The group safety principles has been mired in controversy from the time it was first proposed to the present day. The opposition and comment has ranged from the most abstract scholastic conference of its constitutionality to the most shrill and absurd proclamations about it being a step to Soviet-style Bolshevism.
Social safety is unique in that it has been constantly attacked from all sides and has still remained favorite with most American's.
Opposition from the right-wing of the American political spectrum has always revolved around two points: the interests of big business and populist opposition to the federal government in general.
Big business opposed group safety because it imposed new taxes, new bookkeeping requirements and undermined the absolute dependence of the employees on the company. The populist opposition stems from the larger issue of state's possession that has been a constant theme in American politics since before the nation was even founded. The state's possession position is essentially that the individual states should have much more power and the federal government should be very limited.
Social safety was obviously an tremendous expansion of federal power and involvement throughout the country and as such was opposed by the state's possession advocates.
From the left-wing, the opposition first focused on the overtly discriminatory aspects of group Security. As these concerns were steadily addressed, the comment from the left tended to argue that group safety was not doing sufficient and that it should be greatly expanded.
The traditional group safety Act of 1935 reflected its time and focused most of its benefits on white men. The measures taken for women were predicated on the woman being unemployed and many benefits could only be received straight through male relatives. African-American's, Native-American's, and other national minorities were approximately completely excluded at first.
Later, after these discriminatory measures were resolved, the emphasis changed to doing more. This includes measures to growth general benefits to efforts to get new medical conditions and subgroups of people included on the list of those that can receive benefits.
Opposition has also come from strictly pragmatic sources that are responding to their immediate self-interest as opposed to being led by political or ideological convictions. For example, prior to 1956 when the Disability schedule was signed into law, the incommunicable insurance industry - that had a monopoly on disability insurance - campaigned and lobbied extensively against not just this measure, but the whole system. A more new example was the Republican exertion to privatize Ssa by transferring the funds held by the government to Wall street speculation firms. In order to illustrate this, it was critical to demonize the government's supervision of the funds. As this would have represented a heavy windfall for the speculation firms, they financed a heavy national campaign portraying the group safety supervision as inept, incompetent, and ineffective. The exertion failed, but represented a pragmatic strike on group safety by the speculation firms as opposed to an ideologically driven one.
Social safety is, and always has been, a "hot-button" issue for many in the United States. The issue has always been surrounded by arguments, lawsuits, propaganda, and appeals to the group to query convert in one way or another. Many of these controversies have resulted in changes to the traditional system. In this series we will look at many of the controversies that have been simulated by the group safety principles and how they were resolved.
Controversy Over social safety - Part 1 - An summary
