If Not Now, When?
Jason Kuznicki on Mar 28th 2007
Tyler Cowen edges still further away from the libertarian camp, as follows:
Life without socks would be… “undignified,” but no one recommends government provision or even sock vouchers. Relative to income, socks are sufficiently cheap. There is some inequality of socks, but it seems that just about everybody — even the poor — “has enough.” We don’t even force people to buy socks for their kids.
Might there come a time when health care and education fall under the same rubric?
Yes, I know that, due to rising labor costs, health care and education might continue to eat up an increasing percentage of national income. But still, can’t “rich enough” people make do? Living in Aspen might cost half your income, but if you’re a multi-millionaire no one weeps for you.
Of course today’s poor aren’t rich enough for us to remove government aid. But when will the splendid era of libertarian freedom be possible? Today’s poor are much richer than the poor fifty years ago, and the poor of the future are likely to be richer yet. Won’t the welfare state, at some point, simply become unnecessary?
Readers, please tell me in the comments when the time will come for dismantling the welfare state.
The time is now, of course.
Today’s poor are rich enough for us to remove government aid. We already did this to a considerable extent with welfare reform in 1996. The result was by nearly all accounts a success, and I see no reason to think that we sit at any privileged point of negative marginal return on shrinking the state.
The socks argument doesn’t hold up too well either. By analogy, life without sufficient healthy food is undignified. Healthy food is also a small and decreasing share of household expenses for the poor. Indeed, overeating is a more important problem for the low-income than hunger. Yet government food aid remains, and it’s skewed heavily toward making sure that the poor eat nutritious meals, even if they don’t particularly feel like it. Why? Because doing otherwise would be undignified.
Dr. Cowen, I do say this with some sarcasm, but please, please, stop enabling the sock bureaucrats.
Meanwhile, if you want to shrink the state, entitlement programs for the poor are small potatoes and probably not worth the effort of dismantling just yet. (Ditto to earmarks; even if they are sleazier, they’re still a drop in the bucket.) The real action should be against entitlement programs for the middle class and above: They’re vastly larger and vastly more dangerous than programs for the poor. Worse, they’re morally indefensible even if we accept the morality of compulsory government aid. Which I still do not.
Filed in The Boardroom, The Bureau
Jason, with all due respect, this is totally wrong. In 2005, over 10% of American households experienced “food insecurity”, which is bureaucrat-speak for “not having enough to eat”.
The above quote comes from this link from a USDA survey on the state of food security in America.
Food insecurity means having even a single day within the previous year where you were lacking adequate food. The figure I have seen is not 10%, but 4%, with somewhere around 0.4-0.8% suffering this condition on any given day.
As explained in my link above, the 4% figure is for “very low food security”, meaning a household experiencing a chronic inability to get enough food. The 10% figure is for households that experience food insecurity at least once during a given year. Really, you don’t think that’s a major cause for concern? 1 in 10 American households not having enough to eat from time to time?
Really, I don’t think that it’s a major cause for concern.
Given that this same population — the poor in the United States — also suffers disproportionately from obesity, I have to conclude that a lot of the problem is, while undoubtedly real, also not susceptible to help, except insofar as they themselves do something about it.
This is not to deny that some people go hungry. But it is frankly ridiculous to think that government food aid is keeping significant numbers of people from starving in the United States.
It still amazes me that people still talk about healthcare in the US without addressing the fact that the AMA controls the supply of healthcare providers - so it’s no wonder that the market is skewed.
If we had a company that monopolized the number of socks produced every year and then had the government make it illegal for us to knit our own socks or make socks for other people, we’d be paying a lot more for socks as well. It just boggles the mind that folks understand the reasoning with socks but don’t understand it with respect to the supply of doctors.
Jason, I think you’re making a big mistake. You suggest that obesity is a problem for America’s poor because they eat to much, and therefore, that food aid is misplaced.
I think it’s more likely that the poor are obese because they’re eating unhealthy food, for the simple reason that it’s cheaper than healthy food in the short term.
Add in the fact that people with irregular access to food tend to binge when they do have access to it (a sort of “fattening up for winter” effect), and it’s easy to see why obesity might be a problem for people who can’t afford to feed themselves well.
I have been able to feed two adults on forty dollars a week. It wasn’t altogether enjoyable, but we did it. We didn’t become obese, either. Healthy foods can be quite cheap indeed, and I simply don’t agree with the claim that cheap food means obesity.
I think you may be a better cook. Eating cheaply and healthy required that you cook from scratch. At least that has been my experience. Also some foods some poor people eat were the same there grandparents ate, it was designed to be fattening and stick to your ribs, because the food had to last longer during the day, where people worked physically harder and walked every where they went. It could also be that some poor don’t want to appear poor, the thinking being thin is a sign of being poor.
Once you become obese, it requires very little food to maintain your weight.
I’m not denying that you can feed two people on $40, Jason, but there are peices that need to fall into place in order for that to happen.
-You need to have reasonable transportation to an inexpensive grocer. If it comes down to paying $30 for a taxi to spend $40 on groceries, that’s no different than going to the mini mart and spending $70 on junk food.
-You need to have the capacity to buy in reasonably large quantities. I bet you’d have a lot more trouble feeding one person on $20 than you did feeding two on $40.
-You need to have the capacity to keep fresh foods. Stuff that stores in a pantry tends to have more calories and less vitamins than stuff that stores in the fridge.
-And, of course, you need to know how to cook.
Yes, of course. You have to be a responsible person, teach yourself a few things, and know how to read a bus schedule.
You mean to tell me that for this we must keep government food aid?