Equality is not always right

Our welfare system is unsustainable. John Dalli has told us that the health system is unsustainable, as has the CEO of Mater Dei. We have the Today Public Policy Institute telling us the system is unsustainable, attributing the problem to a “culture of dependency” and we also have the governor of the Central Bank warning us every year for the last decade or so. Malta is €4.6 billion in debt, a figure that will keep on increasing for as long as our budget is in deficit and with an ageing population due to accelerate. Yet our politicians will not listen.

I believe that a partial solution lies in the introduction of means testing for every single welfare benefit, be it health, stipends or even children’s allowance. This would not mean that one either pays for a service in full or gets it totally free. Contributions could be graded in relation to disposable income. I believe that it is in our interest to do it smartly now or else we will be compelled to do it less compassionately in the future. I don’t think we have an option if we want to preserve the welfare state as we know it.

But there is another equally important point we are missing. Making the whole welfare system means tested will not only put the whole structure on sustainable ground but, paradoxically, it would be more socially just in spite of the unequal treatment. As things stand today, people who are struggling are paying taxes to sustain free medicines for people who do not need to have free medicine and paying for children allowances for families who do not need such assistance.

Were the system sustainable, one would be inclined to invoke equality, but today where welfare in concerned, social justice and equality are in conflict. Unless we make the system sustainable, the benefits which have to be handed out on the primary principle of social justice tomorrow will be jeopardised because we are giving precedence to the secondary principle of equality in the distribution of social benefits today.

However, I have very little hope that much will change today or in the near future, so this leads me to another related issue. I suggest that a catalyst that could help to bring about a sustainable welfare society is the change in our democratic system which re-moves the disincentive for politicians to do what is needed and what they know is needed. Today, weaning society off its dependency culture (I borrow this from the Today Public Policy Institute) would come at a cost to political parties and individually to their members. One, however, cannot be too critical of a politician for being reluctant to go against his personal interests (human nature), namely, the loss of government for the party and the risk of not being elected for individual politicians. But one can criticise an imperfect system which creates a conflict and places so much dependency on personal sacrifice for us to get things right. The conflict lies between the desire of the politician to gain re-election and the sensible and fair management of scarce resources.

Sometime in the past I had written to The Times suggesting that making the office of the Prime Minister a single legislature position would help to make government less partisan as it goes some way to removing the disincentive for the PM to introduce needed but painful changes (e.g. means testing); changes which would impact negatively on the chances of his re-election. In recognition, I had suggested the outgoing PM be given the option of taking up the office of the President (with all its perks). This would also make this office a (democratically) electable one rather than one handpicked by the party in government.

I have no illusions as to the realistic chances of such a change materialising. I acknowledge it is a little radical but I have no doubt that we can come up with changes which can improve our preferred though imperfect democratic system in order to liberate state governance from considerations unrelated to the judicious balance between conflicting interests of the state and limited resources. Again, paradoxically, such changes would go towards making the job of government much easier. One such change could be the introduction of the principle of annual balanced budgets already, I am under the impression, agreed to in principle by the two major parties.

Would not the initiative by the President to update the Constitution be the ideal forum to discuss this and other such initiatives? Funnily enough, I suspect that if this amendment to the Constitution were to happen, the introduction of means testing in some form or other, would inevitably quickly follow.