, is slightly less self-sufficient?

The people driving to work couldn't have made the car themselves. If they could have made *a* car, it wouldn't have been as good, and the time and resources they spent learning how and doing it would lessen what they had for whatever else they're doing now.

But the driver is getting a head start and a hand up because they are able to take advantage of the cooperative effort that goes into making cars and roads possible. Take that away and... how do they get to work? How do they earn money to pay for, among other things, the car?

They probably had the car financed, which means they entered into a private agreement with a third party to pay for the car and then they pay them back. This is recognized as being in the car seller's best interest because it's easier to pay for a car after you have one. Hand up.

If we as a society declared "It's irresponsible to buy a car before you have the money to buy a car," then broadly speaking, almost no one who *needs* a car to get to work would be able to afford one.

Lot of people out of work. Lot of cars going unsold.

And broadly speaking, if it *was* irresponsible to sell a car to someone who doesn't have the money to buy one, then way more people would default on their car loans.

The existence of car loans proves that it's a good idea to provide transportation to people who need it.

Now, if this thread travels enough I'll have conservatives finger-wagging at me for not understanding the difference between public benefits and private financing.

But I'm not saying they're the same thing. Not at all.

I'm saying that the free market recognizes that it's *good* to give people the things they need to be, supposedly, "self-sufficient", and the free market verifies that there is more wealth generated when this is so than when it isn't.

Now, if we make it a public policy to make sure everybody has what they need to be... let's say self-reliant, I guess... will there be people for whom, after we've made sure their basic needs are met, they can't go out into the world and work 40 hours?

Sure.

So what do we do about that?

Nothing.

I mean, first of all, it would be unconscionably cruel to specifically cut off the people who need the most help.

Second of all, that wouldn't be *most* people, nowhere close to it. The economic friction spent trying to quantify who "deserves" aid just wastes money and adds so much stress to the whole endeavor for people on both sides of the cut off, which also costs us money as a people.

Car loans are private agreements but they're made possible by a framework of laws and regulations that recognize that there's a public good in them. They're possible because we don't consider financing big ticket, long-lasting items we couldn't get for ourselves "irresponsible".

Because what constitutes self-sufficiency is socially constructed. "Self-sufficient" really means that a person is dependent on others only in ways that are deemed normal and socially acceptable. It means their interdependencies are allowed to remain invisible and unremarked on.

We're not self-sufficient. No one is an island. We're an absurd species with brains so big we can't give birth to them fully formed, and we don't really finish growing them for more than two decades after that. What would self-sufficiency look like, for a species like that?

Our brains can do in one generation feats of adaptation evolution literally couldn't do in millions of years, but the trade-off is that we're born bad at everything. We can each get kind of okay at everything needed to survive, but when we focus on one thing, we get miracles.

But we can't any of us focus on one thing without everybody else covering everything else.

Self-reliance makes us weak. Mutual interdepence makes us strong.

So much study has gone into public benefits and proved that food stamps help people get out of poverty, that public assistance helps people become less dependent on public assistance.

But for that to work, we kind of have to not care if they're dependent or not.

If the ways we render public assistance are formulated around a goal of moving people off of it, we create artificial stress points, cracks for people to fall between. Perverse incentives against saving money or finding a job, and maybe a bind where they have to look anyway.

The more hoops we make people jump through to get benefits... the less good the money we spend on this can do. The more people get stuck in poverty.

We've got to reform our thinking on this.

Forget self-sufficiency. Instead, focus on sufficiency.

Make sure everyone has enough.