Je réponds

So, as I mentioned, my flurry of posts at the end of last year drew forth an unprecedented number of comments. And not only a sig. number(fn1) but also substantive, which was pretty much a first for the blog. I was excited. I wanted and promised to respond. Unfortunately, year-end close and the ensuing annual statement stuff is the busiest time of the year at work and I've also been busy with some stuff at home so I have not taken the time to sit down and give the attention that such a response deserves.

But now I am.(fn2)

First, because I'm pretty sure nobody besides me reads the comments(fn3), here is SaltyGirl's response to my post on the paternalism of foodstamps:

(Not knowing where to begin, she puts on her boots, and wades in the muck.)There are many, many valid reasons for the government to designate what various forms of assistance must be spent on. Your assertion that the very act of designating aid for food, rather than just "giving" handouts is paternalistic is perplexing. There are many parallel circumstances- such as with governments only spending certain funds on certain projects- where it makes good sense to have designated pots of money for certain needs. Why do this? Any number of reasons- accountability, ease of tracking and evaluating need, etc. With foodstamps and other need-based forms of assistance, the gov't has the additional compelling interest of promoting the health and welfare of its people.

Ultimately, the fact that you are against most forms of gov't regulation will probably cause you to dismiss what I am saying. BUT. You should at least learn something about foodstamps while you are dismissing me: http://www.dhr.state.md.us/stamp/spend.htm. For people that are struggling financially, foodstamps are literally a lifesaver. Foodstamps and WIC make a huge difference in the quality of life for almost 30 million people in America. They give children the opportunity to not start out life disadvantaged because they are malnourished. Hunger is a real problem, and it exists in your city, today. Until you are prepared to do without all of the benefits of government, don't heap scorn on others who benefit as well. Aiee! I am supposed to be studying right now! Damn you and your blog, damn you!! :) (fn4)

First, just as an overall comment to dispel any misconceptions, I was not saying that foodstamps were bad because they were paternalistic. Indeed, I was saying that I think the paternalism is a necessary feature of them, that the money would be wasted if the government didn't attempt to direct the handouts to food.

Second, still sticking with the general before I respond in detail, I am not against "most government regulation". I am against stupid, counter-productive government regulation -- a category into which a disturbingly large amount of government regulation falls, I'll admit. But I am fully cognizant of the need for much government regulation. Being a conservative, I also believe that there are limits to how well government will ever function. This does not mean that I feel it should stop functioning. That would be more on the libertarian side of the spectrum and while I have some sympathy for that view, it is miles from where I am.

Another aspect of being a conservative is to be aware that there are no real "solutions" to many of life's problems. We live in an imperfect world that is not perfectible. Indeed, attempts to perfect it tend to lead to the worst kinds of suffering. So when I point out a problem, do not think that I am implying that I have a solution or that there even is a solution at all. There are always different sets of trade-offs that we could change to and we need to be aware of what set we are dealing with and think about what other sets might be possible but there is no "solution".



Now, to deal more directly with SaltyGirl's comment.

I must confess perplextion at SatlyGirl's perplexity (fn5) as stated in the first part. I am fully aware that there are lots of reasons for the government to put different money in different pots. I work fairly closely with accountants and realize that it is important and fascinating work.(fn6) That said, there is no need for the government's obv. interest in tracking their expenditures to dictate that expenditures intended to alleviate the effects of poverty be explicitly guided to food or housing or whatever with separate programs. The only reason for that is that you do not trust the recipients of these payments to spend them wisely. And given that you are designing programs to keep people from starving or dying of exposure (for housing programs), etc., it is imperative that you try as best you can to prevent that from happening.


Let's imagine, for a moment, that we do not feel that we need to supervise the recipient’s spending, that we trust their decision-making and don't feel the need to paternalistically tell them "this money is for food", "this money is for rent", "this money is for clothing" and whatever other programs we might set up. In such a world, the government's interest in tracking their expenditures and testing people's needs could be far more simply met. Rather than have a panoply of poverty programs designed to meet the various needs of poor people, we could simply decide what the minimum income for a person should be. Then need-testing would be the (relatively) straightforward process of seeing how much someone made and the giving would be the (again, relatively) straightforward process of truing up their income to the agreed-upon level. Much easier to administer, much easier to track for fraud, much easier to ensure that everybody's getting their needs met.

In fact, there are people who do trust in the decision making powers of everyone and advocate precisely such a system. Milton Friedman was one such person. I have perhaps a more cynical (realistic?) sense of reality so I feel that such a system would be a disaster. Some portion of the people who received the "true-up aid" would waste the money and end up starving in the cold anyways. They need guidance or structure to prevent that, much in the way a child does. And the word for that guidance is paternalism.

Indeed, SaltyGirl seems to pretty much concede this point at the end of her first paragraph. She says the government has the "additional compelling interest of promoting the health and welfare of it's people". I would agree. But, of course, promoting someone's health and welfare through guiding their actions is paternalism. Again, this does not make it a bad thing.

Not to belabor the point, but when SaltyGirl draws a parallel to the good-directed nature of food-stamp assistance to “governments only spending certain funds on certain projects”, I think she is making an error. No doubt, the government has an interest in knowing how much they are spending on, say, a bridge (I imagine this is the type of project SaltyGirl has in mind), but I hope we can all agree that if the government, when appropriating money for that bridge, felt it necessary to go beyond saying “this is bridge money, here you go” to “this is rivet money, you must spend it on rivets; this is concrete money, you must spend it on concrete; this is girder money, you must spend it on girders” and so on, they would be entering paternalistic territory. Pretty much the only reason I can imagine that they would go to that level of micromanagement would be if they didn’t trust the people in charge of building the bridge to not do something stupid with the money, like just blow it all on a pile of rivets. (fn7)

Now, does the government have an interest in knowing how much money was spent on concrete, rivets, girders, etc. for the bridges they have directed be built? Yes they do. But they get those figures by looking at how much was spent on each category after the fact, rather than trying to direct the money in the appropriation bill.

Moving on to SaltyGirl’s points about hunger being a real problem and foodstamps saving literal millions of lives, I would just say that I was in no way calling for the abolishment of foodstamps or doubting that they help real people. In fact, in the following post, I even said: “of course, in a society as rich as ours we should have a safety net to prevent the worst of human suffering”.

So I hope that will suffice to prove that I am not trying to deny others the benefits of government.


SaltyGirl was interested enough to also leave a comment in my follow-up post about the bad decisions that always seem to be in evidence in media stories about the plight of the poor but I’ll respond to that one in another post.

fn1: Well, significant to me and my little blog...

fn2: A small part of the reason for my long absence was what one might call the procrastinator’s dilemma. I had wanted to respond to the substantive comments left on my blog at the end of last year. I even started composing a response. But I wanted to do it right, spend some time on it. But never seemed to get around to it. And it seemed wrong to throw little one-off posts while not finishing my one big one, so I stopped those as well. It was a vicious cycle. Hopefully this post has broken it and I will learn from the experience to not get into that situation again.

fn3: A quick note about comments. First off, I fully realize that the Blogger software is rudimentary at best. Comments on a separate page without the post? Why? Also, I realize that it looks like you have to register to leave a comment. An exchange with a reader who has emailed me comments in the past brought to my attention the fact that some might be put-off by having to register to leave a comment. You do not, in fact, have to register to leave a comment. You will have to answer a captcha ("what does this text say?") to post and that's annoying but it does keep the spam down. So, just to let you know, don't be afraid to comment. I'd love it and it's prob. not as difficult or intrusive as you think. Also, in the spirit of 50 million Elvis fans not being wrong, I'd point out that Elvis has done it. If the King can comment, why not you?

fn4: I added a paragraph break where I thought it was appropriate and corrected one typo. Because the comment system on Blogger is atrocious (see fn3) I thought it was the least I could do. If there are objections, I'm happy to put it back the way it was.

fn5: Yes, I'm having fun by creating my own conjugation. It's the kind of thing I do.

fn6: Wait, no. Not fascinating, the other one. Boring. That's it. But still v. important. In fact, double entry accounting is one of the key discoveries underlying much of what we think of as "the modern world". Interestingly, it was invented during the "Dark Ages" and is just one of a number of examples of crucial technological innovation that took place during that much maligned era.

fn7: The other big reason they might do that level of micromanagement was if they had the opposite problem: the bridge builder is too honest and would just spend the money to efficiently build the bridge. Why would this be a problem for the politicians in charge of appropriating the funds? B/c they might want to direct money to, say, concrete providers and the bridge guy might not buy as much concrete as the politicians in league with the concrete builders have already decided should be used. Is this type of thing one of the motivating factors for food-stamps above and beyond paternalism? Almost certainly. We do have, after all, an incredibly powerful food and agricultural lobby, but I don’t think it’s the kind of thing SaltyGirl is advocating so I’m sticking it down here.