Living Off Food Stamps and
Evading the True Welfare Issues
GrassTopsUSA Exclusive Commentary
By Gennady Stolyarov II
05-02-07
Oregon
Governor Ted Kulongoski is trying to look compassionate. He has
decided to spend a week living entirely off of food stamps, with a
budget of only $21 to procure groceries for all seven days. During
this entire demonstration, Mr. Kulongoski was accompanied by an
actual beneficiary of the food stamp program—Ms. Christina Sigman-Davenport—and,
of course, obliging reporters ready to publicize this gesture.
During his
shopping, Mr. Kulongoski suffered some horrendous and unimaginably
cruel deprivations. For instance, he was unable to purchase organic
bananas and was forced to settle for the less-expensive regular
kind—made more affordable for low-income people by genetic
engineering and artificial preservatives. Mr. Kulongoski could not
get his preferred Progresso soup and had to buy Cup O’Noodles
instead. And, of course, he had to endure the indignity of
purchasing mostly generic brands. Surely, the suffering of about two
billion Third-World residents who live in utter destitution pales in
comparison with Mr. Kulongoski’s week of “low-class” existence.
But seriously
now: what is Mr. Kulongoski’s purpose in this gesture? In his own
words, "I don't care what they call it, if this is what it takes to
get the word out… This is an issue every citizen in this state
should be aware of." So, Mr. Kulongoski—by approximating the
experience of a food stamp recipient—wants to “get the word out”
about the insufficiency of current food stamp programs and the
alleged extreme deprivation that they result in for their
beneficiaries. This, he hopes, will spur on popular support for even
further expansions of the contemporary American welfare
state. The Oregon governor’s stunt is likely to gather support among
upper-class leftists who believe that everyone ought to be entitled
to get the latest, most-overpriced, and mostly mediocre brands of
everything—but it offers no constructive arguments regarding the
issues surrounding government welfare, and no genuine connection
between the governor’s actions and the position he is trying to
spread.
Here are some
of the crucial questions that Governor Kulongoski did not bother to
ask—and that his gesture obscures rather than addresses.
Is living off
food stamps true poverty? The answer depends on what definition of
poverty we use and to what we compare the financial conditions of
food stamp recipients. By historical standards, even the poorest of
welfare recipients in the United States today has a standard of
living that even nobles and kings in the pre-industrial Western
world would have envied; he has access to far more food than his
recommended daily caloric intake requires. He has an apartment or
house, powered and kept comfortable by modern appliances; he most
likely has a car, a television, a microwave, and even a personal
computer that is perhaps only a few years old. He has historically
unprecedented access to any information he might want—if only via
the Internet at his local public library. He either does not work at
all—in which case he has all the leisure time he could want—or his
work schedule still leaves him with eight or more free hours per
day. He does not have to experience the exhausting toil of the
typical agricultural manual laborer at the turn of the last century
or the near-starvation lifestyle of most in Sub-Saharan Africa
today.
When Adam
Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776, he referred to the
fortunate conditions of English laborers who could afford to have a
shirt to wear most of the time and to eat actual bread with their
meals—compared to the majority of Frenchmen who had neither of these
luxuries. If this is affluence, historically defined, then
Cup-O-Soup and artificially grown bananas are unimaginably high
peaks of extravagance for most people in most times and most places.
People can
live happily, healthily, and productively off the money provided by
food stamps—if they can discipline themselves to live responsibly.
By any absolute definition, this is not genuine poverty. As
for the relative definition of poverty, most commonly used by
advocates of expanded government welfare, it is simply a veiled
desire for egalitarianism and an identical distribution of wealth to
everybody. After all, if one’s poverty is only defined in relation
to other people’s incomes, then “dire poverty” will persist so long
as anybody has an income lower than somebody else. Advocates
of this absurd definition can only consistently advocate the
ultimate goal of total economic equality for everybody—a condition
that stifles aspirations and, as the bloodbaths of 20th-century
totalitarian states have shown, leads to the extermination of the
best and brightest in a society. Some of those who define poverty
relatively may not recognize this implication, but their push toward
expanding the welfare state leads precisely to such horrific
consequences.
Another
crucial issue to address is the kinds of people that normally live
off food stamps. Are they truly victims of circumstance who have
done nothing wrong to deserve a lower standard of living, or is
their predicament (however mild it may be) their own doing? Of
course, there exist people who at times suffer severe financial loss
through no fault of their own. But if those people use the food
stamp program at all—and many will not, out of concern for their
autonomy and self-sufficiency—they will do so temporarily, until
they can find a way to earn back their living. The people who
chronically live off of food stamps do so for one of two
reasons. Many of them do not want to work or to obtain the
skills and education necessary to hold a long-term job; supporting
them amounts to subsidizing idleness and sloth through taxpayer
funds. A smaller group is physically disabled in a manner that
precludes them from holding most jobs. But it is a rare instance
indeed where a physically handicapped person cannot rely on the help
of family members, or the assistance of private charity, or the
performance of some job that is within his ability.
If indeed the
vast majority of people who live off food stamps do so because of
personal irresponsibility and sloth, then expanding the
incentives for them to do so should be out of the question. Quite
the contrary, they are precisely the ones who should not receive
any assistance at the expense of hard-working, productive,
disciplined taxpayers.
Furthermore,
is the welfare system even desirable, or does it pose disincentives
to people who could otherwise be working and earning more money?
Does having a guarantee of a regular income from the
government—irrespective of what one does—dampen one’s desire to work
and to stand on one’s own? Does it encourage perpetual dependence,
both material and intellectual, on the support of others? If so,
then the welfare state hurts more than it helps. Rather than
alleviating the conditions of the least-financially-endowed
Americans, it hinders them from achieving independence and
prosperity through discipline and hard work. Charity is sometimes
important and justified—but only for those who have fallen on hard
times through no personal fault. Private charities are far more
effective at assisting only those who genuinely seek to help
themselves; they can discriminate amongst potential recipients and
make their aid conditional on active searching for jobs, development
of skills, and living a clean, moral life. Government, on the other
hand, is far less selective and tends to disregard questions of
personal morality and ambition when distributing aid. Furthermore,
taxpayers have no choice whether to support the struggling young
genius with big dreams for himself and the world or the chronic drug
addict who wastes his welfare money on fueling his destructive
habit. Government makes that choice for them and supports the drug
addict far more often than not.
But not a
trace of these kinds of discussions was to be found in Kulongoski’s
attempt to show the world what living on welfare is really like.
Instead of thoughtful analysis, the Oregon governor has engaged in
mere sensationalist, populist propagandizing for a program that is
incoherent and exacerbates the problems it was meant to solve.
Kulongoski’s gesture is mere political posturing; it does not
constructively address the issue of government welfare or the
fundamental criticisms of the welfare system.
Gennady Stolyarov II is
Editor-in-Chief of
The Rational Argumentator, a magazine championing the principles
or Reason, Rights, and Progress. His works have been published by
Le Quebecois Libre,
Enter Stage Right Magazine, the
Ludwig von Mises Institute,
Rebirth of Reason, and other organizations. Mr. Stolyarov can be
contacted at
gennadystolyarovii@yahoo.com.
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GrasstopsUSA.com 2007
