As surprising as it may be to some, I was not always the zealous and single-minded advocate for liberty I am today. For three years, I studied film scoring at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, where a sizable population of panhandlers persists despite the often hostile weather. The school is both prestigious and expensive, so it will come as no surprise that there were a wealth of talented (and poor) student performers who would have loved to make a few extra bucks by playing in public. Not only would these performances provide a service for passersby who enjoy the music, it would give musicians extra practice and experience turning their skills into cash. It is difficult to see a downside to allowing an area to thrive with great art and potential income at the same time.
Yet, the actual performances one sees strolling along Massachusetts Avenue are curiously few. The reason for this is that Boston has busking laws, regulations requiring a government issued permit for any kind of public performance. The cumbersome red tape of acquiring a busking license meant that many students were unable or unwilling to jump through the necessary hoops to earn money from their craft. This brings us back to the panhandlers. Can you guess what activity requires no license from the state? That’s right, begging. Faced with a choice between providing entertainment for money and simply asking for a handout, the law overwhelmingly favors the latter.
The backwards incentives in such a regulatory scheme are mindblowing. It is reasonable to assume that the members of a city’s homeless population would like to increase their incomes by learning a skill with which they can entertain their potential customers. It is also reasonable to assume that the local community would prefer workers to beggars, yet the law strongly disincentivizes the former in favor of the latter. If the acquisition of a busking license proves too great a challenge for well-trained music students, how can we expect the homeless to marshall the wherewithal to apply for one?
Boston is far from unique in this respect. In Oregon, a young girl was recently rebuked for attempting to sell mistletoe in celebration of the holiday season and to help pay for the cost of her braces. The progressive and tolerant state will brook no spreading of holiday cheer without the express permission of the government however. God forbid people try to pull themselves up without the helping hand of the benevolent state.
The girl, prevented from contributing to society in a positive way, is encouraged instead to be a parasite, taking in scraps either voluntarily given or coerced from the hands of taxpayers, while being forbidden from giving anything in return.
This is the mindset of progressivism: to keep down the productive in order to create a society of helpless dependents, to manufacture necessity in order to continue its own existence. Like the psychologically sick mother who abuses her children in order to then comfort them, deriving perverse satisfaction from the feeling of being needed, progressives delight in perpetuating poverty and indigence for the sake of their own self-importance.
The object of any poverty relief should be to increase the standard of living for poor people, not to keep them as pets, maintained by handouts that preserve their helplessness for generation after generation. Liberals maintain the fiction that they are motivated by concern for the poor and a desire to help those on the bottom rung of society, but actions speak louder than words. Labor regulations and licensing procedures aggressively discourage self-sufficiency or self-improvement among the homeless, while encouraging perpetual dependence with no hope for the future.