Let Them Buy Whatever They Want
I am frankly exhausted with all the stories of people buying item X with food stamps that some folks fear they really should not be buying, where X is everything from liquor to twinkies.
People are either adults or they are not. I don't think our act of charity towards them gives us the right to be their mother. I am all for consolidating all the zillions of existing niche government benefits programs into one single EITC or similar income-floor program. Then people spend their money however they hell they want -- if they screw up and spend on unwise things, well that is their business.
I used to have this argument all the time with my New England liberal mother-in-law. Interestingly, in this argument, we would both call the other arrogant. I would say she was arrogant for assuming she knew better than other adults how they should spend their own money. She would call me arrogant for assuming that people without my background and education could make quality decisions for themselves.
Since this is my blog, I will grab the last word here. If we were talking about having the poor choose between a number of exchange-traded derivatives, I could concede her point. But we are essentially talking about what to buy in a supermarket. We force everyone through 12 years of public education. The Left pretty much gets to determine what that education encompasses. If adults are leaving that system and still can't be trusted with their own money, then why are we even bothering?
I am OK with consolidating all of the programs into a single income-floor/"living wage" sort of program, but what bothers me is all of the things that suddenly become necessities once someone else is paying for it. There's lots of things I forego because I have other financial obligations that people receiving government handouts are somehow entitled to receive simply because they don't make as much money as I do. While I'd like to believe that, yes, they are adults and are capable of making responsible decisions, I'm also of the opinion that if they really were adults capable of making responsible decisions, a lot of them wouldn't need handouts in the first place.
I was not exact on the wording, but what I was referring to was that if I buy a $4 gallon of milk and then sell it for $2 to buy $2 worth of soda, that soda costs me $4 rather than $2. So, it the soda now costs me $4, I will buy less.
I voted while in the military, and yet found no candidates promising no war on weekends. Even the ones promising "less" war were lying. Take Dear Leader as an example. Look at all his accomplishments in getting us out of Mideast wars and Gitmo. There is no conflict of interest in my belief that we need a very strong military, and still not deploy it while other options are still available. Being willing to fight to defend my country is not the same as becoming the world police.
I was on welfare, as they called it back in the 70's and It was embarrassing busting out the stamps when the dollars ran out. I worked my ass off in order get my ass off assistance. I never wanted to see another government office again much less a handout after that experience. It taught me to appreciate every dollar I earned from that time forward and to spend every dollar wisely.
Fast forward 40 years
EBT is discrete, easy to qualify for and stay on for as long as you please. They no longer use stamps, just a very stylish looking card you swipe like a CREDIT card through the scanner. The EBT system is perfect example of what is wrong with our government. This perpetuates a subculture of irresponsible people who now feel entitled not embarrassed.
Restrictions? HELL YES...as many as they can come up with. You do realize there is no budget for EBT, it's funded as required.
I agree with you, but I think it has led me to draw the opposite conclusion. If we accept that many people who are in need of public assistance will spend money on things that they don't "need," then it seems to me this argues in favor of governmental intrusion for those people who cannot do things for themselves competently. Essentially, people are getting free money and "wasting" it on things like cigarettes, booze, soda, etc. I take this as evidence that they will make poor choices in many aspects of their lives, and then we as a society will be forced to deal with the consequences, up to and including revolution if there are a bunch of poor homeless people roaming around with not enough to eat.
It is arrogant to think I know what is best for adults, true. But, it is also strange to observe somebody making the purchases a foolish child would make and conclude it is ok so long as that is what he wants.
In conclusion, the fact that many people make poor choices has led me to be reasonably satisfied with the status quo, meaning forced retirement savings through social security (obviously this must be changed a bit to make it sustainable), and other similar types of government programs. I am all for introducing more choice at the margins, for example via vouchers to attend private schools, etc. But, all in all, I think the status quo is about where it has to be given the body politic.
Yeah, but what is the alternative? Appointing a monitor to go grocery shopping with the recipients of public benefits? Forced sterilization of "irresponsible" parents? Allowing people to go hungry, including kids? Taking kids away from their biological parents for things other than really horrible neglect or abuse? I think the "cure" to the current problems may be worse than the current problems.
That soda cost you $0 if you were given the $4.
"I don't think our act of charity towards them gives us the right to be their mother."
I heartily disagree with this statement. I believe that one of the insidious effects of government "charity" programs is the inherently coercive nature of them. In a sense, the mothering aspect of the program comes from the fact that resources are limited, even for the government. There is only so many aid dollars to go around and the idea that those dollars are being used to facilitate vices rather than facilitate a basic level of subsistence is galling. Accepting government assistance should be uncomfortable and leaving those programs in a productive way should be heavily promoted.
I would rather see these programs largely gone and replaced with a private alternative. But it is absolutely the case that if you take the money, you take the chains. It is the people who live off of these programs that have put themselves in the position of being wards of the state. As Ben Franklin once said:
“I am for doing good to the poor, but...I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. I observed...that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.”
I believe this was a theme in Heinlein's Starsship Troopers in talking about the idea of democracy and what citizenship should entail.
"people had been led to believe that they could simply vote for whatever they wanted... and get it, without toil, without sweat, without tears."
How interesting the that some of the political themes from that book resonate once again. Of course, the re-institution of Roman classes of Cives and Latini as part of a plan to foil the loooters and moochers has its own problems.
So a $4 tub of ice cream is the measure of whether someone is getting too much money? The SNAP recipient receives about $4.50/day/person, although this figure could be considered somewhat off because of school nutrition programs). Someone buying Ben and Jerry's is blowing through an entire day's worth of SNAP funds. That's fine by me though, because they're an adult and possess enough reason to figure out what groceries to buy. They aren't getting a larger check next month though, so they're stuck with their choices.
OK, do we really need to get into opportunity cost? Let's just say you can buy less soda by buying an selling the milk first than you could if you could pay for it directly.
I would be with you on this if it were 20 years ago. Today, it would be simple to allow the cards only to be used with a certain set of skew codes. The UPC, is a nationwide database and even your cell phone can scan one and tell you what the item is. Also we need to get back to food from grocery establishments only, none of this using the card for cash or using the card at KFC. In California, they at least put a ban on pulling cash from the cards at Casinos and cruise ships - that was turning out to be quite an issue, if CA can do it, everyone can.
Finally, I would suggest, if you object to the above to get rid of the food stamp program in its entirety.
It really wouldn't be nearly as simple as you make it out to be. Possible yes, but definitely not simple. Defining a list of permissible and impermissible products is quite the task. A large grocery store might have 60,000+ SKUs to categorize.
If you ban seafood, do you also ban canned tuna? If you ban steak, do you ban beef jerky? How is soda defined? Does sugar free soda count as soda? Sure, you might say, but then what about flavored carbonated waters? Plain carbonated water? Plain old bottled water? What about concentrated syrups to make your own soda? Either the government has to make all these decisions for every product or it has to publish a massive set of rules and every SNAP-accepting store has to interpret the rules for each product.
We've already seen the same kind of chaos with sales tax exemptions, and those are far similar. In some states, deli sandwiches are tax exempt unless they are "for here" or heated or the store puts hot gravy on it (side note: here it's still taxable if the sandwich is allowed to cool), but not if the customer heats it himself in a store-provided microwave. Century Theaters has gone to court over the taxation of movie theater popcorn. Do you really want to go through all this again with a different set of rules for SNAP?
And surely it's likely that smaller grocery stores will give up and just avoid accepting SNAP entirely rather than go through the pain of handling the new rules.
They used to have a rule in place where you couldn't buy alcohol or cigarettes with your card. That would be easy to implement. Not sure if I go into every new age health fad, and ban things based on the freebies demands from Marin. But the 60000 skew issue isn't as big a problem to make out, because the only items not indexed by type are fresh vegis and fruits.
I suppose that would be the real problem defining just how far to go. I would say. Lets make it simple, bread and water.
Most of that food in school is subsidized for low income families. I think some 60% of purchasers get a subsidy. Again, subsidy by the government and they are more than within their rights to tell you what to do. Many school districts are forgoing federal funds so they can serve what they want too, and they find the pickup in paying customers offsets the loss in subsidies.
If we were treating them like adults, we would make the care contingent on them finding a way to better their situation. I get it that there are exceptions, lime folks with downs syndrome and such, but for the other 90% that is how to do it.
We are actually infantizing people by giving the free benefits with no strings attached.
There is no such thing as "forced charity." Your point about charity involving accountability from the receiver is part of the distinction between welfare and charity.
Yes there is forced charity. The government forces me to give money to those they deem less fortunate than I am - that is forced charity for me, and since there aren't any conditions, it is welfare for the recipient.
I used to work with a guy who spent his first career with the Army. He talked about voting in his first election after he got out (so, in his 40's-50's). He argued that his job as a soldier was to follow the orders of the Commander in Chief, and that while under this obligation he, and all other serving this way, should be apolitical, and therefore should not vote. I think it's an interesting concept.
The problem with this whole discussion is that it assumes that people vote for their self interest. Much to the surprise of us economists, that is not actually the case. Welfare recipients do not predictably vote for more welfare as opposed to less, nor do rich people predictably vote for lower taxes rather than higher.
"It really wouldn't be nearly as simple as you make it out to be.
Possible yes, but definitely not simple. Defining a list of permissible
and impermissible products is quite the task."
They do this already for WIC. In fact, I don't even think they whitelist SKUs. WIC usually requires you to purchase the cheapest brand available for the item listed on the voucher. Once you put the register transaction into WIC mode (at least, in the register systems that I worked on 15 years ago and are still in place today) no other items are allowed. Did you pick a brand of cheese that wasn't the cheapest? The register will not let you ring the item up. The system also kept up with sales (hence my comment on the SKU whitelist). Normally, the store brands are the cheapest of the items, but sometimes a sale can change that. This screwed with the longterm WIC users: they knew which store brands and what sizes were the proper ones (and over time, so did I), and then one week the store would have a sale on, say, Kraft cheese and all of their store brand cheese would not ring up.
FYI, when you're scouting for a line in a grocery store, stay out of any line with someone who's got a separate pile of these kinds of items: eggs, cheese, juice (either frozen concentrate or ready-to-drink jugs), infant formula, infant cereal, milk. This is likely a WIC transaction and will therefore likely take forever.
So you believe that your Libertarian ideals can be achieved without "political engagement and the use of politics and state to achieve its goals"? Are you are retard, or just a garden-variety, card-carrying Libertarian? Not that it matters, because there is scant difference betwixt the two options.
Right. WIC is not a model to emulate here. It humiliates people in grocery store lines and creates enormous confusion, because the rules change regularly. This also helps explain why it seems many more stores accept SNAP (where the rules only require distinguishing eligible food from ineligible non-food) than WIC (with far more complicated rules).
Getting rid of foodstamp restrictions
Fascinating! I would like to hear more about these restrictions. Please indulge me and provide the details, which hopefully aren't inclusive of prohibitions against paying for a meal at Ruth's Chris with EBT plastic.
You are responding to a leftist Libertarian here. You should not expect anything other than nonsensical "Fuckin'-A DUH"-worthy blather. They and their ilk are incapable of constructing the logic trees to rationalize their retarded ideology.
That's a splendid comment. Well-reasoned and fully fleshed out. Would you perhaps have a newsletter to which I could subscribe? I salivate in anticipation of reading additional sage insights from you.
Yeah, TJIC had many redeeming qualities, but his Libertarian fucktardedness always intruded. He started drinking, last that I read, but if he's not single and miserable now, I'd bet a year's salary that he's dating an ugly leftist hag now. Libertarians are fucking leftist trash.
I realize that it chafes the asses of leftists like yourself, but taking the fruit of other people's labor should be stigmatized. Humiliation is healthy, when it provides an incentive to get the fuck off of the public teat. I've read enough of your retarded comments to recognize a hard-core D-bag bent, but goddamn, boy...since when does "humiliation" rise to a Constitutional crisis?
Mneh...more like $6/diem here in Florida. But you keep on plucking your chicken.
Conservatives are the most charitable faction, according to surveys that I've seen. I'd wager that Libertarians are beneath leftists on the scale, because they are amoral fuckers without any sense of obligation.
Where does one possibly go with this statement? I find myself these days in politically difficult waters being on the conservative end of libertarianism. Although you clearly mean to dig at libertarians by calling them amoral, you inadvertently stumble upon a truth. Amoral is not the same as immoral.
From my point of view, I would say that what you earn is yours to dispose of as you see fit, whether it be for charitable causes, for hookers, or for a pleasant day at the game with the family. If you really want, you can build a money bin like Scrooge McDuck and swim in it all day for all I care. That is the meaning of fredom. It is not my place to tell you how to spend your resources and libertarians for the most part would thank all the meddlers to butt out of their life and finances.
But just because libertarians don't think that it is anyone else's business how they dispose of their wealth doesn't mean that they are less inclined to give to a local church, to St. Jude's, or whomever. There is also nothing in the libertarian creed that prevents anyone from donating their time and labor to efforts like habitat for humanity or doctors without borders. In fact, such private efforts to improve the human condition are greatly preferred over the government compelled "solutions" in fighting the various wars on social ills that have been declared over the decades.
The leftist position which you raise up (sort of) to bash libertarians, however, is no charity whatsoever. Compassion through compulsion is hardly worthy of the name. It takes no moral rectitude to volunteer other people's money for your "charitable" works any more than prison labor can be called "volunteerism".
@chembot:disqus, search for "welfare reform" here on Coyote Blog. Do the same for "immigration" and discard all but the posts wherein Warren whinges about his resolute desire for free immigration and open borders. Compare the stats. He, and by extension, Don Boudreaux, Alex Tabbarok (or WTF ever, from Marginal Revolution), all rabidly demand open borders. Without the cessation of welfare, they are all agitating for--at the level of "community organizin'" a la Buhraq Hussane Ozero, forced charity through the public funding of illegal immigration. Warren is an unapologetic leftist. He wants freedom of movement, without any obligation to the United States of America. Boudreaux and Tabbarok, the same. None of them pledge allegiance. None of them feel any pride in the success of our experiment in republican liberty.
Whether it is forced "charity" via D-bag taxation or compulsory welfare via Libertarian open borders, it's all the same totalitarian bullshit. Warren and his leftist, filthy pals want clap like circus seals at the thought of the US ceding sovereignty to anybody that wants to invade and begin drawing a paycheck for being a human. That's not hyperbole, that's a fact, from everything that these filthy fuckers frothingly booster.
Well, this is why I can't comfortably claim to really be either truly conservative or "big L" libertarian. I too vigorously disagree with his open borders stance. Open borders is incompatible with a welfare state at least nominally tied to citizenship. Open borders at this point is deeply unfair to the legal immigrants who wait upwards of a decade or more to fully realize their american dream. And furthermore, I have never really believed that borders are as artificial as a lot of libertarians claim them to be. After all, they mark more than just the basic endpoint of a gov't jurisdiction, but also demarcate the area that is bound to a certain culture and idea of social organization. While I do believe that labor mobility could be increased through some sort of regulated non-citizenship guest worker program to eliminate the 2nd class worker status and free riding issues of illegal immigration, that is markedly different than the open borders idea.
It is interesting though that you call the open borders idea totalitarian. A lot of libertarians see it as an extension of natural rights of free movement and the ability to form contracts (in this case for your own labor.) But libertarians are not really a monolith. You put the anarchocapitalists in the same room with the minarchists (nightwatchman state types) or the social libertarians and you will get pretty divergent ideas about how society should be structured. The unifying idea that runs through all of these strains of libertarianism is the maximization of autonomy to greatest possible extent (which I whole heartedly agree with) and to a certain extent a pacifism with regards to foreign affairs (another area where I am more comfortable with the conservative position than the libertarian one)
My comment provided more to the thread than yours, but thanks for playing Skippy.
As long as we are going there, what about making it illegal for ALL government employees, including teachers, firefighters and police to vote in any election where the politicians being elected have any say in their pay and or benefits?
Ok...
...wow.
Have a nice day.
Wow, so much right-wing bizarro world stuff!
Here's a Lulu: "Adults have the right to spend 'their money' anyway they like. But
welfare recipients are spending MY ( and other taxpayers) money."
First of all, it's not tax money they're spending. Obviously. Governments with sovereign, fiat currencies (dollar, pound, yen, but *not* euro) are not provisioned by taxation. Again...*obviously*... Where would tax payers (or lenders-to-government) get the dollars to pay taxes (or lend) if government didn't spend them out into the the economy first?
If you went to Washington D.C. and paid your taxes in cash at the Treasury building, after they marked your bill "Paid" they would shred the money. They don't need your money! They can make as much as they need at any time they need it!
Taxes make the money valuable, and hopefully discourage less-than-productive economic activity, but they do not, and obviously do not, fund government.
Notice the bait on this particular hook: "But it's no fair that some shirker / alky / lazybones gets money (even the pathetically small amount the U.S. offers in "welfare")!" Even chimps have a sense of fairness. It's brilliant.
Unfortunately, the more generous treatment of welfare recipients, criminals and homeless people turns out to not only be kinder, it's cheaper. Seriously. Providing housing for the homeless, jobs for the unemployed, rehab for the criminals...all that stuff is cheaper than the militarized army of occupation...er, I mean "police" or the emergency room visits, etc.
But reminding people that they will suffer the indignities of poverty, homelessness, even starvation... if they don't accept whatever crappy job is on offer ... well, that's the whip in the hands of the plutocracy.
And Warren's "Be Perfect!" message ("Hey! They're either adults or they're not!") is congruent with our feudal masters' wishes too. It's like libertarianism...something that really never exists, except in an aspirational way. Worth looking into, BTW, is the fate of the recent experiment in libertarianism called the "Dark Internet." See http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/on-the-high-seas-of-the-hidden-internet/. “The Silk Road might have started as a libertarian experiment,
but it was doomed to end as a fiefdom run by pirate kings.”
Finally, just because it comes up so often when I remind people that money can serve them rather than enslaving them, the commonplace comment here is "But if you just 'print' money without end, you'll create [hyper-]inflation!"
First, no one is suggesting that government print infinite money, even if it has that capability. But let's grant a *theoretical* capability for government, with its unlimited dollar resources, to bid up prices, competing with the private sector for limited goods and services.
Who else is bidding for the unemployed? Or for all that slack in manufacturing? (Hint: No one.)
Even if we minted a few trillion-dollar coins and paid off the national "Debt" tomorrow, it wouldn't cause inflation. Obviously. Those "debt" dollars have already been spent, and done whatever bidding they were going to do. For more about this, see http://www.rooseveltinstitute.org/new-roosevelt/federal-budget-not-household-budget-here-s-why ...
And if all that is just so much economics baloney, then ask yourself where all this "fiscal responsibility" was when multi-trillion-dollar Middle East wars or multi-trillion-dollar financial sector bailouts were the topic of conversation. But let grandma's pension or medicare be the topic and "Whoops! We're out of money!"... It doesn't pass the sniff test. It looks more like that whip in the hands of the rentier plutocrats, as they seek to extract all surplus from the economy (no vacation for you, welfare person!), turning it into a series of toll booths.
So... sorry for your pain, my right wing brethren. Please take care of yourselves, and for heaven's sake stop believing everything you hear from these masters of propaganda.
I pigeonhole Libertarian, open-border policy as totalitarian because the natural result of it has always been and always will be tyranny. There's no way to control a mass of people that have no shared culture other than violence. Libertarians have this normative, idealistic, facile philosophy that people will just be peaceful and fit in if we welcome them and give them shit. That's retarded and ignores history, human nature, and reality. It's never worked and never will, because humans don't behave like that. Libertarians of any stripe (and, really, if there are so goddamned many sub-groups of Libertarians that you have to slice them up into micro-factions, is it really an over-arching ideology?) keep dramatically pushing the notion that people can live peaceably together without any government to keep the peace. Again, this is based on wishes and is a thoroughly leftist dream.
Totalitarianism is the natural end result of Libertarian dogma. Beg your pardon for not making that clear. There has to be some agreed-upon compact between citizens of any peaceful state, but Libertarians persist in their conceit of knowledge...freedom is good, so we must get everybody in on this deal. No, that will fail, every time. We need people that want to be Americans, not the D-bag constituency that wants to destroy America. I don't think that Warren wants to see the implosion of this nation, but the inevitable result of his Libertarian frothing at the mouth will produce the same result. You can have a totally free homogeneous society, but you can't have a completely free society filled with myriad groups that hate the dominate demographic. But, whatever. Libertarians are filthy pieces of leftist shit. They actively agitate for the destruction of my country and I'll continue to denigrate and ridicule them. That obviously intelligent people can be so wrong is a bug of Libertarian acolytes...history will show them to be arrogant also-rans, fringe leftists.
I am willing to agree that libertarianism in general has a major fault in believing that everyone desires total, unfettered freedom for their own actions. Their idea of society tends to ignore that human beings seem to have a particular and insatiable penchant for meddling in the affairs of others, which is why the anarchocapitalists who want total capitalistic economic autonomy with no governing state will be forever disappointed. The libertarian ideal (at least according to the minimalist government types), ironically, is pretty well embodied by the US constitution and the bill of rights. Where the founders erred is assuming that there would never be any meddlers after them who would create an entire career out of making rules for others to live by. They should have put lifetime term limits in for everybody and severely restricted the scope of the commerce clause.
As to immigration, again I agree that the open borders idea is unworkable and undesirable. But at the same time the system can't continue in the way that it has for the very reasons you state. We should enforce the immigration law we have, and perhaps go further by forcing employers to pay a huge fine and sponsor their illegals at a penalty rate for a non-citizenship limited worker visa. I also agree that the multicultural diversity ideas promoted by the left at the expense of a social contract and cultural assimilation are extremely destructive. It points to a lack of faith in our own culture and I fear in the long term will those ideas will probably corrode away the glue that holds our society together; I hope I am wrong.
As to being disappointed in the factionalism of libertarians, can you honestly say that the more conservative strains of thought are not factionalized? Is Mitt Romney indistinguishable from Jesse Helms or William F Buckley? (Ah, but Mitt is no true conservative!) Fine, what about the Economic conservatives not concerned with social issues? Are they indistinguishable from the Moral Majority types? Or defense and foreign policy oriented Neo-conservatives? How about the Teddy Roosevelt types? What it the overarching philosophy? (To me, it looks like "beat the libs and institute our own more morally comfortable brand of bloated gov't once we are in power".) Be very careful that you only label your own brand of conservatism as the one true philosophy and all of the other strains just aren't "True Scotsmen".
As for myself, I am willing to say that I mostly agree with about 70-80% of the libertarian value system. Well, whatever. Just like there will never be a second coming of Reagan, there will likely never be a politician of any stripe that I agree with 100%. The best I can hope for is to come as close as possible while still retaining a hope for electoral victory. (And even though on average that defaults to "Republican", I can't even begin to express to you how truly disappointing that is.)
You call libertarians leftists, but what what I think bothers you is that while on economic issues many libertarians are more naturally inclined to be allies of conservatives, on social issues they are distinctly different than either "leftists" or "rightists" and mostly travel in a direction perpendicular to either. And so while we get credit for supporting economic freedom for business, we get cast out for wanting to extend that to individuals (through more open immigration) While we get credit for believing in strong property and contract rights, don't you dare support gay marriage (also a contract with religious basis but state enforcement). People should be left free to choose their own path free from government coercion; why don't you give a damn about anybody else? Have you no obligations to society?
Perhaps you can see why the average libertarian carps about tribal politics; we get the same crap from both sides in equal odor. If our lives were a house, the conservatives want to monitor the bedroom and the fence while the libs love to control the kitchen, the living room conversation, and what goes on with the garage, the utilities, and the lawn. (I suppose it is no comfort to you that the leftists I engage in conversations with regularly call me a republican shill.)