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I've also read those principles when they were linked, and also immediately thought: I'm so, so not a conservative. I disagree with almost everything in that list. Not particularly surprising though, since I'm not religious, either.
But that's unfortunately where my agreement ends. Incidentally, your post sums up many things I find extremely irritating about liberals quite well, and why I currently tend to side more with conservatives.
Yeah, duh, all systems are being gamed. That's not a moral stance, that's just basic reality. There is about an infinite number of ways to have access to more money than that theoretic limit:
And so on. For a simple example from my own life: We've had neighbours - a family with two kids - upstairs back when I was a student. The guy was a construction worker and very nice, the wife was permanently unemployed from even before they had kids. But somehow, they were regularly not in their place for weeks on end, and they were the kind of white trash that certainly isn't living a jet-set life. So what was the reason? Pretty simple: The flat which we thought was theirs was actually officially only his. She pretended to be a single mom with two kids and got all the government benefits associated with that, among them a nice little house in the suburbs. And then they got all the money from his work on top, while paying very little for the cheap flat.
The reality in most western countries is that if you earn anything like the median wage legally, you'd be better off switching to gaming the system. Yes, for the rich and upper middle class it might not seem worth it, but the working poor and lower middle class not only know this, they usually personally have people around them already doing this. And yes, the only thing holding them back is a combination of self-respect and peer pressure. They tell you this, and instead you mock and denigrate them.
There is also this weird insistence to pretend that not wanting government money being spent on something is the same as prohibiting something. No, they can just pay for it with their own money! I've had this discussion with my wife when she was younger about a clearly drunk beggar. No, I don't want to give him money; He clearly already could have bought something for himself instead of getting drunk. With welfare I can't just opt out, so yeah, I want it to be limited to important stuff. That doesn't mean I want alcohol banned altogether, since not only do I expect most people to be capable of enjoying it in appropriate quantities, they may even get drunk if they want to because it's their fucking money. That's basic common sense.
Worse, there really are a lot of people who do actually want to prohibit thing. They're called "liberals":
Or meat, or cars, or alcohol, or any number of things. For many a liberal, there are only two states: Banned or mandatory support.
Again, yes. As a teen, I really got along great with my cousin's husband, who was ca 30 or so at the time, and I was gaming with him in the same clan regularly. Inter-personally, he's nice guy. But it doesn't change the fact that he claimed benefits for some undefined back issues that make it impossible for him to continue to do the warehouse work he did before. Even if that was true - and frankly, I don't think so - he could have certainly done a regular desktop office job instead of gaming 10 hours+ all day. He's sitting in front of a screen either way. At least once they had kids, he started helping out with house / child chores. Of course not because of virtuousness, but because my cousin got sick of his shit bc she was a full-time nurse.
You can believe whatever you want, 90% of young guys would certainly prefer gaming all day over working, and young women are only a little bit better. In most cases, the primary reason they don't is their parents giving them shit. If their parents are already gaming the system, their kids will usually do so as well.
As a matter of fact, most research on the topic concludes that conservatives give more to charity than liberals despite earning less. When I was still forced to go to church, helping the poor and needy was the #1 matter being preached. But helping and indulging their worst vices are not only different, they're opposites. Kirk was pretty average in this way.
At the end of the day, I can't help but notice that most liberals belong into two camps: So sheltered that they basically don't get into contact with dysfunctional people, and the actually dysfunctional. The former can't fathom why people might game the system because they already have it so nice without doing so, and the latter can't fathom not gaming the system. Others are stuck in-between, trying desperately to keep the system working somehow.
The kind of behavior you're describing isn't mere gaming the system, which implies taking advantage of the program's structure in ways that are unintended but technically allowed in order to maximize benefits. What you describe is outright fraud. Not reporting income is the most basic kind, though I have no idea how common it is in relative terms. In my personal anecdotal experience, "We're not going to get married because she gets benefits she'll lose if my income is included" is more common, but it's a mistake born more from a misunderstanding of how things work and doesn't work as often as people think it does because eligibility is determined by household income irrespective of whether you're married. A not too bright and not too close friend of mine got burned by this, or, more accurately, his girlfriend did. She had a kid from a prior relationship and they were going to get married but didn't for that reason. He works as a bus driver, I don't know what she does, if anything, but I know of a few low-level jobs. Anyway, she was living in subsidized housing and he was living with his parents and they ended up renting a house together. When she put down the change of address they asked what the rent was and if she was paying for it and when she told them the situation they explained to her that since he was no mere roommate buying his own food and keeping separate house his income would have to be included in the calculation. He works as a school bus driver so their income was still low enough to qualify, but there was a definite reduction in the benefit amount. Parents giving their kids allowances is unearned income that needs to be reported.
The neighbor you described was committing fraud, plain and simple. That isn't a problem with the system, because the system doesn't allow it. He was keeping his own apartment because he had to have a separate residence on paper. Keep that in mind, maintaining the fraud required paying for an apartment he didn't need, and on top of that moving his family between two locations to keep the government from catching on. If you're an unmarried couple with kids, both incomes are going to count if the parents are living together. The guy was taking deliberate steps to trick the government. Gaming the system would be if there were a hard line where his income only counted if they were married and they deliberately weren't getting married and the government knew this but there wasn't anything they could do about it because it was within the rules. Changing the rules doesn't prevent fraud because the new rules can be ignored as easily as the old ones.
I've seen conservatives trot out this statistic a lot, but there are two caveats. The first is that while it's broadly true at a national level, the effect disappears at the local level when adjusted for overall political leaning—liberals in red counties donate as much as conservatives, and conservatives in blue counties donate as much as liberals. The effect could simply be that since red areas generally have lower tax rates, people living there simply have more to donate regardless of political affiliation, and nationwide it makes it look like conservatives are more generous. The more important caveat is that none of these studies ask the nature of the charitable giving. Donating the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and Trout Unlimited both count as charitable donations, but neither do much to help the poor. Complicating this even further is the guys whose name I can't recall who popularized this idea (he was one of those proponents of Compassionate Conservatism) 20 years ago based his research on data that differentiated religious giving from non-religious giving, and included religious giving in his calculation.
And what are you gonna do about it? Not you, personally, of course, but the system. The answer, in my experience, is: Nothing. On paper, they look too much like what they claim to be, and even if the state would start to do personal visits to random benefit-receivers, their legal options are so limited that it's trivial to hide the presence of the guy. Not that I would be in favour of the state doing that to begin with. I don't think the moving around had anything to do with the government, they just used the apartment for storage or the like. In fact they were very lazy about it in a way that made it rather clear they didn't fear them catching on at all; When we had a water leak in the apartment above them and they were repeatedly notified by phone that they have to be present so a handicraftsman can enter, they just ... didn't, up until the moment they were threatened that they have to pay for damages. It was very, very clear to everyone including the landlord that he didn't really live there. But as long as the flat gets paid they just don't give a shit, especially not in these places. We actually had several other people in this building who clearly weren't living in their apartments, at least not all the time, for various reasons. This included me & and my wife; For almost three years, I was officially living in the UK, my wife officially in Germany, but in reality we spent almost half/half in each, mostly together. It's just completely infeasible to investigate anyone renting a cheap small flat, there's way too much of it.
A system isn't measured by what words are on pieces of papers, but by what it does (note: this is distinct from saying that this is outright it's purpose; Of course systems can just simply be badly designed. Though if flaws don't get fixed even after being repeatedly pointed out, it's reasonable to conclude that at least some people in fact like those flaws and don't want them to get fixed). In my experience, everyone thinks this way once it's about a topic they care about; If, say, discrimination against blacks was illegal on paper but there are no mechanisms to suss it out and nothing short of a confession is considered sufficient evidence in court, and anti-black discrimination was as a result still widely practiced with impunity as long as they aren't so stupid as to openly admit it, I'd be pretty sure you'd consider such a system racist, and defending the system with "well but that's illegal so the system is actually perfectly fine" is at best extremely naive, at worst (and, honestly, more realistically) a bad-faith defense. So there imo isn't a hard separation between fraud and gaming the system here at all.
A system is good if the rules as-written are as close as possible to the rules as-practiced, for legibility reason, and if the incentive gradient that is created as a result of the rules as-practiced are reasonably aligned with the intentions of the rulemakers and the population as a whole when the rule was crafted. The second part especially means that the benefits from fraud/gaming the system need to outstrip its cost, otherwise the money is just going to go somewhere else entirely. This is where, in my experience, left-wing systems tend to dramatically fail in a reliable fashion. It's always "nobody is going to game the system", then it's "well that's fraud so it doesn't count" and then finally "why are we deep in the red and everyone still complains that it's not enough".
You can certainly find some conservatives somewhere who really are all about punishing the wicked poor, but this is where limiting benefits to basic necessities is showing its value. Someone in genuine need is still going to be very happy about a can of rice, but it's not worth playing stupid accounting games for. A small apartment is great if otherwise you're literally homeless, but ditto. And so on. To a first approximation with maximal uncharity, that might sound like wanting to punish them, but it's simply a very effective safeguard against being taken advantage of. Which is why conservative tend to have it as an instinctive reaction.
I'm actually broadly against investigations unless it's about a lot of money, since in the west the combination of high legal requirements and high cost of man-hours means that it can happen extremely fast that the cost of the investigation outstrips any plausible amount that could have been defrauded. It's best for fraud to just not be worth it, investigating the most egregious cases, and just eating the (small, in a well-designed system) difference.
I know this objection, but the same goes for a lot of left-wing charity being extremely politically charged; Imo politics is pretty isomorphic to religion in general. Once you look into the details, one might even conclude the opposite: Lots of nominally religious charities have not only overwhelmingly secular staff nowadays, but in particular very far left staff, and re-direct the money from the conservatives to their own pet causes instead.
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Does religious giving change the calculus much? The salvation army is technically a church. Planned parenthood is technically a charity but seems to do very little actual charity and lots of advocacy. I'd suspect that the 'only nonreligious charities should count as charitable giving' thing is mostly to make liberals look good; plenty of churches have charitable arms, and plenty of liberal charities don't do very much actual helping the poor. It probably evens out in the wash.
"Actually religious people aren't generous if you don't count religious giving" isn't really a very convincing line.
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I think it changes the calculus because most people who attend church regularly make regular donations in a way that doesn't exist for most charities. The Salvation Army is religious, but donating $500 to them isn't quite the same as putting $50/week into your parish's collection plate.
Well yes, it skews up the percentage of income religious people donate. I'm not convinced it changes the calculus of what percent of donations are actually used for charity.
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Your post reminds me of Bastiat. Hr said something akin to the statist claim that we (classical liberals) oppose food when we oppose the government paying for food or education when we oppose the government paying for education.
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