Welfare handouts aren't fair – and the public knows it

[Trajan]

interesting data from across the Pond.

I find myself in agreement with their findings....


Welfare handouts aren't fair – and the public knows it
A new survey shows that despite years of propaganda from the Left, Britons retain a deep-seated sense of fairness and individual responsibility



Like a mythical traveller seeking truth, a think tank has asked a profound question: what is fairness? And lo, the people have answered with (almost) one voice: what "fair" means is that those who are deserving shall receive, and those who are not shall be – well, not exactly cast out, but certainly not entitled to everything that's going.

As we report today, Policy Exchange – supposedly the Prime Minister's favourite ideas outlet – has done a brave and unusual thing. Rather than polling the public just on policy and voting intention, it has put a far more abstract moral issue before them. It instructed the pollsters at YouGov to find out precisely what the public thought the most powerful term of approbation in the political lexicon – "fair" – actually amounted to.

The quite unequivocal reply that was received (with breathtakingly enormous majorities in some forms) came as no surprise to this column. To most voters, fairness does not mean an equal distribution of resources and wealth, or even a redistribution of these things according to need. It means, as the report's title – "Just Deserts" – implies, that people get what they deserve. And what is deserved, the respondents made clear, refers to that which is achieved by effort, talent or dedication to duty: in other words, earned on merit.

As I have written so often on this page, when ordinary people use the word "fair", they mean that you should get out of life pretty much what you put in. Or, as the report's authors put it, "Voters' idea of fairness is strongly reciprocal – something for something." By obvious inference, a "something for nothing" society is the opposite of fair. And this view, interestingly, is expressed by Labour voters in pretty much the same proportion as all others.

more at-

Welfare handouts aren't fair – and the public knows it - Telegraph

Polling abstract data-

http://www.policyexchange.org.uk/images/publications/pdfs/JUST_DESERTS.pdf

 

[Wiseacre]

"Just deserts" works for me - but the other side of the coin is a fair shot at an opportunity to earn those just deserts. It's never going to be equal, some are born with the proverbial silver spoon, but I see nothing wrong with continuing to work on making opportunity more available.

So, welfare no. I might give you a fish today, but tomorrow you need to go get your own fish. But at least everyone deserves a place to throw in their fishin' line.