Santa Claus and the Welfare State

Every year at around Christmas time there are numerous opportunities to donate toys or other gifts to charity. The idea is that there are many kids out there who, absent these charitably donated toys, would be getting nothing on Christmas morning. I'm a big supporter of this effort and I think that even though buying a toy to donate is, for most of us, no great hardship whatsoever, it can have a big impact on some child's holiday. I have very fond memories of my childhood Christmases. I couldn't imagine what it would have been like to not have gotten any gifts on Christmas morning.

My own kids are now 6 and 8 years old. As a family, we have donated to the gift drive at our church for the past several years. My kids enjoy being involved in this act of charity. They help to choose the gifts based on the profiles of the children we have selected and they usually help to wrap the gifts as well. In the beginning they just went along with the program and didn't think too much about it. They just knew that we were buying a gift for a 5 year old boy or a 6 year old girl and they didn't think much beyond whether the child would like the toy we bought.

Last year, though, they seemed to think a little more deeply about what we were doing and why we were doing it. One of my kids asked "Why do we have to donate gifts? Aren't these children going to get gifts from Santa?"

On the surface this is a very logical question, and it seems simple enough, but when you consider that my kids still believe in Santa, you realize this isn't really that simple of a question. The challenge is in answering it in such a way that still preserves the illusion that Santa exists but also makes the point that it is still important for us to donate these gifts to help children who are less fortunate.

The answer that my wife and I gave was to remind our kids that each year they get a couple of gifts from Santa, but they also get gifts from their parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, and family friends. The gifts we would be donating would supplement the gifts that those kids would, of course, still be getting from Santa. Essentially the donated gifts would take the place of the gifts from the parents or other family members who can't afford to buy gifts this year. My kids took this answer at face value and didn't ask any follow-up questions or probe any further. Whew!

I was recently thinking about this question again and realized that in some ways it actually reveals a lot about our society. Here's an interesting thought question: what if Santa really did exist? How do you think that would affect people's charitable giving during the Christmas season?

Let's suppose that Santa really does exist. What if children all over the world just automatically got gifts on Christmas morning without any parental involvement whatsoever? How would that change our attitudes toward the donating of gifts to charity? I don't think it would be a stretch to say that charitable donations would decrease substantially because if the kids are getting gifts from Santa, they obviously don't need any donated toys. The main motivation for most people to donate toys at Christmas is because we KNOW there is no Santa Claus and there would be some kids who would not be getting anything if we didn't donate some toys. Sure, there would still be some people out there who would donate toys even if Santa did exist, but I think there would far fewer of them. The whole motivation behind the act of charity goes away when the toys from the North Pole really do magically show up on Christmas morning.

So, I think we could draw a lot of parallels between Santa Claus and the welfare state. With the one notable exception in that Santa doesn't need to seize money from the citizens under threat of jail or worse in order to fund his gift-giving. (You could argue that the elves are actually slave labor, but that's a topic for another post...)

So, what are the similarities? Here are some that come to mind:

• Both Santa and the welfare state are impersonal. Nobody actually interacts with Santa, the whole reason he delivers his gifts in the middle of the night is to avoid contact. The government agencies are similarly faceless. Some unemployment agencies allow recipients to fill out applications online - no need to even talk to a person.
• The gifts don't "cost" anything. Christmas toys just somehow materialize at the North Pole (I know the elves supposedly build them - but where do they get the wood, paint, etc..?) Santa's gifts are unlike other gifts because there is no implied sacrifice on part of the gift giver in order to provide you with the gift. If Aunt Ethel gives you a pair of socks, you at least know that she had to pay for them. There was some sacrifice on her part in terms of money and time. Like gifts from Santa, welfare benefits just come from the government - they just somehow materialize. It's not clear who had to sacrifice to pay for them. Taxpayers are like Santa's elves - just nameless slaves.
• You don't actually have to do anything to earn your gift. Santa merely applies some arbitrary judgement of naughty or nice, but otherwise pretty much everyone gets something. Government benefits are similarly automatic - just being above a certain age qualifies you for SS or Medicare. Just lose your job and you qualify for unemployment benefits.
• They both create a sense of entitlement. Children expect their gifts from Santa each year - despite the occasional parental threat of telling Santa to put them on the naughty list. People similarly feel entitled to "their" government benefits. They are often spoken of as a "right".

Think about it. One of the primary arguments in favor of social welfare programs is that if the State were not there to take care of these people, nobody else will. I don't believe that's true at all. The Christmas "Toys for Tots" phenomenon provides a concrete example of how people feel compelled to help others out when they know there is no Santa. In much the same way that Santa, if he existed, would crowd out private charity, state-sponsored welfare currently crowds out private charity. We could call this the Santa Claus effect.

Imagine if we lived in a country with no state-sponsored welfare (and you don't have to go back very far into American history to find a time when this was the case). Would there indeed be thousands of people starving to death and dying for lack of medical care? I doubt it. Granted we could not now just pull the plug on these programs because there are large numbers of people who have been taught by the government to be dependent on these programs, but we need to stop making more people so dependent. Any transition away from the welfare state would have to be gradual enough to not leave those who are dependent out in the dark. But it can be done. Allowing young people to opt out of Social Security and Medicare would be a start.

I'm convinced that in the absence of welfare entitlements, two things would happen:

• People would become more self-reliant. When Santa isn't there to bring toys, the parents make sure to take care of their own kids. Similarly if the people knew that there would be no Social Security to pay for their retirements, they would save more on their own.
• Private charities would step in to help those who, for some reason, needed help. I think it is important to note that the number of people needing such help would be far fewer than those who receive benefits today - see above. Like the thousands of people who buy toys at Christmastime for children who would otherwise be getting nothing, people would help those in their community who needed help.

So, as much as I like Santa, I know in my heart that we don't need him. And, as a matter of fact, we are much better off without him.