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As somebody who grew up poor, those programs were awesome, and I'd like to see them expanded.
One of the biggest problems with food stamps back in the day was that you could just... sell them. When we stayed in one place long enough to get benefits, my mother would barter food stamps for booze or other ineligible goods. I, on the other hand, would get saltines and mustard for dinner, if we had the money for it. Sometimes I'd just get a big glass of water. The EBT card system probably makes that harder, but not so hard that it doesn't happen.
On the other hand, programs like government cheese were fantastic if you were a hungry kid. It wasn't fungible in the same way food stamps were, so it usually ended up sitting in a big box in the fridge and you could just... eat it if you were hungry. The real, undeniable, fundamental foodness of it acted as an extra guardrail against abuse in a way that is probably impossible with financial assistance
I don't know if it's maximally efficient in the purely utilitarian, ruthless economic way that a lot of people here prefer, but as a hungry kid having real food in the apartment was hard to beat.
There's gotta be a connection between a mama who makes those kinds of decisions and needing food stamps in the first place. That's enough to throw the whole program in the bin and go back to local neighborhood charity by people who can verify it's being put to good use.
Who will do this? Who will administer it?
Who will keep track of the budget or at very least the inflows and outflows of charity funds such that the neighborhood charity isn't unable to provide funds to people in need as they've run out of donations for the month?
How will this be more effective than the current system when you easily 1000x the number of "administrators" / people to coordinate this , human time is very expensive.
How will this work in major cities when a single tower can house 900 people?
What happens if this doesn't happen in a community? Say an impoverished trailer park. Or a condo tower without much by way of community. People will literally starve, are you okay with that?
Are you fine that a 3 year old child of drug addicts could credibly die or be very effected by malnutrition if your "grassroots community support organized by someone" program doesn't work across 300million people?
How about if that kid is 6 and severely malnourished, a teacher notices, and then they need to get hospitalized, a cost the hospital will inevitably eat because neither the child or parents will be paying for that. Are you okay with increased medical costs as a result of not giving people food?
It goes on and on, explain how you think this program will work, explain what you anticipate to happen when it falls apart in a locality due to any number of reasons, and then if any of this sounds more economically efficient than the status quo.
Charity organizations normally have treasurers and are required to publish annual financial statements. Outside of legal requirements, they can submit to the oversight of bigger charities.
Citation needed.
As the kids say, yes_chad.webp.
I think the standard libertarian argument is to make adoption easier. If the teacher (or the school?) cares so much, he can adopt the child. Don't force the hospital to pay for it.
My assumption, which anyone is free to disprove, is that the various levels of government, even as inefficient as they are, enjoy significant economies of scale when administering programs like welfare.
Downloading welfare to groups of people that are what, approximately Dunbar's number in size?
America has 343 million people, let's assume a "local community charity that knows everyone and thus knows who is deserving of benefits" serves 10x Dunbar's number so 1,500 people.
We now need approx 228,667 charities. Each one of those needs people to file tax returns, track inventory, collect donations, give out donations, etc. a charity requires administrators (or bureaucrats, if you will). Plus, those administrators need to pay rent, and buy food. So you need to pay them for their human labor time. So you now need a certain % of the charity donations to pay them. You also need to ensure no one who works for the charity is stealing money, so you need compliance and controls and good reporting. Holy shit, you've just invented government again, it turns out coordinating large numbers of humans to accomplish complex things is difficult and expensive.
A very quick research check shows an estimate of 700,000 - 900,000 government employees (all levels) who work in benefits administration, so each charity can employ no more than 3/4 people maximum, which is actually the bare minimum you need to have enough separation of duties for proper compliance around cash handling.
I don't see a world in which downloading all welfare responsibilities to magical "local charities" (which absolutely do not exist) even saves money over the status quo.
I am wildly not okay with people in the richest country starving to death. Similarly, and inevitably, I am incredibly not okay with $10,000-$100,000s of my tax dollars being wasted on medical care to fix someone's severe malnutrition that a few $1,000 of rice would have fixed a few weeks previously, that's just stupid.
Speaking of stupid, I think libertarianism is absolutely fucking retarded. This is not a personal attack, you strike me as an intelligent and thoughtful person, but the libertarian ideology is absolutely retarded. It is a luxury belief that can only exist because of the very large, very productive society that supports the people who mistakenly believe human civilization can work under it's framework.
I read that entire link you sent me, it was a mixture of good ideas and absolutely retarded ideas.
To begin with, the little intro box says
Perhaps they manage to draw a path between "virgin land that he finds and transforms by his labor" and modern society, but immediately this is retarded because there is no virgin land to find, period. So we're on a shaky foundation given this is what, 200 years put of date?
Next up:
We immediately are treated to libertarianism being retarded. If your "system" legally allows parents to let children starve to death, it's an awful system. And I'm very confident it is a system that will rapidly be outcompeted by systems that do not allow retardation of this level. We are the descendants of "soft" farmers instead of "hard" nomads because the farmers, who weren't Chad horse archers, still outcompeted them.
I would note here there are no libertarian societies, except maybe Somalia (which is a shit hole). Libertarian societies clearly cannot compete with societies that guardrail retarded behavior like "allowing children to starve to death".
The libertarians are able to pivot the anti-libertarian position to also then have to be anti-abortion, which is clever. Not trying to get sidetracked, but I think that's easily addressed by picking a dividing line in age in which a fetus picks up personal property rights/potential adulthood.
I'm actually not super offended if a mom didn't want to keep her rape baby. I wouldn't want the government to force that on her. I don't really think that any of the above people aside from parents should be obligated to take care of a kid, so libertarians and I agree here.
This is retarded and such a false equivalency, just pick a line in age in which parent doesn't have to maintain the child anymore.
This is stupid and unhelpful, we're not there yet, we can handle it when we are.
Just pick a line in the sand? That isn't impossible. Obviously in that example they aren't obligated to die to save the kid.
This is retarded. Obviously minimum care is what the parents "owe". If a kid has say diabetes, then insulin is included in "minimum care" , going immediately to "muh procustean, muh not everyone the same" is immediately answered by "the bare minimum to keep that specific human alive" which in 99% cases is a roughly identical level. This is trans-tier "because a fraction of 1% of people don't fall into the gender binary, we must make government IDs and medical records for everyone worse and less helpful".
No because the rescuer didn't conceive life to the child. Because the parent did conceive life to the child. This isn't complicated.
Just pick an age, in 99% of cases this works just fine. This is actually a solved problem.
Based.
I'm actually not entirely opposed to this, although at a certain age this will obviously psychologically damage the child, which society will have to pay for with increased criminality, etc. Again, societies with things like marriage, that force adults to shut the fuck up and stay in a family unit (which is demonstrably better for child outcomes) clearly outcompeted societies that didn't, so this would be a regression in civilizational quality.
I do actually agree however that adoption should be much easier, and priority should be made to rescue children from absolutely shit parents (like destitute drug addicts, I'm not opposed to sterilization of awful potential parents) so they can go to better homes.
I agree with basically all of it , but I think like with basically other libertarian "solution" , the proposed system is absolutely retarded, incredibly fragile, and would almost immediately disintegrate and be subsumed by neighboring countries with functional civilizations.
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I like about the free school food for any kid, even if their parents didn't apply programs that their parents don't have to apply, the kids can just go up to the counter and get breakfast or lunch. Also, the food I've observed is surprisingly good, actually.
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