Joel Handler
        Law

            UCLA law professor Joel Handler has focused almost the entirety of his academic research on the single subject of welfare.  Unfortunately for his students and the millions who read his expert opinions in the media, these decades of focus have failed to produce a cogent opinion, or developed in Handler anything other than a business-as-usual statist outlook.

            Given his area of scholarship and his political ideals, the 1996 reform of the American welfare system was simultaneously a lucrative period for Handler in terms of media attention but personally disheartening.  While his protests were carried far and wide, Handler could ultimately do little other than stand and watch as this major nail was driven into the coffin of President Johnson’s statist “Great Society” initiative.

            Handler made a valiant effort to save welfare, to be sure.  One of his main criticisms, propounded in his book “Down from Bureaucracy” revolved around the theory that (as one review phrased it) “some disadvantaged members of society will find new opportunities in the changes of the 1990s…others will simply experience powerlessness under another name.”  Handler’s own words echoed this theme, when he complained that “for the vast majority of mothers and their families, life will go on much as before, unless dramatic changes take place in America's labor markets and the larger environment.” 

            Handler made the even grimmer prediction to the Riverside, California Press-Enterprise that “The vast majority of [these former welfare recipient will] remain in poverty.  Jobs are very uncertain.  They have very difficult problems with child care, housing and transportation.”  Handler treats this statement as if it somehow comprised an insight rather than a fact of life for all but the wealthiest or most talented members of society.  If Handler means to emphasize that former welfare recipients have it harder than the average American, he’ll get no argument.  Nor should he be scorned for drawing attention to the issue.  But he also does nothing to help broaden the coalition of concern when he accuses American society of scapegoating welfare recipients.  Or, in Handler’s denser academic language, “Majoritarian society affirms its norms by stigmatizing others.”  Handler here makes the mistake of assuming that the mother who chides her child, “Work hard so you don’t end up like that homeless man,” cannot also be a hard-working volunteer at a soup kitchen.  It is utterly logical and morally defensible to portray another’s failures as an instructive lesson on what not to do in life.  Indeed, learning from the mistakes of others is the way of the world.

            Handler is no fan of the reformed system of welfare as it currently exists, and excoriates the practice of workfare, which requires, wonder of wonders, that welfare recipients work in exchange for their money.  To anyone else, such a work-for-money exchange might seem common-sense.  But in Handler’s opinion, we could be doing better, a lot better.  His better way is the same as that of his fellow faculty member Carol Pateman: a guaranteed income.  This idea, last considered in 1969 under the auspices of President Nixon and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, would have paid every United States citizen a minimum amount of money with no strings attached and no work expected in return.  In addition to advancing this golden ideal in his book “Social Citizenship and Workfare in the United States and Western Europe: The Paradox of Inclusion,” Handler is also a Benefactor-level donor and a Life Member of the Basic Income Earth Network. 

            A close reading of BIEN’s “What is Basic Income?” section gives a good dose of the through-the-looking-glass logic which drives the movement.  BIEN notes, “it is the inability to tackle unemployment with conventional means that has led in the last decade or so to the idea being taken seriously throughout Europe by a growing number of scholars and organizations.”  The emphasis on what Europe thinks, and what Europe is experiencing, is instructive in this case.  As it turns out, BIEN used to stand for “Basic Income European Network,” and it is Europe’s particular economic ideals that propel this supposedly global movement. 

            It is indeed true, as BIEN says, that parts of Europe have been struggling with high unemployment.  What BIEN and Handler fail to realize is that ‘sickly’ is the natural condition of the statist economies that come nearest to approximating a basic income scheme.  Welfare states that manage to survive or even nominally thrive do so because of unduplicable natural advantages.  France, with its 35-hour work weeks and 10.1% unemployment rate for 2004, is a prime example of a sickly statist economy. 

             Contrast that to The Netherlands, the prototypical statist success.  The country, despite its cradle-to-grave welfare system, boasts a 6% unemployment rate, among the lowest in Europe.  But as noted, exceptional statist economies are also unduplicable.  The Netherlands is a quiescent, ethnically homogeneous country, with welfare programs massively subsidized by North Sea oil and gas revenues.  By comparison, the United States has an ethnically mixed population of 295 million citizens, a net oil deficit, and still boasts a 5.5% unemployment rate.  The lesson in all of this is that some socialism is like some poison: even a little bit is a lot bad.  What BIEN and Handler are calling for is even more backwards.  Having found that mild to moderate statism doesn’t work, they’re calling the same tune, only twice as fast.  Let’s be thankful that Handler is only an academic, and that he and BIEN remain proponents of a fringe economic scheme.

            In addition to advocating for a massive American welfare state, Handler also keeps company with classroom indoctrination theorists.  Handler appeared at the first plenary session of the October 15-17, 1998 Society of American Law Teachers (SALT) conference titled “Power, Pedagogy & Praxis: Moving the Classroom to Action.”  According to the summary written by Professor Sumi Cho, the moderator of Handler’s plenary session, the gathering storm clouds of conservatism spurred the need for “extending our teaching beyond the classroom and into the area of political engagement.” This new era was epitomized by “Adarand and the Fifth Circuit’s Hopwood decision, Propositions 187 and 209 in California, the Welfare-to-Works and Defense of Marriage Acts, and Solomon II.”  Bear in mind that this is 1998, in the heart of President Bill Clinton’s seemingly bulletproof second term.  If Cho was already feeling chill winds, she likely died from exposure in the first 100 days of the Bush presidency.

            As a response to outside political reversals (for liberals, anyway), Cho wrote, it was important for law professors to redouble their own efforts at indoctrination.  Cho urged, nay, demanded that professors become ever more resolute in convincing students that every political issue has only one correct interpretation (the liberal one, natch).  This is no exaggeration of Cho’s view.  In her own words, the “Power, Pedagogy & Praxis” conference “attempts to reconfigure the pedagogical by placing the “classroom” more consciously and directly into relationship with external power arrangements and community activism.”  It would have been bad enough had Handler merely been in the audience for this kind of partisan strategizing; attendance leaves plenty of room for plausible deniability.  But his direct participation, undoubtedly as part of a favorable academic chorus, leaves little question about Handler’s willingness to strategize and promote the increasing politicization of the classroom.

            It’s not very often that such direct evidence of indoctrinationist activity by a UCLA professor is found.  Most of them, frankly, don’t need someone to tell them how to be a better classroom radical.  Those who are open about their agenda, as is Joel Handler, are to be congratulated for openness of agenda, if not content.