Two Freedoms. Hugh Segal

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СКАЧАТЬ from working at all. And in many of the micromanaging, condescending rules that govern welfare eligibility, breaking out and trying to earn more or improve one’s education is officially discouraged by clawbacks and cancellation of benefits. This is a prime example of the state actually working against equality of opportunity and discouraging people from reaching up in order to create it for themselves. This is the state, despite the best of intentions, actually engaging, through perverse rules, pettifogging bureaucracies, and institutionalized condescension to destroy freedom from want. So, the most developed and wealthier states do not necessarily have a lot to teach less developed states. In fact, there are some lessons they can learn.

      In Brazil, there is a program called Bolsa Familia, originally instituted by President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in 2006. It is the largest conditional cash transfer program in the world. The money is most often, and preferably, given to the female head of the household. With it come two conditions: all children must be vaccinated and all must be enrolled in school. The eligible amount is about US$12 monthly per child (to a maximum of three children) and it is given to those families who are considered below the poverty line. For those in extreme poverty, there is an additional, unconditional sum of about US$36 to assist with food, shelter, and gasoline. In order to reduce the corruption often associated with social programs, the assistance is provided in the form of a debit card, which can be used to withdraw funds from the government-owned savings bank. Bolsa Familia has been listed as one factor responsible for Brazil’s reduction of poverty, which fell by 27 percent in Lula’s first term, and has been touted as the reason for an increase in the number of educated and literate young people who, because they remained in school longer, were able to qualify for more than menial employment.

      Another project is being attempted in Namibia, though on a much smaller scale. In the village of Otjivero, population one thousand, a coalition of churches, trade unions, and NGOs, all proponents of BIG (Basic Income Guarantee), have provided unconditional grants of about US$18 per month to every member of the village for two years. The results thus far have been more than hoped for. In six months, school attendance improved dramatically, malnutrition, especially among children, decreased, and people were able to increase their economic activity, through small business start-ups or finding employment outside their village. Poverty in that one village, in Namibian terms, decreased dramatically. A “Mincome” guaranteed annual income pilot project in Dauphin, Manitoba, in the mid-1970s produced similarly encouraging results. At the time of writing, Utrecht and other Dutch cities were pursuing similar pilot projects.

      Implied in the above examples is the notion of “choice,” surely key to any freedom we value. If freedom from fear means that people are free to choose how they vote, worship, associate with others, what media they consume, what they say, write, or promote, within the reasonable confines of the rule of law, then surely freedom from want must also protect the freedom to choose those paths that shape one’s progress through life. Programs like “Rules-Based Micromanaged Welfare” (RBMW) are about the end of choice and the total dilution of economic freedom.

      When the Canadian Senate Subcommittee on Cities was holding hearings as part of a multi-year study of urban poverty in Canada in 2007–2009, one witness, who spoke informally after the hearings, told me about her church group, which prepared annual Christmas food baskets for the neediest in the church’s part of the city. At one gathering for the planning of the coming basket assembly cycle she asked: “Why don’t we just give the families the cash and let them assemble their own Christmas hampers with what they want instead of what we want?” The response from her well-intentioned co-volunteers was shock and horror. Even the kindest and most thoughtful of community volunteers could not, in this context, allow the poor to decide for themselves. The idea did not proceed and the baskets were filled in the usual way. Freedom from want must imply freedom to choose one’s economic way ahead within the context of workplace and marketplace reality.

      Hope and choice are essential to freedom from want — as is a basic economic floor beneath which people are simply not allowed to fall. That floor may differ from society to society, from culture to culture, but without it, the equality of opportunity essential to freedom from want is simply a myth evoked to divert attention about how unequal opportunity really is.

      Vastly unequal opportunity is not an “over there” problem, with no direct impact on the countries of the West. The absence of freedom from want, in its most severe form, produces, in many countries, a profound absence of freedom from fear. The collapse of that freedom produces a way ahead for violence, which, in turn, produces the unavoidable reality of weak and failing states. Such states provide the most fecund ground for war, terrorism, and disease — three effects that further deepen poverty, doing so in ways that turbo charge the explosive decline. As violence tends to engender more violence, as diseases migrate more broadly than ever before, it becomes clear that the evaporation of freedom from want in one location has consequences well beyond the place where the specific freedom has been reduced or lost. So, while Sierra Leone, Somalia, Madagascar, or the Democratic Republic of the Congo may not be part of the local newscast, the carry-on effects of the erosion of the two freedoms in such places is not all that far removed from influencing the freedom from want and fear in your own neighbourhood.

      The positive changes resulting from the increase in the speed and intensity of both communications and global trade are not without balancing negative effects also. While information moves more quickly now, so, too, does disease. Ideas of freedom and the footprints of freedom’s benefits also travel with remarkable speed. All of which produce opportunity and inspiration, and at the same time discouragement, envy, and risk.

      In every country reached by global media — i.e., everywhere except perhaps North Korea — the images distributed of the lifestyle enjoyed by those blessed by a freedom from want create a divide between those nations that have and those that have not. However, this divide is not only one that exists between nations; this tension also exists within every country. It is one that exists between those who enjoy a freedom from want — and believe their reality to be the appropriate state of affairs — and those who do not — and know what they do not have (assets, luxuries, and choices).

      Surely among the choices and opportunities of those who do have freedom from want is the responsibility to spread that freedom to others, within their own society and their country and to the world beyond. There are no gated communities that can keep out the microbiological migration of disease or the digital transmission of terrorist plans or messages. There are no laws that can keep safe all who have freedom from want from the consequences of the anger and despair of those who not only lack that freedom but who also lack any reasonable hope of attaining even the most minimalist version thereof.

      A critical part of any realistic definition of freedom from want is that it be an expansive and inclusive one that sustains its strength by drawing those without into its orbit. Failure to engage on the broadening of the freedom from want is to weaken that very freedom, a weakening that has, does, and will have a compelling and destructive effect on those at home and abroad who currently possess it but do not sufficiently cherish it.

      The well-meaning intent of the foreign aid commitments of many well-off countries reflects a post-war, post-colonial recognition that freedom from want actually matters. And countries like the United Kingdom, who, in the toughest of times, kept their international development aid at a minimum of 0.7 percent of GDP, are especially worthy of praise. But the question of how that aid is administered and what choices are offered the recipients of that aid are serious, fundamental questions — unfortunately, they are ones that are often not well addressed by donor governments.

      Separating aid budgets from expenditures on defence and security is old-fashioned and counter-intuitive. As any Canadian military officer who served in Afghanistan can testify, local security and the mix of military patrols, solid intelligence, and focused and locally validated aid went hand in hand.

      In 2011, as I saw at a local shura (consultation meeting) in the Panjway District of Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, when travelling with the Canadian minister СКАЧАТЬ