The McMillin Double-Standard

The Huffington Post a few days ago reported on a certain legislative conflict in the Indiana General Assembly. Republican Jud McMillin sponsored a bill to require drug testing of all welfare applicants in the state, leading Democrat Ryan Dvorak to introduce an amendment to levy the same requirement on members of the state legislature. As a result, McMillin temporarily withdrew the bill in order to reword it and try again.

This is a wonderful story, and it illustrates a breaking point I’ve been looking forward to for some time. Society needs to better recognize the responsibilities that holders of government office have to those entitlements that benefit them personally. Anybody who controls access to a good or service for other people should be subject to the most rigorous qualifications for their own access to the same. To structure a system otherwise is to invite conflicts of interest.

It belies his gratitude for the benefits of being on the government payroll if a legislator utilizes his salary, health benefits, and the like, but thinks nothing of limiting unemployment insurance or social security and erecting road blocks to such programs for citizens who rely on government money but can’t take it for granted as a sitting legislator can. It borders on dictatorial if a government official places some sort of burden of proof on his constituents in order that they may access something that he takes casually for himself.

It may seem sensible to place such restrictions on welfare recipients since they do not need to work for their entitlements as legislators have to work for their salaries. But the simple fact is that both groups derive personal benefit from their government, and it is unfairly and irresponsibly presumptuous to expect one and not the other to prove their worthiness, especially when one group is tasked with upholding the very system that feeds them both.

There’s no reason other than pure bigotry to think that poor people are more likely to be on drugs than are those who come from a socio-economic status that puts them close to the halls of power. But even if there was, if drug use ought to bar one’s access to government money, it ought to be a universal standard, and certainly not one from which assemblymen are exempt on the basis that they’re probably not on drugs anyway, so they don’t have to prove it. That would be a shockingly undemocratic double-standard.

If the poor owe it to their country to prove their worthiness for its entitlements, government officials owe it to their country to prove their own worthiness on the basis of the very same standards, and more besides. If your very livelihood is the preservation and improvement of the government that pays your salary and ostensibly serves its constituents’ interests, you should feel the full extent of what that government demands of its citizens. Government servants should never take government for granted, lest they lose sight of what it means to the rest of us.

Please Stop Working for Free

I was pleased to see that Stephen Colbert levied brilliant criticisms against CNN’s iReport social network on his Monday night show:

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It’s wonderful to see a satirist or critic taking on the topic, but it’s important to keep in mind that CNN is far from being the only organization to uncompensated labor from the public, at the expense of actual jobs. If CNN is the worst offender, it is only by virtue of its being an exceptionally large and visible organization. But some content on the front pages of Yahoo! is drawn from its amateur contributor network. And while it does allow people to earn nominal payments based on page views, ultimately Yahoo! is relying on a large pool of writers and photographers who are willing to work for free and consider any compensation whatsoever to essentially be a gift. AOL and the Huffington Post utilize the same model, and of course the latter is also infamous for simply reposting paid content from other news sources. On top of that, there are various sites whose sole concept is to gather creative content from as many people as possible and then present some sort of prize to those that pay dividends on nothing. And each of them seemingly finds a steady supply of willing participants.

That willingness seems unlikely to become the focus of other critics, but I think it is the main issue here. So long as news outlets remain primarily concerned with making money, it is only natural that they will latch onto business practices that allow them to maintain output without the need to pay formerly requisite salaries. Quality be damned, if it brings them any revenue, it is worthwhile because it contributes nothing to overhead. There’s even a business term for this kind of acquisition of labor: crowdsourcing. It serves much the same purpose as outsourcing work to foreign countries, but is even better for the business, as outsourcing exploits the necessity of workers accepting appalling low wages because of their local conditions, whereas crowdsourcing exploits the willingness of workers to accept no payment at all because of their imagination of some future reward.

Certainly, I would be thrilled if there came a breaking point for the news media, and they came to realize that they have an obligation greater than the acquisition of capital. Each person can play a role in promoting that realization, primarily through his choice of what media to consume, but ultimately that breaking point is up to the executives of several corporations, and out of our hands. What ordinary people should realize instead is that they are enabling this sort of exploitation, and contributing to the rampant decay in the quality of news and popular culture. There is a breaking point that every writer and artist must reach, whereby we come to understand that we are being used, and that we are allowing ourselves to be used.

There’s really nothing in it for us if we keep giving away work for free. I’m sure that many people provide content for major websites purely in pursuit of fifteen minutes of fame, but I expect that many people also do so on the assumption that it will lead to some discovery of their brilliance, that the exposure to a wide audience of CNN viewers or Yahoo! readers will open doors for them. What they ought to understand, though, is that that pursuit of self-interest will ultimately prevent those doors from opening to anywhere. Every decent writer who offers free content in hope of future opportunities is evidently expecting someone to come along and pay for what everyone else is getting for free.

Of course, if the decent writers and artists realize this and drop out of the crowdsource, I suppose that would just leave behind the terrible writers and artists, and raise the question, would CNN, Yahoo!, AOL and the like continue to drink from a tepid pool? They might. But the subsequently accelerating deterioration of quality just illustrates the way breaking points work. If we keep quality content out of the hands of those who would exploit it for free, won’t there come a point at which the dreck they’re channeling into public view just isn’t worth looking at anymore? There simply must be a lower limit to what we’re willing to accept and popularize. There must be, even though there is apparently no lower limit to what many people are willing to accept as compensation for their creative efforts.