Before You Condemn Welfare
A Question for You
Before you condemn welfare for the poor, answer one question honestly.
How much of your own prosperity is the product of your individual effort, and how much is the product of an economic, legal and social system that has consistently worked in your favour?
Pause before answering.
Did you build the roads you travel on?
Did you generate the electricity that powers your home?
Did you create the drainage systems, sanitation services and countless public utilities that quietly keep your town and city functioning?
Did you build the schools that first taught you to read and write?
Did you create the universities that educated you?
Did you build the institutions that made your profession possible?
Did you establish the courts that protect your life and property?
Did you create the currency you use every day?
Did you build the banking system that enables millions of transactions every day, channels savings into investment, extends credit and quietly keeps the economy functioning?
Did you build the countless silent services that make your everyday life possible?
None of us did.
We inherited them.
Every one of us lives upon a civilisation patiently built by generations before us.
The Welfare We Never Notice
Yet there is one form of support that attracts endless criticism.
A bag of rice.
A school meal.
Healthcare for the poor.
An old-age pension.
Employment support.
These are dismissed as freebies.
But the far greater benefits enjoyed by the rest of us are almost never called welfare.
We do not describe our education as welfare.
We do not describe the legal system protecting our rights as welfare.
We do not describe the banking system that quietly powers modern economic life as welfare.
We do not describe public infrastructure as welfare.
We simply call them normal.
Perhaps the greatest welfare is the welfare we no longer recognise.
Who Decided What Your Work Is Worth?
Now ask yourself another question.
Whose decision is it that a sanitation worker should earn ₹10,000 a month while another person earns ₹1,00,000?
Did nature decide that?
Did God decide that?
Or did society?
Modern economies often reward occupations according to their relationship with the ownership, management and multiplication of capital.
The closer an occupation is to that sphere, the greater its rewards often become.
The closer it is to indispensable physical labour, the less society tends to reward it.
This is often treated as though it were a law of nature.
It is not.
It is the outcome of the institutions we have built, the policies we have adopted and the values we have chosen.
The question is not whether every occupation should receive identical monetary rewards.
Every society will reward different responsibilities differently.
The deeper question is this:
Should differences in income determine whether one family lives with dignity while another struggles for life's basic necessities?
A civilised society need not make that choice.
The Work Upon Which Civilisation Rests
Imagine that sanitation workers stop working for just three days.
Imagine that farm workers stop harvesting.
Imagine that electricity workers stop maintaining the grid.
Imagine that construction workers stop building.
Imagine that nurses stop reporting for duty.
Society quickly discovers whose work is truly indispensable.
The irony is difficult to ignore.
The work upon which civilisation depends most directly is often the work civilisation rewards least.
We applaud those who manage wealth.
We rarely pause to acknowledge those whose daily labour makes civilisation itself possible.
Success Is Never Merely Personal
Individual effort matters.
Talent matters.
Discipline matters.
Innovation matters.
No honest society should deny that.
But no honest society should deny another truth either.
Success is never merely personal.
It is also institutional.
Some people possess abilities that happen to be recognised and rewarded by the institutions society has created.
Many others possess extraordinary gifts that those same institutions never recognise.
How many musicians never found an instrument?
How many athletes never found a coach?
How many inventors never found an opportunity?
How many children, born in villages or poor families, carried within them remarkable potential that society never discovered—not because they lacked ability, but because the institutions around them never gave those abilities a chance to emerge?
No civilisation discovers all its talent.
Every civilisation also leaves some of it behind.
A Question of Conscience
Now return to the original question.
If society helped determine what work would be rewarded...
If society helped determine which talents would be recognised...
If society built the institutions that enabled our success...
If society quietly supports our lives every single day...
On what moral basis do we condemn the smallest assistance extended to those whom that same society has rewarded least?
This is not a question about economics.
It is a question about conscience.
A Personal Reflection
I do not write this from outside the system.
I too have benefited from it.
My education.
My profession.
My opportunities.
None of them were created by me alone.
Recognising that does not diminish my effort.
It simply reminds me that I have no moral right to deny another human being the basic necessities of life.
The Measure of a Civilisation
A civilisation should not be judged merely by how generously it rewards success.
It should be judged by whether it remembers those upon whose labour civilisation quietly rests.
The sanitation worker.
The farm worker.
The construction worker.
The cleaner.
The driver.
The electrician.
The nurse.
The millions whose names we never know.
Without them, our lives would come to a standstill.
Perhaps we have been measuring value backwards.
Before we condemn the smallest support extended to those who have received the least, let us first recognise the immeasurable support civilisation has already extended to us.
Gratitude is not charity.
It is honesty.
And honesty is where justice begins.
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