In more than 10 years of service in my profession, I have never found it so difficult to explain to people why we need to support social welfare as in recent months. When people hear where I work, they often mention a great deal about the government's unusual and unreasonable actions in recent times. They also criticize social welfare for being a faulty system that is meant to benefit certain interest groups (even if they are the disadvantaged) and serve as a vote-buying strategy.
Regardless of the purposes, this kind of strategic abuse just lends a helping hand to the capitalist class and economists who always oppose social welfare. On the pretext of distributing meager benefits to certain underprivileged people via the government, they can effectively shift the focus and target of the majority of people who have gradually felt resentment and bitterness due to economic hardship. They also cover up the problems for which the new government is responsible, such as the great incentives offered to big business groups and the drain of capital from the country.
The strategic application of this kind of welfare politics in a bold, rash manner is an attempt to polarize a social movement in which many courses of resistance and class issues are beginning to take shape. In any case, they would be lucky if they succeed. If they fail, the public will have to pay the price for their undertaking.
An important task is to differentiate a legitimate social welfare system from a false social welfare system. First, the equal status of citizens and the advancement of social unity provide an opportunity to examine a sense of justice which has been torn apart by the phenomenon of the "Two Taiwans." Next, from a complete, clear social account record, we can see how the heavy tax burden of wage earners turns into basic financial resources to subsidize the capitalist class and strengthen corporate competitiveness, as well as how those meager subsidies provided to the disadvantaged are used as a door decoration and a scapegoat for the economic ruin of the country.
Soon after it came to power, the DPP government held the Economic Development Advisory Conference to advocate the economy's precedence over social welfare. As a result, the standing of the policy of social welfare hit rock bottom. Many incentive measures that offered tax reduction, allowances and public investment were used to support big business groups and the survival of certain industries.
The marketing of this kind of "supply-side economics" for the capitalist class did not help to slow down the pace of industrial migration to China, stop the drain of capital from the country or solve the problem of huge debts left behind in Taiwan. Instead, it facilitated the widening of the wealth gap and the polarization of our country into "Two Taiwans." With the propaganda of "international competitiveness," the government even lifted labor market control and efficiency assessment to quickly lower and transfer the operational costs of businesses, thereby squeezing the survival space of the middle class and creating a polarized situation.
Since the SARS outbreak, the social welfare system has been used for "individualized" personal monitoring and community control. The following attempts to implement employment measures, financial reforms for the farmers' and fishermen's associations, and educational reforms to combat tuition hikes have all left the new government in bad shape. Now the government must fully mobilize the administrative system and scrape together resources in order to defend itself in the upcoming election battle.
Consequently, we have seen a wave of messages concerning "welfare" after the government proved incapable of recovering the economy. The government's attempts to fight unemployment with NT$70 billion worth of subsidies (including wage subsidies for employers), increased subsidies for the elderly, proposed subsidies for Aboriginal chiefs, and low-interest educational loans have all made the public even more worried about the government's shaky finances.
By using the local Taiwanese consciousness repeatedly to cover up their own class interests, the authorities and their supporters always impute their failures to the previous government and various pro-unification ideologies. This kind of stance focusing on the split between the new and the old, or between independence and unification, is perhaps outdated. The broadening of class division and the demand for social justice point at those authorities who have fallen short of the expectations for reform and progress.
The new government will not be exempt from responsibility just because it has only been in power for merely more than three years. In fact, the new government was a solution sought by middle class politics.
From the historical development of capitalism, we can see that the KMT is the authoritarian aristocrat and the DPP is the capitalist class. As for the working class and citizen politics, they must await a new wave of social movements to strengthen their cause.
If we take a serious approach to separate the goal of social welfare from the application of policy measures, we can create a third road that transcends politics and has a real sense of social vitality. It is only when we see through the fictitiousness of a pan-blue and pan-green showdown, as well as the fading spectrum of unification and independence, that we can make a turning point possible.
Chang Shr-syung is a professor of social welfare at National Chung Cheng University and a member of the Taipei Society.
Translated by Grace Shaw
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