The Conservative Heart

by Arthur C. Brooks

  Needless to say, I think this cramped thinking gets it exactly backward. Psychologically and philosophically, welfare is no substitute for work. Relieving extreme material want is a necessary step, and we should be thankful our government has the resources to achieve that. But at the same time, a bloated welfare state that nudges middle-class citizens away from the labor force is moving our society away from the dignity of earned success.

  Lesson 2. All honest work is a sanctified pursuit.

  Materialism isn’t the only reason that someone might view Dharavi as more degraded than Marienthal. Another reason is elitism. Some people simply can’t imagine anyone could derive satisfaction from sorting toothbrushes.

  We saw this elitist attitude on display when Vice President Joe Biden appeared on The View in February 2014 (no, I am not a regular viewer). The vice president took the opportunity to tell women why Obamacare was a blessing: It would give them health care and thus allow them to quit their jobs! “How many of you are single women, with children, in a dead-end job?” Biden asked.36

  Impressively, this single sentence captures a great deal of what is wrong with elite society. People who have jobs that other elites appreciate look down their noses at people in other positions. They think that anyone whose job doesn’t require a lot of higher education isn’t really living at all—and that government should compensate these poor people so they can quit their undignified toiling.

  A few years ago, a New York Times reporter interviewed a thirty-nine-year-old Dharavian widow named Sylva Vanita Baskar. She works as a seamstress and earns additional income by renting out her spare room to four laborers. She banks an extra forty dollars a month and lives in the other room with her four children. Through unbelievable thrift, Sylva managed to save several months of her entire salary for a computer to help her kids study. Another several months’ salary goes every year to their private school tuition. Her daughter wants to be a flight attendant and see the world. Her son has designs on becoming a mechanical engineer. “The children’s lives should be better,” Sylva told the reporter with pride. “Whatever hardships we face are fine.”37

  There is incredible dignity in this woman’s work. She is building a better life for herself and for her family. She can come home every single day—exhausted, no doubt—and think to herself, Those children are going to have better lives because of what I do. She is unlocking new opportunities for them through finances, to be sure. But even more important, she is setting a powerful example. She is modeling values that will enable them to pursue happiness throughout their lives.

  Some people just can’t see this. They do not see Sylva Vanita Baskar’s work as a source of dignity. They see her labor as a punishment. Too many people in positions of power and privilege look down on those who don’t make a lot of money, or whose work is deemed boring by the cosmopolitan crowd’s standards.

  We know better than this. The work of the seamstress in Dharavi is precisely equal in moral standing to the work of a CEO, a think tank president, or the vice president of the United States. A thriving economy creates jobs for all kinds of people at all levels of education and experience. If the ancestors of today’s professors had been prohibited from sorting toothbrushes or sewing clothes for the workers’ own “benefit,” my job would not exist.

  Do not misinterpret this. We have a lot more work to do to ensure that the seamstress, the toothbrush sorter, and the McDonald’s worker can earn more money for their families. America in 2015 is not a well-oiled machine that churns out real-life Horatio Alger stories. We must be warriors so that everyone can become more prosperous, especially those who need relief the most.

  But abundance without the dignity of earned success is a shallow victory, and we must set our sights higher. Pope Francis, noting the youth unemployment rate in Europe, recently asked his fellow European bishops, “What are we doing for the young people? Giving them something to eat? Yes, that’s the first thing. But that doesn’t give dignity to a young person, to anyone. Dignity comes from work. And there is the danger that the children of Grandma Europe are losing their dignity because they do not have jobs and cannot bring bread home.”38

  The people of Dharavi have that dignity. They are bringing bread home. They are sanctifying their work. If we fail to understand this, we will implement policies that assign insufficient value to jobs for the people who need the blessings of work most of all. We will make America more like Marienthal.

  Lesson 3. It’s not where you start out that defines you. It’s where you are going.

  A dynamic society defines itself by where it is going and what it is doing. A static society defines itself by where it is now. In the last chapter, we saw that Dharavi is a dynamic society. The Europe that spawned Marienthal and modern-day Spain is increasingly static.

  Even poor Europeans live in nicer homes than people in Dharavi. But the people of Dharavi don’t define themselves by the walls around them. They define themselves by the future they are building for themselves and their children; by the values they are passing on to their children; by the strong bonds of faith, family, and community that they work to strengthen every day.

  Dharavi itself is, literally, a place for people who go places. Most of the residents have moved from poor villages all over rural India. They willingly migrate to live in a crowded and sometimes dizzying slum. Imagine the courage this requires—and the determination to be defined not by where you are, but by where you are going. That’s the mantra of the migrant. That has historically been the mantra of America.

  Throughout our history, America has been a bright beacon for such stories. Our moral example and the economic system we propagate have played an enormous role in building present-day Dharavi. But if we borrow Grandma Europe’s amnesia and forget our own lessons, Marienthal will be our future.

  So where are we? Whether we visit a homeless shelter in New York, a ghetto in Washington, D.C., a slum in India, or an unemployed village in Austria, the lessons for the conservative heart remain the same. We have a duty and privilege to help those with less power than we have. And we need them to remind us of the dignity of all work, and the importance of progress.

  The agenda for accomplishing this involves a culture of faith, family, community, and work. It requires a little bit of help from all of us. And it requires a nation built on real hope.

  This agenda has a name. It is called social justice.

  Chapter 5

  A CONSERVATIVE SOCIAL JUSTICE AGENDA:

  A Better Way to Fight Poverty

  Jestina Clayton came to America in 2000 as a refugee escaping Sierra Leone’s brutal civil war. Her name, “Jestina,” means “justice” in her home country.1 But what Jestina found when she tried to start a business in America was anything but justice.

  Jestina moved to Utah in search of a better life. Looking for a way to help support her growing family while her husband went to school, she saw an opportunity: There were a number of parents in Utah who had adopted African children, but did not know how to braid their hair. Growing up in Sierra Leone, Jestina had learned the art of traditional African hair braiding. She had been braiding hair since she was five years old. And so, like countless American entrepreneurs before her, Jestina came up with an idea to tap into this unserved market: She would start an African hair-braiding business for these adopted children.

  It was not long before word spread among parents, and her business took off. “It’s not like it was bringing me millions,” she told National Public Radio, “but it was covering groceries.”2

  Jestina Clayton was an American success story. She had escaped a terrible situation, come to the land of freedom and opportunity, and founded a little business that, while not making her rich, was allowing her to help take care of her family. She was building her life. That is the American Dream, right?

  Not surprisingly, Jestina was shocked when she received an email from a stranger who warned her, “It is illegal in the state of Utah to do any form of extensions without a
valid cosmetology license.” The sender threatened to report her to the authorities if she did not stop braiding hair.

  Jestina had thought that in America, all you needed to start a business was a good idea and the willingness to work hard to earn your success. So she was stunned to discover that she needed a cosmetology license from the government requiring 2,000 hours of classes costing $16,000. She would have to study 40 hours a week for 50 weeks to do something she already knew how to do. Worst of all, not one single hour of the required training was in African hair braiding. The license had nothing to do with her business.

  Jestina was sure that if she explained her unique business to the state cosmetology board, they would see the absurdity of the situation. She was not using any chemicals or equipment that required training. She was just braiding hair. She came to the board with a PowerPoint presentation, explained her business, and asked for an exemption. They turned her down, and told her that she had two choices—get the required training or get the state legislature to change the law. Their solution was to ask a war refugee, new to our country and trying to start a new business, to lobby the state legislature.

  Jestina had hit a dead end. She was forced to close down her business—eliminating the source of income she had built for her family, as well as a useful service needed by these adoptive families.3

  That might have been the sad end of the story, had it not been for the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit public interest law firm devoted to individual rights and economic liberty. The institute heard about Jestina’s plight and stepped in to help her. Together, they sued the state of Utah. They argued that the required 2,000 hours of training was more than is required to become an armed security guard (36 hours), a mortgage loan originator (60 hours), or an emergency medical technician (130 hours) combined. And in 2012, a federal judge ruled in Jestina’s favor. The court declared that “to premise Jestina’s right to earn a living by braiding hair on [Utah’s licensing] scheme is wholly irrational and a violation of her constitutionally protected rights.”

  “The system works,” Jestina declared after the ruling.4

  Well, sometimes. Jestina was lucky that a powerful public interest law firm took up her cause, but not everyone who faces the brick wall of government regulation has those kinds of resources at their disposal—especially not the poor. Most people in Jestina’s situation just give up.

  And Jestina’s situation is not unique. Consider: If you want to start a licensed real estate business in Washington, D.C.—a typical second career for upper-income families—you need 135 hours of training.5 A well-to-do mom can afford a babysitter to take care of the kids while she puts in those reasonable hours. But if you want to start a business painting nails or braiding hair in our nation’s capital—a typical first income for poor, single mothers without an education—you need 1,500 hours of training to receive your license.6 When it is harder to become a hair braider than a real estate agent in America’s capital city, the system is officially rigged against people at the bottom.

  Jestina was one of the lucky ones. Millions of Americans without her drive, grit—and the help of a law firm—have little hope to rise in America. Currently, all they are offered are promises that the government will stick it more to the rich through higher taxes and greater redistribution. But this will never help a poor American climb out of poverty, find a better job, and get a good education—let alone start a business.

  We need real solutions to give those in need the social justice they deserve.

  WHAT IS “SOCIAL JUSTICE”?

  Many conservatives recoil at the mere mention of “social justice.” They see the term as the exclusive language of the left. But this is a mistake. “Social justice” simply means working for a society that lives up to our American standards of fairness. And conservatives believe in fairness just as much as liberals do. We just define it differently.

  The left generally espouses the idea of “redistributive fairness.” Liberals argue that beyond some unspecified limit, an uneven distribution of income is unfair on its face, and so promoting social justice means using government to promote greater financial equality for its own sake.

  Conservatives, on the other hand, champion “meritocratic fairness.” We believe that real fairness means that everyone should have abundant opportunity to pursue their happiness, and that—above a reasonable safety net for the truly indigent—rewards should follow hard work and merit.

  Put another way, the left advocates greater equality at the finish line. Liberal efforts to attain social justice, then, usually attempt to equalize outcomes through redistributive taxation and social welfare spending that extends far above the poverty level.

  To conservatives, a social justice agenda means making the starting line more equal for the vulnerable by improving education, expanding the opportunity to work, and increasing access to entrepreneurship. Then it must ensure that rewards reflect effort, merit, and virtue. Further, true conservative social justice must also fight cronyism that favors powerful interests and keeps the little guy down.

  And what are the policy specifics of conservative social justice? These come from listening to the people who need our help. That’s what I was doing in Dharavi and at the Doe Fund.

  Strangely, this approach seems to be a rare one. Most research on poverty is performed with actual people nowhere in sight. One of my colleagues tells an instructive story. One afternoon, as he toiled at his PhD dissertation in a top university’s poverty research center, an actual poor person walked in. He had seen the signs on the building and thought they could do something to help him. The expert researchers had no idea what to do. Their instinct was to call security.

  There is no substitute for hearing what people who have actually lived through tough times have to say—people like Nazerine Griffin, Devon Greene, and Richard Norat, people who once slept on the streets and are now working and earning their own success. They told me precisely what people who are struggling need to build prosperous and satisfying lives. They’ll tell you that it was three things that helped them rebuild their lives: good values, a little bit of help, and a whole lot of hope.

  It is on these three pillars—values, help, and hope—that conservatives can build the specifics of the social justice agenda that America deserves.

  VALUES

  The problem with conventional government approaches to poverty is that many of them unwittingly give up on people. As we learned from the example of the Doe Fund, this flows from a lack of belief in the poor. As individuals and as a society, we often treat poor people as less capable than others of leading productive lives.

  By now, everyone acknowledges that poverty in America is often intertwined with social pathologies, such as substance abuse, criminality, domestic violence, and other problems. Values thus play a pivotal role in determining whether people live in prosperity or poverty. According to an analysis by scholars at the Brookings Institution, adults who finished high school, gained employment, and waited until they were at least twenty-one and married before having children had just a 2 percent chance of living in poverty. Their odds of moving into the middle class were better than 70 percent. Those who did not follow that sequence had a 77 percent chance of living in poverty and just a 4 percent chance of reaching the middle class.7

  Moreover, the Brookings research shows that the decline of marriage and the growth in out-of-wedlock births dramatically increases people’s chances of living in poverty. Today, 40 percent of babies born to young women who have a high school degree or less education are born outside of a marriage, making it four times likelier those children will live in poverty. By contrast, if the same share of adults were married today as in 1970, that fact alone would reduce poverty in America by more than a quarter.

  Are these problems a cause or a consequence of poverty? Some on the left insist they are symptomatic, and that ramping up income redistribution and government spending programs would help clear these issues away. A few on the right declare that
these moral issues are the only ones that matter, and material poverty would vanish if individuals would simply reform their ways.

  The truth is more complicated: Values and economics are intertwined. Both common sense and the testimony of the poor themselves tell us values always matter, and that moral intervention must accompany economic intervention for the latter to be truly effective.

  This is, as we’ve learned, why the Doe Fund has been so successful in transforming the lives of homeless men in New York City. Paying child support is a must. Start using drugs again and work is taken away until you get clean. These ethical standards are nonnegotiable. The Doe Fund is strict, but it is precisely through that rigor that it never gives up on people. If they slip up, it helps them back up. But it never stops holding everyone to the same high moral standards.

  The key lessons are no different from the lessons that good parents teach their children. Don’t use drugs, stay in school, work hard, save your money, be responsible, don’t have kids until you graduate and get married, and live an upstanding life—or else the odds will be stacked against you. I’ve never met a parent who believes that their kids have to receive their allowance before it is fair to ask them to behave decently. It’s the other way around!

  So why are these values good enough for our children, but not good enough for our brothers and sisters in need? When we fail to share our values with the poor, we effectively discriminate against them. And that hidden bigotry robs them of the tools they need to live lives of dignity and self-reliance.