The Samaritan's Dilemma: Should Government Help Your Neighbor?

Gordon Gekko was wrong. Greed is NOT good.The code of the Good Samaritan was simple: "Help when help is needed."In The Samaritan's Dilemma, Should Government Help Your Neighbor, Deborah Stone shows that Gordon Gekko's ethos, and that of Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan, stems from Malthus and Emerson at their worst. While Friedman and Reagan ushered us into the contemporary world; Malthus, Emerson, and a fear of communism led Herbert Hoover to believe that market forces would end the Great Depression and private charity would alleviate suffering. He was wrong.However, Malthus' real argument, according to Stone, is less a scientific treatise on population and hunger and more a political tract that suggests that helping the poor brings on more poverty. Emerson confuses bonds of community with bondage. It's as if they read Jonathan Swift's "Modest Proposal", and thought he was serious.Stone looks at where we are, how we got here, and where we need to go next. She outlines, and rebuts, "Seven Bad Arguments Against Help." She discusses what she calls "everyday altruism" and "The Samaritan Rebellion." The stories she relates can - and should - bring a tear to your eye - especially the accounts of the lives of people killed on September 11.She shows that democracy is built on cooperation, and describes what might be called Hoover's Fear, and America's Folly, which is the path on which our government treads. "Unlike dictatorships and totalitarian forms of government, democracy requires citizens to participate in making laws and policies - to govern themselves."Stone concludes that while most people believe that everyday altruism, volunteerism, and community service are outside the sphere of politics, this faith that people have the capacity to make a difference is integral to democracy and personal fulfillment. "Done right," she says, "government help strengthens democracy." The New Deal and the Great Society grew out of a sense of justice and fairness to correct visible inequalities of wealth and power. Ronald Reagan's Presidency and culture however, which has defined America since 1980 to the present, reverses the liberal, and liberating prescription. Rather than power, and assertiveness, the poor need tough discipline, to listen to authority, and to be submissive. After 30 years, it can be fairly established that Freidman's neoMalthusian principles, Reagan's beliefs, Hoover's fears have been America's folly.Stone is really asking is what is the purpose of government and an economy? She answers: * Jobs should pay a living wage, * Jobs should allow workers to do their jobs and take care of their families, * Government should supplement family care with publicly supported care.This is like John Ehrenfeld, in "Sustainability by Design" defining "Sustainability" as "Flourishing ... Forever."We need to take responsibility for our selves and our communities.

The author was kind enough to mention my experiences in assisting people in need (Page 188) but I think she entirely missed the point of my article in Newsweek, and this needs some serious clarification. First of all, yes, in my story I do express a lack of empathy for SOME of my clients, but, my god, woman, for other clients my descriptions suggest more than enough empathy to break anyone's heart. Furthermore, at the end of the story, a kitchen staff member does indeed "attempt" to explain her empathetic views to me, and in the last line of the story I GET IT, totally. So I am redeemed in the story, not left heartless and uncaring. My story is one of opening to awareness through service. It's a shame she didn't read it more carefully.

I use Stone's excellent "Policy Paradox" in teaching classes on public policy, so looked forward to reading this meditation on the role of government in society and our political system. It surpassed my high expectations going in. Very readable: completely free of academic jargon, and a wonderful mix of thought-provoking points and engaging stories kept my interest throughout. At the book's heart is a deceptively simple--and vital--question: how and when should we help our neighbor? And who, if anyone, should do so when I'm unable/unwilling? Stone convinced me that our current answers, rooted in a false spirit of "self-reliance," are poorly thought-out and, too often, downright cruel. I'm a fiscal conservative, but her account of what we the people collectively (i.e., our government) should do for one another in times of need left me both profoundly moved and ready to help. A genuinely important book, by a national treasure of an author.

This book, better than any other piece of journalism that I have seen, lays out clearly and shockingly, all in one place, the way we as a society were led down the path of mistrust and the politics of scarcity over the past half century. It is mind-blowing even to someone who is well-educated and reflective like myself to have all this put together in one place, to see how the United States of America turned so dramatically from the legacy of FDR and LBJ to the path of Reaganomics along which even our one Democratic president during the time since Reagan also trod. The book should be required in all public policy, ethics, political science, philospophy, and ethics classes at every college and university, undergraduate and graduate progam, in the country! I did not support Obama for President (was a Hillary supporter), but after reading this I see why he won the nomination -- he knows how to speak the language of altruism and morality that Stone articulates so well in her many examples offered throughout the book. Somehow, if we are to survive as a society and a political entity/nation, we MUST get back to the recognition of our mutual interdependence and away from the politics of fear-mongering and threatened scarcity that conservatives have been so good at for so long. We are coming apart at the seams; this book helps explain why.

For those of us old enough to remember times when public discourse was, generally, less hysterical and more respectful than it has become, the key question must be : has this decline in good manners and common decency come about by, as it were, an unconscious slide or has it been provoked deliberately by certain interests ? I read this book, which deals above all with the US some time ago, and found it related very well to the situation in this country, and, probably, throughout our Western world . The explanation for the decline is that disrespect for all altruistic impulses and policies has been cultivated very purposefully by the "Chicago School", its economism having no place for anything but rampant, unrestricted individualism ( which, of course, ends up inevitably as the law of the jungle) A couple of centuries of effort by the more decent thinkers and leaders to produce a more humane world have been reversed since, roughly, the Reagan-Thatcher era on the grounds that they alone are Right. Very Right. It is, indeed, hard to retain any respect at all for such false prophets who pose as "realists" (naturally, since you and your mega-rich buddies hold virtually all the strings, reality does appear largely in your image, don't it ?)The book shows with ample references how the process of de-altruisiation has been planned and executed.