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Freedom from Want: A Definition

I know, I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children on Chicago’s South Side, how narrow the path is for them between humiliation and untrammelled fury, how easily they slip into violence and despair. I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder — alternating as it does between a dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its proscribed confines, a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware — is inadequate to the task. I know that the hardening of lines, the embrace of fundamentalism and tribe, dooms us all.[1]

— Barack Obama

It has always been my own observation, from the streets of Dhaka to the boulevards of Singapore, from the schools in the First Nations’ communities of the Canadian far north to the neighbourhoods of Kuala Lumpur or Dar es Salaam, that freedom from want is about more than poverty versus dignity; more seriously, it is about the survival of hope. Hope is the central foundation for life and is the fundamental component necessary for the determined progress for each person, their family, community, and nation. The absence of hope disfigures a society and can destroy a community.

The earnest belief that one has prospects, that one can maintain what is good about one’s life and reasonably expect improvement, whether the focus is freedom, health, material or social progress, more peace, less violence, more opportunity, less suffering, is at the essence of the human condition — at least when that condition is upbeat and constructive. The absence of hope, the fatalistic sense that nothing can improve, that you cannot do better for your family or that your children cannot aspire to make progress equal to or beyond your own, is inevitably the companion of despair and all the destructive pathologies — for individuals and communities — that despair brings with it.

The lessons of history are sadly and unavoidably clear: the collapse of freedom from want into a state of economic and social despair can produce huge, even cataclysmic consequences — not only for those living in despair but for their neighbouring communities and countries. A thorough look at the economic collapse of Germany during the Great Depression, or at the places on Earth where violence, war, and conflict have occurred most often since 1950, indicates how the collapse of freedom from want has also meant the collapse of peace and stability.

The evaporation of hope that accompanies the loss of freedom from want almost always produces despair. This means that for individuals, families, communities, and sometimes entire countries, violent and aggressive choices rest comfortably on the “nothing to lose” foundation that despair so easily constructs.

While war and crime have many causes and complex determinants, an examination of the levels of “want” or relative poverty in places like the Congo, Guatemala, Eritrea, Mali, North Yemen, Chad, Somalia, Gaza, and Afghanistan speaks eloquently of the impact of relative poverty and the eradication of hope as consistently present causal spark plugs for violent options. And even in our own Western communities — in places like Belfast, Londonderry, Chicago, Los Angeles, East Vancouver, and Brixton — whatever the explicit “spark” for any violent outbreak, be it religious intolerance, alleged police brutality, or the death of a local hero, it is the foundation of despair and the absence of hope that helps fuel the conflagration.

Police rarely spend much time responding to urgent violent events in the better parts of town or among the better educated and more economically hopeful. It is the poorest 10 percent of the population, in terms of income and prospects, who fill over 85 percent of the places in prisons and make up the vast majority of the criminal and petty crime cases before the courts in Canada. The costs of despair are borne by all of society in the same way as “freedom from want” enriches all of society, even those who take their own version of that freedom largely for granted. Hope matters.

But hope is neither sustained nor crushed only by material well-being or the lack of same.

Hope is crushed when the gaps between oneself and the better-off mainstream are demonstrably unbridgeable no matter how hard one strives or works. These gaps are not always the product of economics or class, however, although these sources of inequality are endemic. Gaps may also exist because of racial, religious, caste, or gender prejudice. They may exist because of one family kleptocracy — think Syria or pre–Arab Spring Tunisia or Sri Lanka under the Rajapaksa family — limiting access to the economic mainstream.

These gaps may exist even in modern democracies, because ghettoized, recently arrived generations cannot break into the societies, which may still be shaped more by family connections than merit. Freedom from want also means freedom from this type of exclusionary prejudice. And while the political left and the right will each claim to have a better grasp on this anti-discrimination imperative for freedom from want, the truth is that neither part of the political spectrum can claim a monopoly on virtue or an absence of abuse. The riots that broke out amidst the poor underclass of recent immigrants inhabiting the suburbs in Stockholm underline how even the most civilized and humane democracies are not immune.

Margaret Thatcher’s disdain for the aristocracy and often stated preference for a society where individuals succeed by “lifting themselves up by their own bootstraps” reflected her own frustration with a landed gentry that previously excluded people of the wrong colour, religion, or gender in favour of those who did not have to strive since they were able to inherit, regardless of merit. Teddy Roosevelt’s attack on “the trusts” that controlled so much of America at the end of the nineteenth century was his way of confronting the same oligopolistic economic ruling class. Lenin and Marx’s engagement against the tsar and the poverty with which so many Russians were oppressed pointed to a similar revolutionary zeal.

But tracking their path also tells us the story on the other side of the ledger. The belief by some in the West that the collapse of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact, beginning with the destruction of the Berlin Wall, implied the “flawless superiority” of capitalism was and remains a vain and hollow conceit. As the near repetition of 1929 that occurred due to the wild excess of Wall Street banks in 2008–09 tells us, complacent self-satisfaction on the part of the “owners of the most” is sorely misplaced. Corporate greed manipulated by investment banks is how the crises of 1929 and then 2008–09 happened.

The communist nomenklatura that arose after 1918 in Russia, reflecting the new party apparatchiks’ network of exclusion, was no better than the aristocratic or multigenerational wealthy oligopolies they sought to overthrow when it came to generating hope for the thousands of desperate Russians who had pinned their hopes on the changes promised by the new party. And even when totalitarian communism was replaced by a new, post-Gorbachev capitalism, the bright new world promised for the people did not appear. Oligopolies owning disproportionately high percentages of a nation’s wealth soon arose. Once again, power and privilege remained a protected world, a place whose domain could be penetrated only by paying corrupting dues to the authoritarian and non-accountable governments or leaders. Such a situation does little to advance hope or diminish despair. Freedom from want means a reasonably equitable opportunity to compete, to earn, to learn, and to expand one’s prospects. Its absence means the opposite — and the opposite means trouble.

This relationship between hope, prospects, and aspiration does not mean that objective and numerical measures of poverty or want do not count. They count very much. But they are not the whole story. They count because of their reputable calculus of deprivation. They describe the architecture of despair where the freedom from want dies, taking hope, aspirations, dreams, and stability with it. And they help set targets for improvement as well. When freedom from want in any society is dead, dying, or under siege, especially if the society in question has a history of little equality of opportunity, many aspects of “stability,” any principles of an ordered society, such as private property, are themselves at risk.

Francis Fukuyama reflected on the issue in this way:

In a Malthusian economy where intensive growth is not possible, strong property rights simply reinforce the existing distribution of resources. The actual distribution of wealth is more likely to represent chance starting conditions or the property holder’s access to political power than productivity or hard work. (Even in today’s mobile, entrepreneurial capitalist economy, rigid defenders of property rights often forget that the existing distribution of wealth doesn’t always reflect the superior virtue of the wealth and that markets aren’t always efficient.)[2]

So the justice, both economic and social, that is implicit in freedom from want really centres on the reality of opportunity. Socialism, in its most raw form, seeks to legislate outcomes, usually through the resource and priority allocation role of the state and its minions. The enforcement of equality of outcomes, however difficult and unlikely, requires a disproportionately large regulatory and taxing role for state infrastructure that, by definition, has to hold some people back from making all the progress they might. This is anathema to citizens who believe that human and economic potential restrained, repressed, or in some ways confiscated by a state apparatus is not only freedom denied but mediocrity imposed. Dividing and redividing the same pie will not only create a situation that is unfair, but will also usually result in a deployment of efforts better used in growing the pie. Results and outcomes are usually typically beyond any state to competently or fairly legislate, tax, or control.

And if over-legislating in the interest of equality of outcomes is a vice, so too is the excessive faith in laissez-faire economics so often favoured by the far right, since it is a destabilizer of permission to hope, which depends upon the freedom from want and a basic competitive order of fairness. Moderation in the approach to these challenges is not a weak-kneed response but the only rational instrument by which the balance of freedoms can be sustained.

When governments of the right or left try to legislate outcomes, they usually spawn a huge expansion of contraband, a dilution of foreign direct investment, and a detached and self-centred upper-income economy, with a “rentier” class that seeks gain outside the system by cozying up to the political or regulatory power structure. Of course, the ruling parties or political classes rarely deny themselves the best of what is available, which they get first, so those seeking to share in the bounty are required to seek accommodation with the political elite in order to gain access to the spoils. As a result, social democracy, rigidly imposed, frequently results in the replacement of open competition for income increases and market share with a competition for advantage in the “who you know” network that can be just as inequitable and exclusive.

The similarities between the old Communist nomenklatura of the defunct Soviet Union, the new democracy-lite oligarchy of modern Russia, the zero-democracy rulers of China, and many African dictators, past and present, are remarkable in many regards — what is instructive is their basic problem with corruption. Freedom from want cannot exist in these kinds of societies because not only is there no equality of opportunity, but no distribution of opportunity anywhere beyond the self-preening and militarily protected dictators’ circle, however large or small, defined by ethnicity, tribe, family, religion, or political allegiance. Are there serious analogous exclusionary examples among the 0.20 percent of the top 1 percent in many countries of the West? I think so.

The principal target for countries seeking to advance freedom from want must be a recognizable minimum definition of “equality of opportunity” rights for each society, intelligently sustained and constantly evaluated and updated. There will be local leaders who fight progress in the name of preserving local control. The failure to ratify a good-faith $2 billion funding agreement between the Government of Canada and the Assembly of First Nations’ national chief in 2012 for a properly financed national Aboriginal school board and curriculum was caused, in part, by local band council chiefs who vetoed the agreement because they were upset about not getting their share and not being duly consulted by the chief of the AFN. While the consensual and consultative culture of our First Nations in Canada is to be celebrated, localism that stands in the way of higher standards of education nationwide for First Nations children should not be celebrated.

There are, of course, divergent definitions as to what “equality of opportunity” really means. To be fair, different societies and cultures, with their different geographies and histories, will, within the context of available resources, have different answers to this question.

For some in developing countries, ensuring that most of the population has more than two dollars a day to meet subsistence needs will appear a reasonable interim step in the effort to free people from want. For others, measures of access to education, basic food, and shelter form a more practical composite indicator.

The efforts of national governments to intervene in the economy in order to improve the lifestyle of the poor with such strategies as income minimums can run into “localism” champions, who do not always have local opportunity in mind. In fact, they may be seeking to preserve their own local privilege and the economic dominance they hold by virtue of inherited property or community standing. Non-unitary states and nascent or recent democracies, where trust in those who govern from afar is not yet robust, often find the obstacles to opportunity fairness erected by these opposing figures paralyzing. Of course, every well-developed, economically vigorous, long-standing democracy will have deep political divisions on this issue of equality of opportunity. However, countries where the gaps between rich and poor are stagnant or growing have not only the most heated debates but also the most glaring inequities in relative terms.

The fact that the poorest Canadians, Americans, and Europeans live on more money than poorer populations in parts of Africa or rural China does not in any way diminish the absence of freedom from want for the lower income classes of the Canadian, American, and European populations. Having to negotiate through Plexiglas for enough to feed one’s children under welfare programs in rural Ontario or Swiss cantons may seem less daunting than what is faced by the rural poor in Afghanistan. But for the families in North America confronting that hurdle, many of whom also face a series of problems caused by such things as substance abuse, educational failure, poor health, and dramatically shorter life spans than their better-off Canadian and American neighbours, the comparison of their situation to others elsewhere around the globe is the essence of a meaningless measure. It provides no comfort and less hope. And the absence of hope equals the absence of freedom from want. In the more developed states, the direct attack on freedom from want — the core challenge of confronting poverty head-on — in both absolute and relative terms — is frustrated by the ideologies on the right and left that simply and directly get in the way.

Governments, whether local, regional, or national, often find it hard to address the core inequality of opportunity; it is politically difficult to confront. Many find it easier to address the supposed contributing factors to poverty rather than poverty itself. In some ways, this is like replacing rational triage in a trauma centre or the emergency department of a hospital, trying to stop a patient’s bleeding or diminish her pain with detailed inquiries into the patient’s nutritional status.

In many countries, unless the suffering individual falls into a commonly approved category, such as a senior citizen, veteran, disabled person, et cetera, the notion of dealing directly with the reality of poverty is considered too politically risky. What we find in these places, and my own Canada definitely falls into this category (as does the United States), is that poverty is not seen as a treatable cause for all the negative pathologies that produce crime and health problems. So, instead, well-intentioned billions are spent in a dehumanizing welfare system, in educational investment, and in special programs aimed at the impacts of or the alleged causes of poverty rather than on poverty itself. Some public sector unions on the left prefer investing in plans where the professionals, through government, hire civil servants (usually unionized) to run targeted programs aimed at different aspects of the lives of the poor. Efforts to stem family violence, anti-substance abuse initiatives, work programs tied to welfare (or food stamps in the United States) are all seen as preferable to topping up the low incomes, however insufficient, of the genuinely poor. Interesting mythologies are constructed that, when broken down, assume that poor people cannot be trusted to spend an anti-poverty top-up responsibly. There is a Victorian presumption that those living in poverty are imbued with an intrinsic “moral weakness.”

On the right, “paying someone to do nothing” is considered the ultimate fiscal and moral sin, and so automatic top-ups are set aside as creating huge disincentives to work. The problem with this bias is that it is utterly disconnected from facts on the ground. The vast majority of people living under the poverty line in Canada, the United States, and most other countries are actually working — sometimes holding down more than one low-paying job. Single mothers with infants or toddlers are discouraged, by welfare rules in various jurisdictions, from working at all. And in many of the micromanaging, condescending rules that govern welfare eligibility, breaking out and trying to earn more or improve one’s education is officially discouraged by clawbacks and cancellation of benefits. This is a prime example of the state actually working against equality of opportunity and discouraging people from reaching up in order to create it for themselves. This is the state, despite the best of intentions, actually engaging, through perverse rules, pettifogging bureaucracies, and institutionalized condescension to destroy freedom from want. So, the most developed and wealthier states do not necessarily have a lot to teach less developed states. In fact, there are some lessons they can learn.

In Brazil, there is a program called Bolsa Familia, originally instituted by President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in 2006. It is the largest conditional cash transfer program in the world. The money is most often, and preferably, given to the female head of the household. With it come two conditions: all children must be vaccinated and all must be enrolled in school. The eligible amount is about US$12 monthly per child (to a maximum of three children) and it is given to those families who are considered below the poverty line. For those in extreme poverty, there is an additional, unconditional sum of about US$36 to assist with food, shelter, and gasoline. In order to reduce the corruption often associated with social programs, the assistance is provided in the form of a debit card, which can be used to withdraw funds from the government-owned savings bank. Bolsa Familia has been listed as one factor responsible for Brazil’s reduction of poverty, which fell by 27 percent in Lula’s first term, and has been touted as the reason for an increase in the number of educated and literate young people who, because they remained in school longer, were able to qualify for more than menial employment.

Another project is being attempted in Namibia, though on a much smaller scale. In the village of Otjivero, population one thousand, a coalition of churches, trade unions, and NGOs, all proponents of BIG (Basic Income Guarantee), have provided unconditional grants of about US$18 per month to every member of the village for two years. The results thus far have been more than hoped for. In six months, school attendance improved dramatically, malnutrition, especially among children, decreased, and people were able to increase their economic activity, through small business start-ups or finding employment outside their village. Poverty in that one village, in Namibian terms, decreased dramatically. A “Mincome” guaranteed annual income pilot project in Dauphin, Manitoba, in the mid-1970s produced similarly encouraging results. At the time of writing, Utrecht and other Dutch cities were pursuing similar pilot projects.

Implied in the above examples is the notion of “choice,” surely key to any freedom we value. If freedom from fear means that people are free to choose how they vote, worship, associate with others, what media they consume, what they say, write, or promote, within the reasonable confines of the rule of law, then surely freedom from want must also protect the freedom to choose those paths that shape one’s progress through life. Programs like “Rules-Based Micromanaged Welfare” (RBMW) are about the end of choice and the total dilution of economic freedom.

When the Canadian Senate Subcommittee on Cities was holding hearings as part of a multi-year study of urban poverty in Canada in 2007–2009, one witness, who spoke informally after the hearings, told me about her church group, which prepared annual Christmas food baskets for the neediest in the church’s part of the city. At one gathering for the planning of the coming basket assembly cycle she asked: “Why don’t we just give the families the cash and let them assemble their own Christmas hampers with what they want instead of what we want?” The response from her well-intentioned co-volunteers was shock and horror. Even the kindest and most thoughtful of community volunteers could not, in this context, allow the poor to decide for themselves. The idea did not proceed and the baskets were filled in the usual way. Freedom from want must imply freedom to choose one’s economic way ahead within the context of workplace and marketplace reality.

Hope and choice are essential to freedom from want — as is a basic economic floor beneath which people are simply not allowed to fall. That floor may differ from society to society, from culture to culture, but without it, the equality of opportunity essential to freedom from want is simply a myth evoked to divert attention about how unequal opportunity really is.

Vastly unequal opportunity is not an “over there” problem, with no direct impact on the countries of the West. The absence of freedom from want, in its most severe form, produces, in many countries, a profound absence of freedom from fear. The collapse of that freedom produces a way ahead for violence, which, in turn, produces the unavoidable reality of weak and failing states. Such states provide the most fecund ground for war, terrorism, and disease — three effects that further deepen poverty, doing so in ways that turbo charge the explosive decline. As violence tends to engender more violence, as diseases migrate more broadly than ever before, it becomes clear that the evaporation of freedom from want in one location has consequences well beyond the place where the specific freedom has been reduced or lost. So, while Sierra Leone, Somalia, Madagascar, or the Democratic Republic of the Congo may not be part of the local newscast, the carry-on effects of the erosion of the two freedoms in such places is not all that far removed from influencing the freedom from want and fear in your own neighbourhood.

The positive changes resulting from the increase in the speed and intensity of both communications and global trade are not without balancing negative effects also. While information moves more quickly now, so, too, does disease. Ideas of freedom and the footprints of freedom’s benefits also travel with remarkable speed. All of which produce opportunity and inspiration, and at the same time discouragement, envy, and risk.

In every country reached by global media — i.e., everywhere except perhaps North Korea — the images distributed of the lifestyle enjoyed by those blessed by a freedom from want create a divide between those nations that have and those that have not. However, this divide is not only one that exists between nations; this tension also exists within every country. It is one that exists between those who enjoy a freedom from want — and believe their reality to be the appropriate state of affairs — and those who do not — and know what they do not have (assets, luxuries, and choices).

Surely among the choices and opportunities of those who do have freedom from want is the responsibility to spread that freedom to others, within their own society and their country and to the world beyond. There are no gated communities that can keep out the microbiological migration of disease or the digital transmission of terrorist plans or messages. There are no laws that can keep safe all who have freedom from want from the consequences of the anger and despair of those who not only lack that freedom but who also lack any reasonable hope of attaining even the most minimalist version thereof.

A critical part of any realistic definition of freedom from want is that it be an expansive and inclusive one that sustains its strength by drawing those without into its orbit. Failure to engage on the broadening of the freedom from want is to weaken that very freedom, a weakening that has, does, and will have a compelling and destructive effect on those at home and abroad who currently possess it but do not sufficiently cherish it.

The well-meaning intent of the foreign aid commitments of many well-off countries reflects a post-war, post-colonial recognition that freedom from want actually matters. And countries like the United Kingdom, who, in the toughest of times, kept their international development aid at a minimum of 0.7 percent of GDP, are especially worthy of praise. But the question of how that aid is administered and what choices are offered the recipients of that aid are serious, fundamental questions — unfortunately, they are ones that are often not well addressed by donor governments.

Separating aid budgets from expenditures on defence and security is old-fashioned and counter-intuitive. As any Canadian military officer who served in Afghanistan can testify, local security and the mix of military patrols, solid intelligence, and focused and locally validated aid went hand in hand.

In 2011, as I saw at a local shura (consultation meeting) in the Panjway District of Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, when travelling with the Canadian minister of defence, the chief of Defence Staff, and Canadian troops and civic relations officers, over seventy-five local elders listened to and engaged the visiting Canadians. Respectful pleasantries were exchanged and the local governor, who had been a force for stability and co-operation, invited the local elders to share their concerns and aspirations.

One elder had with him a grandson who needed medical care. Another spoke of the need for more schools. Yet another elder rose and, in a very clear and precise way, explained the need for local gainful employment. He followed his talk by presenting a petition for Canadian investment so that electricity and the fresh water resources necessary for a pomegranate juice plant that would generate income and employment could be developed. The amount of money required would not have been more than the cost of running the NATO air base at Kandahar for one day. The request was duly noted and taken under advisement by the ranking Canadians present. But, in the end, it was outside the purview of Defence officials to deliver.

Ensuring freedom from want is, however, as much a part of the rational remit of defence and security planning as ensuring that there is no risk of military threat or invasion. Putting off this most basic realization and failing to redesign our foreign policy to address it is the height of folly. Global and national security requires the bolstering of freedom from want!