On hopeless idealism, and government’s failure in foreign aid, food aid, welfare, and other programs by Blaire Bayliss

Face The Facts!  The thing that bothers me most about arguing with fiscal liberals is that they always try to make you feel like a monster. If you argue that the government should not give out so much welfare, they take it to mean that you believe the poor should starve to death. If you say the government should not regulate a minimum wage, they take it to mean that you want workers to be abused. Nothing could be further from the truth.

To start with, from a moral standpoint, I have a problem with the idea that the government gets to redistribute wealth according to need and not merit. I also have a problem with the government pointing a gun to my head per say to take away my money, in order to give it to people who they think are more deserving of it.

But from a pragmatic standpoint, I also think that government welfare doesn’t tend to work. For one example, think about disaster relief. Many, many private charities rushed forward to help victims of hurricane Katrina. As did the government, who came forth with wonderful help. For example, FEMA cards which were used by hurricane victims to buy alcohol at Hooters, admissions tickets to gentleman’s clubs, and one-week vacations in the Bahamas. There were the houses the government built for hurricane victims, half of which are still unoccupied.[1]Overall, the fraud and corruption pushed the disaster relief program over two billion dollars. We’ve recently seen the same thing with food stamps [2], both in underground trading and in college student’s waste of food-stamp food. Government aid isn’t getting to those who really need it, and taxpayers are paying for freeloaders.

For example, Star Parker [3] who lived off of government welfare for seven years, who writes that as long as she did not get married, did not save and did not hold a job, she got two checks per month from the federal government. She also received food stamps, freed medical treatment, free daycare for her kids, and says she spent her days sunbathing on Venis Beach. Now,60% of American households take more from welfare than they give in.[4] Or people like Patrick Berry, who was fired from his job in software development. During his 99 weeks of unemployment, he actually turned down several job offers, because they paid less than the government welfare. Kathy Bray of Denham Resources, an unemployment agency, says that 1/4th of the people she talks to aren’t really looking for jobs, and frequently turn down job offers.

People take advantage of government handouts. Even with public housing, the people being housed trash their homes so badly that the government often has to just demolish its apartment buildings. Taxpayers pay for the apartment to get built, it ruins the neighborhood, the people living there vandalize the place, and the government uses taxpayer money to demolish it. That’s why New Orleans intends to end all public housing within the city.[5]

A good example of government handouts not doing what they were intended is unemployment. Unemployment has always increased when the benefits have increased, which is only logical. For example, look at Denmark, with one of the best welfare programs for the unemployed [6]. Despite its great system, Denmark still seeshigh levels of unemployment, and increasing mortality levels. [7] Denmark even realized eventually thatit’s unemployment benefits were causing people to stay unemployed for longer. [8] They also found that the longer people stayed unemployed, the harder it was for people to get a job. [8] In essence, not only were the handouts making people want to be unemployed as long as possible, but in fact the welfare made it so that after welfare ran out, people had difficulty getting jobs. Denmark had to cut unemployment significantly because of the debt it caused the government.

But not just unemployment. We have to stick our noses in other people’s jobs through things like minimum wage. Having a job mean that you agree to work for a person for a certain amount of money, under certain conditions. Libertarians (and objectivists) believe that people are responsible enough to make their own decisions in their lives- if people choose to work for less than minimum wage, that is none of our business. the most popular argument against this is that most people don’t have a real choice- they either have to accept bad, dangerous jobs, or starve to death. Enter The Jungle. The first problem with this mindset is, as I already said, people are responsible enough to weigh the costs and benefits themselves and not have us telling them what jobs they should and should not accept. But secondly, doing things like raising minimum wage won’t suddenly make employers pay their employees more than they believe their work is worth. That’s why the Wall Street Journal (2009, so the link is gone, but I keep the cut-out article in my room) Seattle Pi,[9] and Forbes,[10] found that when you raise minimum wage, you raise unemployment. Good businesses won’t lose money by paying workers more per hour than they gain from their services. (but the companies that will pay workers more than their labor is worth won’t need to worry about going bankrupt, since they can get a bailout for being nice.) So since the choice between a bad job and no job is hardly a choice at all, we should make sure that people must go with the latter?

 Another thing I have always failed to understand- people tend to think that if we were to get rid of minimum wage, people would be paid so little that they would be unable to pay for their families, because companies and businesses will exploit workers whenever possible. So then why does anyone make more than minimal wage currently? Why aren’t companies exploiting them? Perhaps because good workers are worth the money they cost? That’s not to say that business owners always act rationally, but it is to say that they will not always act irrationally.

And then there’s people-helping partially-government-funded organizations like ACORN and Planned Parenthood. Even if you’re totally for these organizations and believe that what they do is right, you can’t ignore the fact that many Americans do not want to support these organizations… at all. Plundering people’s money by force and giving it straight to charity organizations that the people are trying not to support? How is that not wrong? When organizations violate our individual moral beliefs, why should we be forced into supporting them via tax dollars? If only the government decided not to tax people for welfare. Then people would have more money to spend on charities they actually support. But people don’t give to charities, do they? Because Americans are selfish people who don’t want to give? Oh, totally. That’s why the Red Cross found that a majority of Americans plan to give to charity[11] and the Huffington Post has seen that Americans continue to give more to charity as years go on.[12]

Not to mention foreign aid. Just skimming on the surface, many governments steal the foreign aid money that the US sends to help the poor. [13] Food aid, too, is frequently stolen. [14] The money simply isn’t getting where it needs to go. But worse yet, when the food and money does go where it needs to go, many times it does not help. Foreign Policy’s November issue discussed exactly what the government is helping to accomplish in Iraq, using foreign aid money. One of the programs spent nearly ten thousand dollars to teach Iraqi women how to cook French pastries. Ten thousand dollars is a lot for cooking lessons, especially when you consider that the chef who taught the classes had volunteered and was not being payed. So what did the government spend all that money on? Much of it was spent paying Iraqi women to attend the class! [15] That wasn’t the end of it, though- the government also spent over eighteen thousand dollars to print calendars featuring art drawn by local children, and paid to put vets in the Bagdad zoo and much, much more. Foreign aid money is being wasted, even when it does successfully reach the poor.

But food and clothing aid surely can’t be wasted- can it? It can. It can also harm the very people it’s trying to help. In the case of Haiti food aid, we saw the government spend money to send free rice to Haiti- only to drive local rice farmers out of business, and the stability of Haiti was challenged yet again. It was so bad that President Clinton himself stated that the food aid program, “has not worked. I had to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did.” [15] Some have suggested that the United States government could avoid that problem by spending aid money buying from businesses that are based in the country which the government plans to send aid to. But we’ve already seen that we cannot trust the government to make sure that aid money gets In the right place, and we cannot trust it to spend the money on what people really need.

It has even been shown that foreign aid that the United States sends other countries to help fight terrorists actually keeps terrorists around! Look, for example, at Pakistan. For ten years now, Pakistan has been receiving foreign aid money. To date, they have received over twenty billion dollars in aid to help fight terrorists. So then why haven’t we seen a major decrease in the number of terrorists living in Pakistan? Why did we find Osama Bin Laden living just a few miles from a Pakistan military base? Some researchers, such as Navin Bapat, suggest that foreign aid money is actually encouraging countries to keep terrorists around- as long as there are still terrorists living among them, they get a fat check from the US government. When the terrorists are gone, the US aid will stop. Once you realize the incentives and strategy behind this game, it makes sense that the Pakistan government seems to be aiding terrorists. [16]

Does charity solve everything? Nope. Do Americans give as much as they reasonably can? Not always. But we’ve seen that the government isn’t the answer- government hasn’t fixed everything, and frequently is careless with taxpayer money. It simply doesn’t have enough incentive to make sure money is going to the right place, since it’s spending other people’s money. So instead of relying on government programs, rely on private charity. And instead of taking and redistributing our wealth, the government needs to give it back to us so that we can ensure that our charity money is getting to the people who really need it.

1: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/27/washington/27katrina.html?pagewanted=all

2: http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/s_768283.html

3: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Parker

4: http://money.msn.com/tax-tips/post.aspx?post=63c403d6-0a2f-4506-a8b8-25124d49889b

5: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/07/AR2006120701482.html

6: http://www.forbes.com/2008/06/27/unemployment-benefits-world-forbeslife-cx_mw_0627worldunemployment.html

7: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1740418/

8: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/17/business/global/17denmark.html?pagewanted=all

9: http://www.seattlepi.com/local/opinion/article/High-minimum-wage-high-unemployment-1132951.php

10: http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/23/raising-minimum-wage-opinions-columnists-bruce-bartlett.html

11: http://www.redcross.org/portal/site/en/menuitem.94aae335470e233f6cf911df43181aa0/?vgnextoid=ac803595ce1a3310VgnVCM10000089f0870aRCRD

12: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/20/americans-charity-donations_n_880484.html

13: http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=1955664&page=1

14: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/15/somalia-famine-aid-stolen_n_927126.html

15: Foreign Policy Magazine, November 2011 issue

16: Foreign Policy Magazine, September-October 2011 issue’

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