It is true that any society will have to have criteria of eligibility for any benefit. However, the situation is quite different when the criteria are broad, general and give presumptive eligibility to large categories of people. For example, even in the stingy USA children are presumed to be eligible for schooling, and proving eligibility is mostly a matter of providing names, addresses, documented dates of birth, etc.
By contrast, there is a strict means test for public assistance, and a lot of expensive effort goes into keeping people out. This has many secondary consequences that lead to creative use of loopholes of the sort you describe. Everyone has at least one story, or two. As in the examples you offer. Sometimes these are urban legends, sometimes they aren't, but mostly they go to show how the attempt at austerity in awarding benefits leads to other than straightforward expenses and consequences.
If we want to briefly revive the functionalism debate we could discuss what their function(s) could be.
Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema
Kelley Walker wrote:
> >
> >Given that many kinds of support for higher education have
> >been withdrawn over the last twenty or thirty years, I think
> >we can gather that the increased difficulty of getting student
> >loans is part of a larger picture of, one might say, making
> >the ruling class's pyramid's sides steeper, for whatever reason
> >those who attend to such things may have for doing so -- the
> >reinstitution of feudalism, maybe. It has nothing to do
> >with a few Boomers wantonly reaping the government's
> >largesse, which was only to be expected.
>
> oh bullshit. enough people ripped off the middle class welfare system that
> it costs money. it happened frequently when i first started taking part
> time college courses. i know a guy who was a perpetual grad student, had
> been working on it for 15 years. he got out the max stud loan every
> year-but he didn'tneed it. he was getting research assistantships which
> amounted to dusting the books in the faculty lounge. so, he invested it
> back when the interest on loans was far lower than that which could be
> yielded from money market CDs. i know of several people who declared
> financial independence from their parents just so they could get their
> state college tuitions paid for, even though their parents were paying for
> car, clothes, apt and food. add up the number of times these things
> happen, combine it with the reagan era and you get punitive measures that
> harm the poor. which is what i said in the first fucking place. if you
> can't pay b/c you're not making enough, then you renegotiate the repayment
> terms.
>
> ring ring
> hello, i'd like to defer loan payments for a year.
> no problem. i'll fax you the form, you sign and fax back.
>
> if your income is low enough or you are unemployed or for just any reason
> at all, then you simply don't pay for an entire year. i would imagine you
> can do it for awhile. then you can also renegotiate repayment. it is very
> simple and it take all of ten minutes to do--deferring.
>
> you don't need to declare bankruptcy. if you buried yourself in debt in
> order to get a phud and then take a job for 15k or somesuch nonsense then
> this is simply NOT the same as that poor woman who was disabled. she
> _couldn't_ work. joe slacker can, and he can probably find a job that pays
> 25k anyway. some distinctions really ought to be made, under these
> conditions. were the conditions different--where we wanted to reward people
> for doing noble, underpaid work, then no problem. but that's not the case
> now. i see no reason why Mary with a disability should be penalized in the
> same way that Joe Schmuck who has no income because he wants to be a Web
> entrepreneur and is declaring no income or very low income due to the magic
> of modern book keeping.
>
> no matter what benevolent and wonderous utopia we live in in the future, we
> are going to have to have some measures of deservingness.
>
> if educations are free in the future, why should we foot the bill for the
> students who go to college and fuck around and flunk out of most of their
> courses--or is it all going to magically change and no one will do such a
> thing? << i actually have hopes in that regard. but the only way that kind
> of consciousness will come about is when people start recogniziing how they
> are interdependent. that is, they will choose and prefer not to fuck around
> because they will see the value in learning for the sake of learning, they
> will recognize that the entire community is paying for education for all,
> not some abstract faceless "state". marx wanted us to understand how
> production was socialized so we could see our interdependence for precisely
> this reason!
>
> the point,is that talk of how "the state" will provide free this or that is
> just plain ridiculous. doug recently said, "education should be free". and
> i replied: but it's NOT free and can't be free. such language obfuscates
> the fact that salaries are paid, materials are requisitioned, etc. public
> schools aren't free and were the notion extended to college, then college
> wouldn't be free. instead, the costs of educating people are spread across
> the _entire_ population rather than being born by the individual student
> and his or her family. when we use the language "the state should provide
> ____" couching it in these terms makes it seem as if no one pays except
> some abstract thing called the state, as if the _____ provided has no
> costs, as if no salaries are paid, no materials need be purchased, etc. it
> is disingenuous on our part to use such language.