To this day, one of the first questions I'm asked when people get to know me is how I can hold two seemingly disparate viewpoints: libertarianism and social justice. These concepts seem far apart through our cultural lens. For too long, the right has addressed itself only to the rich and the middle class. Very few republican nominees have ever mentioned the poor in the debates. What liberals hate about our philosophy is the perceived social darwinism in letting everyone fend for themselves.
To me, this strikes me as similar to arguments about religion and morality. Said the believer to the atheist: if you remove religion, there would be no morality. Here, if you remove the government from helping people, then no one would help. Both of these arguments are spurious. The flaw is the same in both arguments--that morality is intrinsic to our species. It is a profoundly human characteristic which mediates most behavior. People genuine want to help each other. Most people do this every day without really thinking about it.
When a government gets involved in a market, especially one like conditional and unconditional charitable aid, the market becomes distorted. The attitude that the government will take care of those in need (in return for an ever-increasing price) separates the person giving from a. having to know anything about the problem b. caring about its solution and c. gives them a philosophy that social ills are not "my" problem, but "our" problem. Help in its purest form is stifled in the status quo.
It irritates me to no end that when talking about the social programs designed to help people, it is never questioned that the government must be the source of funding, planning, and often implementation. Sometimes, we can get private entities in on the implementation part (like Medicaid providers), but that's about it.
Matt Zwolinski's book has been extremely helpful in one way in particular. It is the first place I've really encountered someone talking about competition in the marketplace of charity. The benefits of competition and choice are immense. As a social worker, if the agencies my clients depended on were subject to market forces, they would become unbelievably different to work with. Imagine, instead of The System, one would be able to choose between different insurance plans, conditional or unconditional aid programs, charitable programs at hospitals and churches, and low-cost housing.
Competition would improve the responsiveness of the organization to its clients; whereas, a government run or government-dominated system allows none or few competitors, reducing efficiency and client satisfaction while increasing bureaucracy and rent-seeking.
Knowing all of this stuff has also lead me to be a way better social worker, as well. Part of the libertarian perspective that is so invaluable in social work is its focus on the individual (rather than groups). Although social work is definitely concerned with groups as well, the individual level is--at the end--the unit level of a much larger system. Is it a moral action to have a person submit to our current social welfare system? Can a system set up like ours ever get better, let alone adequately serve its interests?
Another day, another time I have to commiserate with a client about DC government services.
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Friday, November 4, 2011
Charity and Community
One of the most difficult things for me in reconciling my libertarian political beliefs and my genuine concern about poverty and other social issues has been this: do I truly believe that a system without government's near-monopoly on serving the poor and mentally ill--one where public assistance would be minimal or non-existent-- would that system be better for more people than the current system? It's a hard question to truly answer. In addition, I feel a great trepidation about losing governmental oversight at these places. Government does a lot of bad, but it's a least minimally decent and ascribes to some healthy, liberal ethics. In this newly privatized market, it feels more likely that people will end up in clinics where abuse takes place or follow traditional or religious teachings that some may find unethical.
Sunday, October 2, 2011
Keywords
So, I've been looking online for some fellow-travelers in this area of study. So far, the list has been vanishingly small. Searches for "radical social work" do not turn up much relevant information. They are usually websites that take a more stringently progressive approach to social work. Libertarian social work has even less of use as a search term.
I branched out from my actual base to include conservative social work. Evidently, there are people who hew to the conservative typography and practice social work. And they are all pretty pissed.
Just to evince a little personal bias here, I think conservatives are remarkably thin-skinned folks. The NAS piece linked above does a good job of raising a few valid points, but the overall tenor of it is just whiny.
Anyway, the article does raise some good points and a couple of jump-off points for future thought. The biggest criticism (repeated ad-nauseum) throughout the article was that social work must promote social justice. I'm used to this, as I had to go through social work education, and it's not that shocking. Also, the trotting out of "social justice" as a conservative boogeyman has worn down my ability to be annoyed by it. They make passing mention to Nozick and Hayek, but ultimately are just content to say that there are other ideas for social justice beyond egalitarian-minded redistribution of wealth. It would have been nice if they did some critical analysis of those ideas to give a sense of the debate and how conservative/libertarian ideas cold change the landscape of social work theory.
One of the major flaws in the article is in its contention that through the CSWE and NASW code of ethics, social workers are conscripted into service of the stated ideas and objectives of those national organizations. I've never felt like I couldn't believe what I do and still be a social worker. I guess that would be different if I held pro-life, anti-gay, or other such beliefs. But, as a libertarian, I don't feel like I can't be a social worker. Much to the contrary, I believe that critical study of social work must lead someone to libertarian ideas. No one really agrees with me on that one, yet.
I'm going to ignore their trotting out the other conservative boogeyman "diversity." Diversity is good, multiculturalism is wonderful, but viewing people as part of groups before recognizing their individual humanity is idiotic. In brief, that's what I think about diversity.
Now, it is difficult to suss out why Nozickian or Hayakian ideas have not percolated through social work education or theory. It is likely a confluence of circumstances. Both the professoriate and student body are much more likely to hold liberal views. Specifically, their values can be delineated further by its level of statism/radicalism.
The more earnest progressives will tend towards the radical approaches to solving social problems--ones that may rely on theories of redistributive social justice, reparations for social damages, but a nominal skepticism of the government as an entity. Extrapolating further, I would venture that these social workers are likely younger than most and have positions with lesser power.
While this label describes most of the social workers I know, I believe that the older, more powerful cohort of social workers subscribe to a perspective I will call liberal statism. Liberal statism uses the authority of the state to put into practice socially and economically liberal values. Their belief in the ability of the state to solve social problems is unwavering and considered settled. They focus only on directing ("ever-dwindling!") government resources to the appropriate programs. At this level people become statistics, metrics to gauge a idea. They are inculcated from the direct effects of their actions, and shielded from the unintended consequences of their interventions.
Liberal statism is the ossified version of progressive social work--the ingrained system that we currently labor under. I would imagine that a prototypical social worker would start out as a progressive and eventually morph into a liberal statist, if they progress career-wise at a large agency or in government. Both ideologies adhere to the same fatal conceit that "if only we had the right people in charge, allocating the right resources to the right places, we could fix all of these problems." This is the same fatal conceit Hayek refers to in criticizing state-run economies. It should be no surprise that mental health is a state-run economy (at least for those of low-income and other populations social work directs itself towards). While progressives may come up with liberatory programs on the micro scale to help people in these groups (it's radicalism in practice), the authority for these programs lies with government agencies, they work through private agencies tied inseparably to government funds, and operate under a government-dominated regulatory framework. These progressives are actually asking the liberal statists the freedom to experiment with ideas and practice how they see fit (great ideas!), but on the system's dime and under the system's rules.
To give an example, I used to work for a harm-reduction, housing-first program for chroncially homeless adults in Washington, DC. Their ideology was inherently progressive and it provides an interesting case study in delineating the difference between progressive and statist. It began as a pilot program in NYC, upended the approach to homelessness throughout the country through the housing-first model, and is one of the astonishingly few harm-reduction agencies in the country. Because their model was rigorously tested and found tremendously effective, DMH and DC government bigwigs love the organization--giving it wide latitude with resources (like housing vouchers) and not enlisting it in the war on drugs. At the same time, there were meetings I attended there where we railed against proposed Medicaid cutbacks in the city, fretted over budgetary problems caused by federal and local funding issues, and in individual conversations (never with anyone high up, though!) the uselessness of some DMH employees, their paperwork/busywork quotas, and an overall frustration with the social support system that extended from local issues to federal policy.
As a libertarian, I loved their micro-level approach because it valued individual competency and choice so dearly! But, their exo- and macro-level conundrums were difficult to sympathize with. Of course the government will start auditing our records--what we do is essentially social control from their standpoint! Of course our funding is going to be cut--that's because we rely on public funding! Of course DMH is going to be useless or idiotic on this issue--they have no competition or incentive to perform well!
To close that personal anecdote off, it was clear that people had simply not thought to set these programs up using private funding, in jurisdictions with small/non-existent mental health oversight, and advocate on the larger scale for more private control of charitable/helping professions.
This is the point, ostensibly, made in the NAS study. Ideas that do not fit in with liberal statism or progressivism are simply not considered. The fault for this lies partially with the professors, organizations, and students of the profession for not demanding a more critical course curriculum that fosters independent thought. However, the majority of the fault falls to those in the libertarian and conservative movements who have never addressed themselves coherently to the helping professions.
Social work as an academic discipline (and academia as a whole) is biased as hell on its face. But that does not mean that they should be any different. As long as they are promoting and fostering independent thought--new approaches to social justice other than redistribution of wealth, e.g.--they are useful institutions. The anecdotes presented in the NAS study, though they evince a great deal of political bias, are fundamentally about abuses of power to those with differing ideas. Idiotic administrators abusing their power is a problem in itself--that they were doing it under the guise of politics is notable, but not of premier importance. The political aspect of these cases does not amount to enough for the NAS' overall narrative--that social work students are forced to become indoctrinated or face discipline.
That's not to say there's a lot of people with my beliefs out there in social work. I started this post out by saying how little material there is for conservative social workers and that there is next to none for libertarian social workers. We got a lot of work to do here!
I branched out from my actual base to include conservative social work. Evidently, there are people who hew to the conservative typography and practice social work. And they are all pretty pissed.
Just to evince a little personal bias here, I think conservatives are remarkably thin-skinned folks. The NAS piece linked above does a good job of raising a few valid points, but the overall tenor of it is just whiny.
Anyway, the article does raise some good points and a couple of jump-off points for future thought. The biggest criticism (repeated ad-nauseum) throughout the article was that social work must promote social justice. I'm used to this, as I had to go through social work education, and it's not that shocking. Also, the trotting out of "social justice" as a conservative boogeyman has worn down my ability to be annoyed by it. They make passing mention to Nozick and Hayek, but ultimately are just content to say that there are other ideas for social justice beyond egalitarian-minded redistribution of wealth. It would have been nice if they did some critical analysis of those ideas to give a sense of the debate and how conservative/libertarian ideas cold change the landscape of social work theory.
One of the major flaws in the article is in its contention that through the CSWE and NASW code of ethics, social workers are conscripted into service of the stated ideas and objectives of those national organizations. I've never felt like I couldn't believe what I do and still be a social worker. I guess that would be different if I held pro-life, anti-gay, or other such beliefs. But, as a libertarian, I don't feel like I can't be a social worker. Much to the contrary, I believe that critical study of social work must lead someone to libertarian ideas. No one really agrees with me on that one, yet.
I'm going to ignore their trotting out the other conservative boogeyman "diversity." Diversity is good, multiculturalism is wonderful, but viewing people as part of groups before recognizing their individual humanity is idiotic. In brief, that's what I think about diversity.
Now, it is difficult to suss out why Nozickian or Hayakian ideas have not percolated through social work education or theory. It is likely a confluence of circumstances. Both the professoriate and student body are much more likely to hold liberal views. Specifically, their values can be delineated further by its level of statism/radicalism.
The more earnest progressives will tend towards the radical approaches to solving social problems--ones that may rely on theories of redistributive social justice, reparations for social damages, but a nominal skepticism of the government as an entity. Extrapolating further, I would venture that these social workers are likely younger than most and have positions with lesser power.
While this label describes most of the social workers I know, I believe that the older, more powerful cohort of social workers subscribe to a perspective I will call liberal statism. Liberal statism uses the authority of the state to put into practice socially and economically liberal values. Their belief in the ability of the state to solve social problems is unwavering and considered settled. They focus only on directing ("ever-dwindling!") government resources to the appropriate programs. At this level people become statistics, metrics to gauge a idea. They are inculcated from the direct effects of their actions, and shielded from the unintended consequences of their interventions.
Liberal statism is the ossified version of progressive social work--the ingrained system that we currently labor under. I would imagine that a prototypical social worker would start out as a progressive and eventually morph into a liberal statist, if they progress career-wise at a large agency or in government. Both ideologies adhere to the same fatal conceit that "if only we had the right people in charge, allocating the right resources to the right places, we could fix all of these problems." This is the same fatal conceit Hayek refers to in criticizing state-run economies. It should be no surprise that mental health is a state-run economy (at least for those of low-income and other populations social work directs itself towards). While progressives may come up with liberatory programs on the micro scale to help people in these groups (it's radicalism in practice), the authority for these programs lies with government agencies, they work through private agencies tied inseparably to government funds, and operate under a government-dominated regulatory framework. These progressives are actually asking the liberal statists the freedom to experiment with ideas and practice how they see fit (great ideas!), but on the system's dime and under the system's rules.
To give an example, I used to work for a harm-reduction, housing-first program for chroncially homeless adults in Washington, DC. Their ideology was inherently progressive and it provides an interesting case study in delineating the difference between progressive and statist. It began as a pilot program in NYC, upended the approach to homelessness throughout the country through the housing-first model, and is one of the astonishingly few harm-reduction agencies in the country. Because their model was rigorously tested and found tremendously effective, DMH and DC government bigwigs love the organization--giving it wide latitude with resources (like housing vouchers) and not enlisting it in the war on drugs. At the same time, there were meetings I attended there where we railed against proposed Medicaid cutbacks in the city, fretted over budgetary problems caused by federal and local funding issues, and in individual conversations (never with anyone high up, though!) the uselessness of some DMH employees, their paperwork/busywork quotas, and an overall frustration with the social support system that extended from local issues to federal policy.
As a libertarian, I loved their micro-level approach because it valued individual competency and choice so dearly! But, their exo- and macro-level conundrums were difficult to sympathize with. Of course the government will start auditing our records--what we do is essentially social control from their standpoint! Of course our funding is going to be cut--that's because we rely on public funding! Of course DMH is going to be useless or idiotic on this issue--they have no competition or incentive to perform well!
To close that personal anecdote off, it was clear that people had simply not thought to set these programs up using private funding, in jurisdictions with small/non-existent mental health oversight, and advocate on the larger scale for more private control of charitable/helping professions.
This is the point, ostensibly, made in the NAS study. Ideas that do not fit in with liberal statism or progressivism are simply not considered. The fault for this lies partially with the professors, organizations, and students of the profession for not demanding a more critical course curriculum that fosters independent thought. However, the majority of the fault falls to those in the libertarian and conservative movements who have never addressed themselves coherently to the helping professions.
Social work as an academic discipline (and academia as a whole) is biased as hell on its face. But that does not mean that they should be any different. As long as they are promoting and fostering independent thought--new approaches to social justice other than redistribution of wealth, e.g.--they are useful institutions. The anecdotes presented in the NAS study, though they evince a great deal of political bias, are fundamentally about abuses of power to those with differing ideas. Idiotic administrators abusing their power is a problem in itself--that they were doing it under the guise of politics is notable, but not of premier importance. The political aspect of these cases does not amount to enough for the NAS' overall narrative--that social work students are forced to become indoctrinated or face discipline.
That's not to say there's a lot of people with my beliefs out there in social work. I started this post out by saying how little material there is for conservative social workers and that there is next to none for libertarian social workers. We got a lot of work to do here!
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
First Post
So, this idea has been brewing in my head for a long time. I have been a social worker for about 1.5 years since my graduation. If you count the time where I still did mental health work beforehand (but planned to be a psychologist), I guess that about totals to 4-5 years.
This whole thing started out because I couldn't succinctly explain to someone how I thought. I could win people over on individual points--like how minimum wage laws disenfranchise those of low-income--but it was hard to give them that kind of over-arching narrative of where I'm coming from.
This is my first attempt to really flesh out my ideas in full, so please, bare with me.
I am starting this blog to build on thought not generally introduced into the minds of young social workers. My education in social work was difficult to swallow, as almost all of the theories and approaches to problems were top-down solutions. They were essentially classes on how to best control those social problems that people experience. Lost on my teachers and the theorists was that underneath the statistics, there were actually individual people living lives, making meaning out of social problems, coping with them in fantastically brilliant ways, and blazing a path forward that no one from on-high could possibly imagine.
Although most social workers would consider themselves humanists, they are not. By nature, they are humanists, concerned as they are for the welfare of their clients. This is a prerequisite. Otherwise, you are mere a bureaucrat, a paper-pusher, or a simp waiting it out for another job.
But the approach to modern social work is so focused on social control, that those who practice it are unable to grasp the vulgar morality that underlies it. What people in social work fail to appreciate that it is not metrics of certain groups that matter! It is individual liberation that is important. Both intra-psychic liberation from mental health problems (or to use the Szasz framing, "problems in coping") as well as liberation from social control. This needs to be the aim of social work. And it is this idea that I need to flesh out.
Social workers generally see the system as terrible. They see people who are disenfranchised, screwed over at every turn, and uncared for by our social safety net. People who are controlled by the system appreciate the degradation inherent in the system and naturally rebel against it (or begrudgingly accede to it in the hopes they find a human on the other end--someone caring). Taxpayers (in the Wire-ian sense), that is to say "normal people," see those who receive services as being taken care of--at least as best as society knows how. However, they too appreciate, to a much smaller level to be sure, the problems inherent in the system. But that just means that the social safety net needs to be made better, with more centralized control, with more of the latest research, metrics, and theory to better tell the lowly individual worker what to do. What they fail to understand, and what social workers can often miss from under the pile of paperwork, is that what is needed is for real human help to again become a part of our lives.
I guess that wasn't succinct at all. Actually, it didn't even explain half of what I wanted. I guess what I'm trying to hammer out here is that social work, to be moral and effective, must come from the bottom-up. It must take a subjective view to subjective problems. It must focus on individual liberation and autonomy. It must, to be fair, be everything it is not.
This whole thing started out because I couldn't succinctly explain to someone how I thought. I could win people over on individual points--like how minimum wage laws disenfranchise those of low-income--but it was hard to give them that kind of over-arching narrative of where I'm coming from.
This is my first attempt to really flesh out my ideas in full, so please, bare with me.
I am starting this blog to build on thought not generally introduced into the minds of young social workers. My education in social work was difficult to swallow, as almost all of the theories and approaches to problems were top-down solutions. They were essentially classes on how to best control those social problems that people experience. Lost on my teachers and the theorists was that underneath the statistics, there were actually individual people living lives, making meaning out of social problems, coping with them in fantastically brilliant ways, and blazing a path forward that no one from on-high could possibly imagine.
Although most social workers would consider themselves humanists, they are not. By nature, they are humanists, concerned as they are for the welfare of their clients. This is a prerequisite. Otherwise, you are mere a bureaucrat, a paper-pusher, or a simp waiting it out for another job.
But the approach to modern social work is so focused on social control, that those who practice it are unable to grasp the vulgar morality that underlies it. What people in social work fail to appreciate that it is not metrics of certain groups that matter! It is individual liberation that is important. Both intra-psychic liberation from mental health problems (or to use the Szasz framing, "problems in coping") as well as liberation from social control. This needs to be the aim of social work. And it is this idea that I need to flesh out.
Social workers generally see the system as terrible. They see people who are disenfranchised, screwed over at every turn, and uncared for by our social safety net. People who are controlled by the system appreciate the degradation inherent in the system and naturally rebel against it (or begrudgingly accede to it in the hopes they find a human on the other end--someone caring). Taxpayers (in the Wire-ian sense), that is to say "normal people," see those who receive services as being taken care of--at least as best as society knows how. However, they too appreciate, to a much smaller level to be sure, the problems inherent in the system. But that just means that the social safety net needs to be made better, with more centralized control, with more of the latest research, metrics, and theory to better tell the lowly individual worker what to do. What they fail to understand, and what social workers can often miss from under the pile of paperwork, is that what is needed is for real human help to again become a part of our lives.
I guess that wasn't succinct at all. Actually, it didn't even explain half of what I wanted. I guess what I'm trying to hammer out here is that social work, to be moral and effective, must come from the bottom-up. It must take a subjective view to subjective problems. It must focus on individual liberation and autonomy. It must, to be fair, be everything it is not.
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