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The biggest reason to avoid means-testing for COVID relief (among other things) isn't that it's more efficient, which it is, or that it avoids the likelihood of denying aid to some who need it, which is also very likely. It's because we don't want to be warped little monsters.
Means-testing for COVID relief teaches and encourages each of us to be little crabs in a bucket. It teaches us to treat society and nation as a game of musical chairs, in which we're supposed to worry that no one else is getting a penny more than they "deserve."
It teaches us, in other words, to be assholes -- cramped little Hobbesian competitors incapable of worrying about whether our neighbors have enough because we're too obsessively worried about whether one or more of those neighbors might have more than me. ...
Hobbes thought we couldn't be any better than that, which is why he didn't think we were capable of being free. A nation of unruly, selfish little assholes obsessed with tearing down their undeserving competitors can only be ruled by the kind of Leviathan such people deserve.
This is why the Tea Party was not about smaller government. The Tea Party was pro-Leviathan. It was all about ensuring our response to the Great Recession didn't help anyone Tea Partiers didn't see as wholly deserving. That requires big, intrusive, micro-managing government.
It requires Huge Government because once you abdicate neighborliness, government has to fill that vacuum. And the Tea Party was an anti-neighbor, war-of-all-against-all, musical-chairs nightmare -- a method for TEACHING ourselves to be assholes incapable of self-government.
Means-testing, in short, makes us meaner. The pedagogical effect of it is to encourage and reward assholery on a national scale, which is incompatible with democracy. Democracy can survive a minority of assholes, but it cannot long survive once they become the majority.
