Richard Morris Titmuss Quotes
… minimum wages must be high enough to enable all citizens to purchase privately the necessary pension and insurance plans which would protect the them against illness, disablement, temporary unemployment and old age.
The minimum wage has never come close to meeting this ideal criterion in any country of the world. At the same time, health insurance costs in the U. S. and some other countries has been increasing at a much greater rate than wages, making this ideal situation even more unattainable.
Richard Morris Titmuss, 1907–1973, British social researcher, The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy
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This statement was quoted over and over by his Presidential opponent, Lyndon Johnson in the campaign of 1964. Although, a wealthy person could on the average do a little better with a private investment of equivalent money and a disability insurance, those citizens of less wealth could not do so as easily. And few could obtain the disability and survivor benefits that comes along with Social Security. Goldwater wanted to make Social Security Voluntary, and most Americans thought the Goldwater prescription for Social Security would kill the program and did not support him. Conservatives have argued for this idea ever since, including Geirge W. Bush who made it a centerpiece of his administration’s program. It was rejected by the voters, and most of those were proven right when with the 2008 stocks had lost 50% of their value—the people who had retired and depended on their return from investments were mostly in terrible trouble. And of course, even in good times, some people who invest in the stock and bond markets do well and some do poorly. What would society do about those who lost most of their retirement. Let them starve because they invested badly?
18 years later, his son—George W. Bush—made the “nutty idea” one of the main planks in his Presidential legislative program. After the younger Bush traveled the country selling his reform ideas, the public came down on the side of his father and rejected the President’s “nutty idea.”
She was also Australia’s First Woman Cabinet Minister.
Richard Morris Titmuss CBE FBA (1907–1973) was a pioneering British social researcher and teacher. He founded the academic discipline of social administration (now largely known in universities as social policy) and held the founding chair in the subject at the London School of Economics.
