The Value of Agency

We missed the meat of the article. A huge amount of Woonsocket is propped up by SNAP spending. It is essentially a constant economic stimulus, functioning exactly as SNAP needs to function. There is a need and it fills it. Like it or not, economic times are dire in this state. They have not gotten better. The General Assembly is following the recommendations of people who did fine during the Great Recession. Their luxury is unquestioned, despite the massive subsidies the middle class receives; to say nothing of the economic policies that favor the wealthy and the corporate “person”.

The most powerful part of the welfare system is the one that through a variety of tax credits and expenditures pays the middle class, the “submerged state“. You don’t have to go down to the Department of Human Services to get your mortgage interest deduction. There’s no special gold card you have to get to spend the money you get from it. And as a result, no journalist will ever ask you to stand up and be exemplary of the welfare recipients using the mortgage interest deduction while going through the bad choices you made in your personal budget (was all that pot you bought in college really necessary). No one will produce a “study” full of conjecture and insinuation that wouldn’t receive a passing grade in a college course while claiming Rhode Island could stand to save hundreds of millions of dollars by cracking down on mortgage interest deduction fraud. But make no mistake about it; that is government assistance as pure and as true as SNAP or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.

Too many of us are approaching the casualties of the economic crisis from a place of unexamined privilege. Rather than examine the economic system that allowed us to make it through the economic crisis while wreaking havoc on so many, we find it easier to scrutinize those without our privileges. How controlling is this scrutiny? In this case, we are not only acting as police of habits and behaviors, but we are attempting to control what someone can and cannot do with their body. More than that, too many are suggesting we deny people a fundamental right; the right to control what goes into their bodies. It doesn’t matter if you’re liberal or conservative, the message is the same: because you are struggling and sought help we will control and humiliate you as we see fit.

What the response to The Washington Post demonstrates to me is that fewer people appear to actually value human agency; for all the neoliberal rhetoric of bootstraps and recent hosannas to liberty. Agency, in this sense, is the ability of people in society to make independent choices. You can see this exemplified in charity giving, when donors are confronted by asks for “luxury” items over “necessities”. It’s about what you value in a person. If you value solely their physical well-being (perhaps merely for their ability to perform economic activity) you deny that luxury item. But if you value the whole of human existence, you understand the importance of even a single so-called “luxury” item. After all, a teddy bear in the hands of a child is undoubtedly a luxury in purely economic terms. But in human terms, it can be worth the world. I will not accept that that value is irresponsible.