Disability services - efficient, standardised, impersonal

The dominant ideas about economic policy owe much to the influence of the Public Choice school of thought, and to the general neoclassical belief that competitive market forces, driven by individual self-interest, are capable of running the most efficient and socially fair economy. Self-interest is thus altruistic!

This belief is ascribed to Adam Smith by those who take his book The Wealth of Nations as arguing that individuals acting in their own self-interest as economic agents would tend to do whatever brought them the greatest material reward, be it in the form of wages, rent or profit. The work that earns those rewards also contributes to the economic well-being of society.

At least two things are wrong with that reasoning.

First, Adam Smith never suggested that all individual interests are selfish. His first book, Theory of Moral Sentiments, explored the range and variety of our human feelings for one another: selfish and unselfish, hostile and indifferent, and actively helpful, for people we know and more generally for human kind.

The interests that prompt our economic activities can include joy in the work we do and pride in doing it well and in its value to others. Adam Smith knew much more than neoliberal economists do about the range of selfish, unselfish, shared and generous interests that motivate our economic activities. But neither he nor they give much attention to the possibility of society being inclusive for people with severe disabilities. For example, most people with severe disabilities need particular kinds of government intervention to help their efforts to cope with the hardships and human problems created by disability, and exacerbated by various kinds of market failure.

American disability author and activist Marta Russell believes that neoclassical economists see the free market as an equaliser, in that when it expands the economy, all will share in its prosperity. Its rising inequality is indifferent; as a natural phase of the business cycle it is good for the market and society at large, promoting efficiency through standardisation.

Compare the use of public policies that can directly affect social inclusiveness. Leon Falkins acknowledges of late that the delivery of adequate social policy is interrupted by the political use of similar policy that creates social dilemmas. (A dilemma is best defined as a catch22, quandary or paradox.) Therefore social dilemmas are those that are created under the current government agendas, stating:

Specifically, if government is invoked to solve the social dilemma, then government, being a public good itself, provides a new social dilemma possibly much worse than the original!

While Falkins is a public choice theorist it does not diminish his concern for problems; however, there are concerns about the prescriptions for solutions, especially where these have an impact on the disability sector. This points to the political dilemmas that are encouraged through current government public policy, creating a situation where another social policy problem is developed to cover up the original.

This outlines a problem for social policy developed by governments that are developed by using methods to increase efficiencies, despite not necessarily being effective. Stretton would dodge such problems by insisting that we don’t need more or less government, we just need better government. The fact that the recent government approach to reform is to reduce its size, by means which impact on social policy, tends to favour the government production of social dilemmas.

My personal dealings with Disability Services and their stated goals under the State Disability Plan suggest that people with severe physical disabilities receive no more than social rhetoric, and a form of social dilemma.

As I noted in a previous On Line Opinion article:

This provision of personal care, which has not been responsive to my changing disabilities and life style, again reveals significant problems in attaining the goals of the State Disability Plan in the context of the everyday lives of people with severe physical disabilities. It is a long way from the stated goal of the State Disability plan to “focus on supporting people with a disability in flexible ways, based on their individual needs, so that each person can live the life style they want to lead”.

This highlights the confusion that can be born out of political misstatements. Victoria’s Disability Act 2006 was passed to further the Victoria’s commitment to its State Disability Plan. Is the Disability Act 2006 just another social dilemma? After all the initial set-up costs are taking vast amounts of money out of a shrinking budget.

Traditional social-democratic and progressive theories reject the notion that inequality is a necessary evil, and contend that sustained economic equality is desirable to maintain social stability and to promote justice and sustain political democracy. Traditional social democrats believe that the market is not self-regulating. Government efforts to counterbalance the negative effects of supply and demand include spending to create more jobs, market intervention to equalise skills and increase job training, and legislation mandating equal access to jobs through civil rights and affirmative action.

Stretton outlines the traditional Social Democratic belief:

Societies like ours needed to change some of their moral beliefs. But instead of replacing old morals by better ones, a lot of people were persuaded that societies didn’t need moral beliefs any more. That is of course a moral belief with a vengeance and one which capitalists and intellectuals can exploit for fun and profit.

Stretton believes selfishness is part of human nature, and its opposite unselfishness is directly related too much that is good in society.

Based on such thoughts is an ideological dilemma that troubles economic thought today. Should the welfare sector become more efficient by developing a more market-like system that could supply and deliver individual social services to those in genuine need of them?

Stretton asks how could individual preferences in practice produce workable public policies? The technical planning, budgeting and co-ordination which now strain the resources of elaborate public services would have to be designed instead by each voter as he or she registered his or her vote.

In practice critics of existing public services want to privatise the social services that could in principle be paid for by their customers, as we have done to telephones, banks, electricity, public road and rail and air transport and some security services. But hospital and medical services and education for all, regardless of capacity to pay?

As a particular example, there is a huge unmet need for disability services where politicians consistently use the old cliché of not having the money in the budget to solve the problems, while they find ways to waste the public’s monies by setting up new initiatives that are bound to fail.

Disability services cannot responsibly be effectively systematised or standardised for the efficiency objectives of a purely competitive society. Efficiency of disability services is irrelevant in my case and for most disabled people who require services to live. Disability services can help to provide essentials of life to people who are severely physically disabled.