Occupy Wall Street, Democrats, the Obama administration, Davos, the Communist Party, and various and sundry fans of government have recently gotten on yet another predictable kick about replacing capitalism with some form of highly regulated central planning. When people are free to buy what they want and make what they want, they say, the marketplace goes wild, dogs and cats start living together, the poles melt, glaciers topple into the sea, polar bears float away, banks collapse, hedge funds steal grand-pappy’s Teamsters’ Union pension, and generally a whole boat-load of bad things happen. As an alternative to all of this chaos with people trying to maximize their own happiness, they claim, maybe just maybe we should have the government step in and regulate the amount of happiness that everyone is allowed to have, including controlling manufacturing so that everyone can get exactly as much stuff as they need in order to be happy, no more and no less.

At a high level, how complex would it be to program everyone’s preferences into a computer and just let the government plan how much stuff of every type the manufacturers are allowed to produce? This has recently become a big deal, since the US government is now trying to dictate to drug companies how much of various drugs they should produce, seeing as how one of the leading results of Obamacare is severe drug shortages of drugs that aren’t widely prescribed.

Let’s dive into the problem.

On any particular shopping trip, an individual has a list of P things that he or she could conceivably want (don’t forget saving some money to pay the mortgage and electric bill in a week as two of the choices). There are P! (P factorial) different ways that the individual can arrange his preferences. A factorial is what you get when you multiply a number by every single number that is less than that number, all the way down to 1. For instance, 2! is equal to 2. Two items can be sorted in two ways. 3! is equal to 6, and 3 items can be sorted in 6 ways. 4! is equal to 24, and 4 items can be sorted in 24 ways. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. This gets large quickly. For example, if there were only 100 things that a person might want he would have 100 factorial possible preference orders . This order is likely to change day to day since people generally don’t spend a lot of time calculating exact preference orders for things they want. They generally wing it. But the government can’t plan for “winging it.” The government needs to plan ahead! So let’s assume we want to make our central planning realistic so we can anticipate exactly what the people want at any time.

How complicated can it be?

Let’s start with a preference list of 100 items. That seems about the maximum that you could remember at any one time. 100! has been computed as roughly 9.3 times 10 to the 157th power (). Written out it is the following:

93,326,215,443,944,152,681,699,238,856,266,700,490,715,968,264,381,621,468,
592,963,895,217,599,993,229,915,608,941,463,976,156,518,286,253,697,920,827,223,
758,251,185,210,916,864,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

That is considerably larger than a google (10 to the 100th power), which Google the company took as its name because of the mind-staggering vastness of a google. And that is the number of computations that would need to be performed to determine one person’s preferences for a set of 100 items.

As a point of comparison, physicists have estimated the entire observable universe contains 8.8×10^79 atoms.

vs.

One person’s 100 item preference map is 10^78 times larger than the number of atoms in the observable universe. That’s pretty big! It is nearly the square of the number of atoms in the observable universe.

As a thought experiment, pretend we have a computer as big as the observable universe and every atom is a logical switch that performs logical/mathematical transactions on data. To process all the data from a 100 item list every atom in the observable universe would need to perform 10^78 transactions. That’s a transaction count per atom of nearly the number of atoms in the universe!

Onward

How many books are on sale at Amazon? As I write this Amazon offers 24,702,516 books in stock. This does not include kitchen items, electronics, MP3 downloads, or anything else offered by Amazon. In order for the government central economic planners to be able to compute the preferences of an inquisitive Amazon shopper of wide-ranging tastes who only wants to buy books that are in-stock, they would need to solve an equation with about 24.7 million factorial moving parts.

But wait! It gets bigger because there’s a problem. People are not all the same. Every one of us is a unique snowflake of individuality. We all have different incomes, different likes and dislikes, different utility bills and energy needs, different appetites for different things, different families with their own unique likes and dislikes. And we all shop at different places, times, and speeds. So is only big enough for one of us with our 100 item preference list. For N of us we need to multiply everyone’s complexity by everyone else’s complexity. And you thought that the factorial was bad! This gets even bigger even faster than a factorial.

To solve the equations for two shoppers, or two hundred, or two hundred million, or 7 billion, necessary in order to provide the right number of diapers, flip flops, cigars, Jack Daniels whisky, and Kia minivans for the population, we must solve a gargantuan multidimensional cross-tabulation of preferences. Calculate the product of over the individuals (i) from 1 to N where P is the number of preferences any individual i has and N is the total population. (Reminder: the product is ALL those factorials TIMES each other)

We long ago passed the number of atoms in the observable universe in our count and the numbers keep getting bigger. So… do you think this will crash any possible computer in the universe? I do. After all, it requires vastly more calculations than there are atoms in the known universe, even if there are only 100 products that any one person might have the privilege of choosing. And no computer can have more switches or memory registers built into it than there are atoms in the observable universe. That’s an impossibility.

Then add in two more facts.

First, people change their preferences on a whim. They don’t have a static set of preferences for all the things in the world. Circumstances change. They learn. They grow. They forget. New things happen to them. They think of new things. And so their preferences change all the time. Calculations of preferences from one day are no good the next day.

Second, people invent new things. These new things are either absolutely new and have no comparable products on the market, or they are better/faster/cheaper replacements for existing products on the market. Calculated preferences on the day before the iPad was released would have needed to be recalculated after the iPad was released. This happens every time that something new is invented and comes to market. New inventions are either better/faster/cheaper or they fail. Nobody would buy a new product that was worse than the existing, known products with which it competed, after all.

What must a government hellbent on implementing central economic planning do?

First, it must remove all individuality from its people. It must turn every citizen’s preferences into a clone of every other citizen’s preferences.

Second, it must stop progress dead. New inventions upset everything. You will need to be happy with what you can get today forever. If the government decides to cut down America’s car choices to the Chevy Volt and the Impala, then that will be your choice for the next fifty years. Remember that Cubans still have the choice of driving around 1957 Chevy Bellaires or nothing, and it is 55 years since that model was made. That’s how central planning works. Kind of ironic given that central planners claim to be so progressive, since the first thing they do is ban progress.

Third, it must reduce the number of products available from the thousands that are available now to very few. This is the real reason why some governments try to give people “free” health care, “free” housing, government mandated jobs, “free” heating and cooling, “free” transportation and so on. They need to reduce the number of choices people have and the resources people have to get stuff. Certainly there must be fewer than a hundred products, as even a hundred products require a calculation that is impossible for any computer to solve ever. Reduce the choices to twenty or so, and then the computers can do the work.

That’s doable.

But with only 20 items available, including one car, one bicycle, one form of public transportation, one brand of shoes, one type of bread, and so on, what has the government done? What do we call a state of affairs where we only have a vanishingly small number of choices available to us, and we are not ever able to exercise individuality because our existence is constrained so tightly?

Unexpected shortages are inevitable

We call it poverty. We call it misery. We call it living in a cage.

That’s socialism for you. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the international socialism called communism, the national socialism called fascism, or the welfare state socialism called the European model. They all depend on controlling the people and reducing the choices they have. All socialism plunges the middle class into the poor class and creates equal poverty, equal misery for all.

That is what central planning must create in order to do its work. It forces us into uniformity. It creates poverty. It creates misery. And we, the people, would have to live with it the rest of our lives.

This article was originally posted at Unified Patriots

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech discuss last night’s testy debate in South Carolina, Newt’s battle with Juan Williams, and the millions of Americans on government hand out programs.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

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Over 46 Million Americans On Foodstamps For The First Time Ever

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Download audio here

Download Podcast | iTunes | Podcast Feed

On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech discuss last night’s testy debate in South Carolina, Newt’s battle with Juan Williams, and the millions of Americans on government hand out programs.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

Rivals attack Romney in testy debate
Video: Newt Gingrich vs. Juan Williams
Ben: Be it resolved …
Over 46 Million Americans On Foodstamps For The First Time Ever

Follow Brad on Twitter
Follow Ben on Twitter

Subscribe to The Transom

The hosts and guests of Coffee and Markets speak only for ourselves, not any clients or employers.

Re-posted from PJMedia.com

In 2011, the political, social, and economic fabric of our nation stretched a little too far. Will 2012 be the year the seams burst?

For starters, we have a broke, broken, polarized, and dysfunctional government, and that saga will play out on center stage in election year 2012. The people are polarized as well. However, one issue has upwards of 70% of Americans in total agreement — our nation is headed on the wrong track. Hard to argue: no nation or empire in the history of the world has ever been burdened with  $15 trillion in debt. I am known to be an optimist, but reviewing the statistics that reveal the sorry state of our nation, I find myself joining the chorus of voters who believe national decline can only be managed but not avoided.

Many Americans, especially Republicans, think the 2012 election is our last chance to turn our ship of state around, but it may already be too late. For exactly how to turn the ship around and who will be captain will cause more polarization, more dysfunction, and potential for upheaval. Per Bob Dylan: “When you ain’t got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose.” Some facts supporting that statement:

Half of All Americans Are Poor or Low-Income

According to the latest census data, 146.4 million  Americans, or 48% of the population, either fall below the poverty line or are in the low-income category.

Of that number, 97.3 million are considered low-income, while 49.1 million are poor. But the fact that should be of greatest concern to all Americans in regards to our future economic well being: 57% of all children are either poor or low-income.

Unless there is some radical change, the national trend towards a have vs. have-not society is already set in stone. Expect class warfare to grow and government entitlement battles to become even more vicious. There is no escaping that income inequality, on a scale that we have never seen before, will have a profoundly negative effect on our traditional American way of life. A child born into poverty has fewer chances to move into the middle class given all the disadvantages poverty heaps on a young life, both mentally and physically.

Census data from 2010 reveals that Hispanics account for 73% of our nation’s poor, and they are the largest and  fastest growing minority demographic, comprising 16.3% of the population. Hispanic growth increased 43% from 2000 to 2010.

Therefore, a massive public/private initiative must be developed to help lift Hispanics into the middle class or the U.S. will eventually cease to be a top tier nation. Our standing in the world economy is directly tied to Hispanic upward mobility.

The American Workforce Is Shrinking

According to USA Today, in 2010 the share of the population that had a job fell to 45.4%, down from a peak of 49.3% in 2000 — the lowest percentage of workers since 1983. This downward percentage translates into 27 million more non-working adults. Looking at male workers only, 66.8% had jobs, the lowest on record. Obviously this downward trend must be reversed, or national decline is inevitable.

High-Skilled Jobs and Low-Skilled Workers

This is a problem — closer to a crisis — that few of our national leaders bother to discuss. Too many  high skilled-high paying jobs are going unfilled. Met any unemployed computer engineers lately? Not likely you will.

Jobs, jobs, jobs may be the battle cry of the 2012 election but it is skills, skills, skills that are the real problem. Moreover, the lack of high-tech skills in our working population is impeding our future economic growth.

When I graduated from high school in the early ’70s, men who did not go to college often became auto mechanics. That path is not as easy anymore. Today, mechanics are highly paid and sought after because they require extensive computer training and certification to work on cars that have become computers on wheels.

How does our economy create low-skilled but adequate wage jobs for the growing number of low-skilled or no-skilled American workers? Solving that dilemma is the key to lifting half of our population out of poverty.

Innovative programs must be developed to help create a new middle class to supplement the current one that is shrinking fast. If we are unable to do that, then continued decline is the economic forecast for 2012 and beyond.

Government is a main source of poverty, and it’s ineffective for government to increase its presence to “solve” problems that it, itself, creates.  Prosperity is caused through increased freedom, not through increased government.  Florida Senator Marco Rubio gets this.  Unfortunately for minorities and for the area’s poor, many leaders in Greater Kansas City do not get this.

As reported in the KC Monitor, Kansas City Mayor Sly James and the Kansas City, MO, City Council are touting the supposed need and beneficial outcomes to the newly-imposed curfew for minors at five major entertainment areas throughout Kansas City.  This curfew was the direct result of a recent shooting on the Plaza.

For the summer months, from the Friday proceeding Memorial Day through the last Sunday in September the new curfew for minors under 16 is now 10:00 p.m. For minors ages 16 and 17 the new curfew is 11:00 p.m.

The Council also designated five areas that during the summer will have a special curfew. The Plaza, Westport, Downtown/Central Business District, 18th and Vine and Zona Rosa will have a 9:00 p.m. curfew for anyone under 18.

In October the curfew will revert for all minors under 18 to 11:00 p.m. on weekdays and midnight Friday and Saturday evenings.

Any minor violating the new curfew ordinance will be detained and their parents called to pick them up. Parents will be ticketed with a fine up to $500 for each offence.

Dutifully, the mainstream media echoed the talking points of Kansas City’s government, with regard to why more regulation — in this case, not business regulation but personal regulation – is a good thing.

Here was the video report from KSHB Channel 41, the NBC affiliate: “So far, so good, on new Plaza curfew.”

Compare the words of Sly James and KSHB Channel 41 with Florida Senator Marco Rubio, during a recent speech at the Reagan library, as reported by Kathryn Jean Lopez at National Review:

“The free enterprise system has lifted more people out of poverty than all the government anti-poverty programs combined.”

The YouTube video of Rubio’s entire speech can be found here.

______________________

Connect with Benjamin Hodge at Facebook, Twitter, and The Kansas Progress. Hodge is Chairman of the State and Local Reform Group of Kansas. He served as one of seven at-large trustees at Johnson County Community Collegefrom 2005-’09, a member of the Kansas House from 2007-’08, and a delegate to the Kansas Republican Party from 2009-’10. His public policy record is recognized by Americans for Prosperity, the Kansas Broadcasters Association, the Kansas Press Association, the NRA, Kansans for Life, and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).

The debt ceiling talks fell apart on Friday as President Obama insisted on $400 billion in new taxes to pay for more government spending. Imagine if he didn’t have to spend those $400 billion over the next decade.

Is it possible that there is $400 billion of waste in the budget somewhere? Where might that be? How about amongst the impoverished?

What do most Americans think of when they think of the word poverty? Homeless is likely at the top of the list. Lack of adequate or any food is probably not far behind. Not enough money to have heat in the winter might be another. Lack of medical care. There are no doubt others, but those likely the things most Americans think of when they think of the poor. And that’s not by accident.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 30 million Americans are living in poverty. That number has remained largely stable for decades. When the nightly news reports that fact and couples it with pictures of people sleeping on grates around the National Mall or a woman and her children huddled in a homeless shelter, most people with a heart feel like there must be a problem if such poverty can exist within the borders of the richest country on the planet? Unfortunately however that is base manipulation.

The Heritage Foundation recently reviewed a variety of government data and found a picture much different than what the left would like you to believe. They reviewed data from the Census Bureau, the agency that defines how many people are living in poverty, and the Department of Energy, that produces a survey looking at what amenities people have. Looking at the poor through DOE data paints a slightly different picture than what the media paints with Census Bureau data.

According to DOE data, 99.6% of poor households have a refrigerator, 97.7% have at least one TV, 97.7% have a stove & oven, 81% have a microwave, 78% have air conditioning (vs 84% for the general population) 64% have a DVD player, 63% have cable or satellite, 54% have a cell phone (vs 76%) 29% have a video game system (such as Xxox or Wii) (vs. 31%). Forty-three percent of all poor households own their own homes and the average poor American has 16% more living space per capita than the average person living in France, Germany, the UK or Japan. While households with such amenities may be considered poor, they can hardly be considered to be living in poverty in the clearest sense of the word.

The goal here is not to diminish the notion of poverty in America. Indeed there certainly exists poverty in the true sense of the word: According to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development a person classified as living in poverty had a 1 in 25 chance of spending at least one night in a homeless shelter during 2009 vs. 1 in 195 for the average American. And there really are families that end up in homeless shelters with no other place to go. At the end of the day, statistics are statistics but life is life. If you are one of the people who are living in a homeless shelter or on the street or hasn’t had anything to eat or can’t find a safe bathroom, it doesn’t matter what the average square footage a European gets by with is. What matters to you is what is going on at that exact moment.

And that’s where the problem as defined by progressives and Democrats comes in. By defining poverty so broadly they do a disservice to the truly poor. How? By perpetuating programs that send resources to those do not need them. Every time a taxpayer stands in line at the grocery store and watches a welfare recipient talk on her cell phone and pay cash for cigarettes and lottery tickets while using food stamps to pay for food it diminishes support for all government programs. It also keeps dollars from those programs which target the truly needy.

Rather than having programs that could help those with significant problems, we have welfare programs that simply perpetuate more welfare. Between 1965 & 2008 the United States spent $15.9 Trillion in its War on Poverty (vs $6.4 on all real wars) yet 10% of the population is considered to be living in poverty today.

Despite the War on Poverty’s abject failure, it goes on. And here’s where it hurts. Even now amidst the toughest economic environment in half a century, with urban unemployment in the double digits, when the government has to borrow a trillion dollars to pay its bills President Obama and the Democrats continue to play politics. When the GOP seeks to reduce government by cutting wasteful programs, the left accuses them of wanting to cut the safety net out from under America’s most vulnerable. That’s John Edwards lie of Two America’s all over again, and it’s still a lie.

The DOE’s numbers clearly demonstrate that there is a distinct difference between those considered poor and those in need of real help. While the most effective strategy would most certainly be to eliminate all government welfare programs and allow private charities to take over, that is unlikely to get by a donkey led Senate or the progressive in the White House. More realistically, by painting an accurate picture of poverty in the country, Uncle Sam could more precisely tailor programs to help the truly needy. Doing so would help those in need by being more effective, it might help restore the American taxpayer’s opinion of government in general and would save hundreds of billions of dollars just at the time when America finds itself broke.

There’s No Iniquity In Income Inequality

By Bill Flax,         RealClearMarkets          January 22, 2010

Demagogues in Washington are thrilled to ply their vote-buying wiles promising to punish greedy rich villains, but the wealthy are not the evil caricatures of popular imagination. Riches are not generated by depriving others. Some actions grow the proverbial pie. Others shrink it. Those prospering society through work, innovation or investing their capital deserve to be rewarded accordingly.

Greed has been prominently blamed for the current downturn and it certainly contributed, but not entirely in the manner depicted by the intelligentsia. In the Marxist conception of economics as a zero sum game, one’s profits must correspond to another’s losses. Businesses earning healthy returns are seen as immoral and limited government cited as the tool by which those on top exploit the masses. Society is comprised of victims and villains, with those helpless souls trapped at the bottom being pinned under those climbing their backs to the top. It is therefore government’s just role to redistribute power and wealth to the downtrodden.

Those who bought too much house weren’t greedy; that moniker only suits the banks which lost dearly on the unpaid mortgages. Companies losing money should be defibrillated back to health with transfers from those still creating the wealth sustaining us. The unemployed should be financed by those still getting up each morning. The villains are those creating the wealth that improves all of our lives and the victims are those who don’t work or honor their financial obligations.

But all this demagoguery is nonsense. It attracts votes, but a culture built on covetousness is unsustainable. When socialist-leaning reporters, teachers, social-workers, community activists, etc. bemoan how the rich attained their wealth only through robbing or exploiting others, (the classic class warfare agitprop) - the message is clear: hard work is futile.

Leftist do-gooders steer those they profess to be helping into an unnecessary bondage of poverty. Welfare is thought deserved and crime justified. The poor shouldn’t bother working or carry any qualms regarding theft or deceit themselves. If wealth were static, you could only gain by seizing a bigger slice from your neighbors. But wealth isn’t static. Capitalism grows the pie and benefits all.

The opportunity to work far surpasses handouts by offering both monetary reward and accomplishment. It allows the recipient a paycheck in exchange for contributing as opposed to the shame of only burdening society. Some are better compensated than others, but there is nothing immoral regarding different outcomes. This is natural.

It isn’t immoral that one is tall and another short. Nor is it unfair that one team wins and the other loses if the rules were applied evenly. It is absolutely immoral when government picks who wins. A cheating opponent is troubling enough, but the state should never violate its constitutionally-mandated role as an impartial referee. Unlike sports, where only one team wins, free markets allow both parties reward. Inequality doesn’t evidence winners and losers so much as reflecting one winning even more wonderfully than other victors.

The appropriate comparison is never whether someone else is better off, but what other options exist? It’s not unfair that my neighbor makes more than I. It is silly if I could earn more elsewhere yet complain rather than do so. If no other opportunities avail themselves, comparing your status with those more fortunate is a fool’s errand.

Poverty rarely results from a lack of opportunity. We earn when someone is willing to reward us because they also derive a benefit. If nobody values our output, we should redirect our efforts. The value of anything, our labor included, is a function of what someone is willing to pay. We make ourselves useful to society and get rewarded through market forces commensurately.

The media and academy compare real world capitalism, inevitably corrupted by imperfect man, with theoretical socialism. In practice, socialism of the fascist, communist or social democrat variety rarely works except on the blackboard. In theory, there would never be a traffic jam if everyone would just drive 65. In reality, socialism fails because it mistakes human nature. Incentives matter.

We are an inherently selfish species. Greed goes back to Adam, who had it all and still wanted more. Whether one considers Genesis a depiction of actual events or an allegory explaining human nature, the fact is undeniable: mankind from the dawn of history has been flawed. Greed didn’t just appear because George Bush was president. Greed defines us. It always has.

Capitalism may be the one aspect where this otherwise debilitating quality gets channeled into the benefit of all. In capitalist societies, wealth is generated by mutually beneficial trade. Wealth comes from adding value.

Through honest, free exchange, our wants are best satisfied by serving our neighbor’s wants. Without property rights and the freedom to transact for gain, we would fall into the mutually destructive perdition of jealously. We would consume as much as possible while producing as little as possible: communism in a nutshell.

America’s poverty line far exceeded the per capita income of every communist nation. Without free markets, no one excels. Markets don’t stunt the growth of low earners. They reward those who achieve more. People who denounce inequality are not concerned with the misfortune of some; they covet the bounty of others.

Socialism holds down everyone except the politically connected. Capitalism allows producers to rise on their merits and in so doing lifts the standing of all around them. Even the poor in modern America are generally extraordinarily rich by any material measure.

Those below the poverty line live better than nobles or tribal chieftains a few centuries back. Almost half own homes. About two thirds have more than two rooms per person while less than 10% have more than one person per room. Approximately three quarters of those below the poverty line have air-conditioning and own a car. Virtually everyone, the poor included, enjoys luxuries unavailable to the wealthy of recent past.

Even kings of yore didn’t have cell-phones, televisions, appliances, automobiles or the vast array of medical, culinary and entertainment options available to welfare recipients today. The lowest quintile of income consumes the most calories. The predominant dietary issue facing the poor isn’t starvation, but obesity. Our less fortunate aren’t suffering a lack of fortune.

The appropriate means to ensure wealth is earned fairly is not to inflict government into the market, but to extract it. No more bailouts, handouts or political patronage.

 http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2010/01/22/theres_no_iniquity_in_income_inequality_97600.html

Other work by this author.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

The budget debates have been illuminating. Apparently, those heartless tea partiers would gladly allow children to starve so millionaires can pay less in the way of taxes. The latter has been a recurring slander leveled against welfare reform in the ’90s and more recently in response to Paul Ryan’s budget proposal.

No one starved then. What if Washington stopped doling out relief now? Would a vacuum prevail? It’s an odd presumption considering free markets have lifted so many millions out of poverty and America is the world’s most generous dispenser of private charity. Maybe sanctimonious liberals fear such a vacuum because they are notoriously stingy.

People who oppose government redistribution contribute four times as much charity as those who favor such schemes. This includes 3.5 times as much to secular charities. Those who prefer free markets also give more blood, are more likely to provide directions, to return change given mistakenly or offer assistance to the homeless.

To truly be charity, alms must be given freely, require nothing in remuneration and offer the donor no material benefit. If possible, benevolence should be anonymous. The left hand ought to not even know what the right hand does.

Instead, the Left hand blares a trumpet about compassion while spending others’ money as it shamelessly smears the Right. Who is really heartless: those seeking fiscal responsibility or those spending our children into peonage?

Using one’s heart and one’s mind are not mutually exclusive.

The real vacuum is federal spending. Washington filters our taxes through a bureaucratic black-hole before spewing out waste and vote-buying patronage. Public charity is an oxymoron. There is nothing moral in confiscating property from one to bestow on another.

As discussed previously, society does not revolve around Washington. The building blocks for an ordered, coherent community are families, friends and neighbors and then church (or equivalent). Only if each fails does government have any justification to execute its own counterfeit charity.

In our limited, constitutional republic, the pecking order for a public response is first local government, and then state. There is no constitutional standing for federal charity. Rather than Congressman Ryan’s block grants to states, why funnel these funds through Washington at all? Instead, restore control back to state and local governments. The closer proximity between giver and recipient, the more efficient and responsible is charity’s conduct.

Historically, when private parties provided most benevolence, it was generally administered more prudently than politicians redistributing other’s largesse. Thomas Jefferson bragged that you could travel the entire eastern seaboard and never encounter an American begging. Private charity was readily available and distributed responsibly so as to not create additional social burdens.

Relief was never meant for people who could help themselves, but don’t. Instead of easy handouts, people who neglect their duties could be taught responsibility and the dignity of work. Sensible charity offers a minimal safety net to prevent starvation or exposure, not provide idle comfort.

Poverty once suggested that someone lacked food, clothing or shelter. As the Heritage Foundation observed,

According to the government’s own surveys, the typical “poor” American has cable or satellite TV, two color TV’s, a DVD player or VCR. He has air conditioning, a car, a microwave, a refrigerator, a stove, and a clothes washer and dryer. He is able to obtain medical care when needed. His home is in good repair and is not overcrowded. By his own report, his family is not hungry, and he had sufficient funds in the past year to meet his family’s essential needs.

Not exactly dire circumstances. The average menial laborer today enjoys more material abundance than a prince or tribal chieftain of recent past.

Washington sets the poverty bar at three times the income level necessary to afford an adequate diet. In 2011 it’s about $22,500 for families of four. The calculation considers only about four percent of government assistance. An average family with children in the bottom third of income receives over $30,000 of government relief annually across 71 means tested poverty programs.

Per the Census Bureau, people classified as poor spend $2.24 for every $1 of reported income. Many underreport income, acquired illicitly or otherwise, to avoid taxes and qualify for greater handouts. If the rate were based on consumption, poverty would be halved.

These endeavors violate many of the essential ingredients of sound economics. By means testing, incentives are perverted. They discourage effort, personal savings and marriage. We incent people not to work, spend frivolously and have children out of wedlock despite a clear correlation between marriage and success; and similar connections between illegitimacy and crime, drug abuse, unemployment and poor academic performance.

Welfare may profit overpaid government social workers, but it impoverishes those most vulnerable in our midst while consigning them to communities wreaked by high crime and moral despair. Men become superfluous as women marry the state. As illegitimate children became a bread ticket, we got more illegitimate children. Men turn to the street unbridled by the responsibility of providing for their offspring.

Handouts destroy families, rendering the recipients into perpetual dependence. Welfare creates so many additional social needs that only government can marshal sufficient resources in certain low-income areas. But that government exacerbates a problem leading to more government and thus more exacerbation offers a rationale to shrink, not expand the state’s reach.

The welfare state was created by opportunists exemplifying Lord Acton’s warning that power corrupts. It exploits the poor as political props with little regard for their well-being. The state is not altruistic. It is not inhabited by exemplars of wisdom and virtue transcending the human frailties that befall the rest of us.

According to Hillsdale College’s Michael Bauman, “More frequently than we care to admit, our poverty programs are thinly veiled efforts to enhance our self-esteem and to assuage our consciences by means of state programs. To imagine that by such shallow and self-gratifying efforts we can eliminate human poverty is shameless hubris, not charity and grace.”

Government sinecures actually lobby Congress on behalf of continuing these wasteful, overlapping programs for their personal enrichment. The SEIU, AFSCME and other bureaucrats advocate ardently for enlarged entitlements. But budget matters are secondary. The question is do these programs harm their supposed beneficiaries.

Social problems grow proportionately to what we waste “solving” them. Increased spending has not decreased poverty. The poverty rate stood at 12.6% in 1970. We now dispense, in real terms, about 15 times as much in blatant disregard of human nature. President Obama accelerated welfare spending by over 40%, to almost $1 trillion, but the rate today is 15%.

America spends over $2 trillion annually on entitlements, but this promises to explode as Baby Boomers retire. Private charity totals about $300 billion. If Washington ceased, could private parties tackle this terrific burden?

Today, America is far wealthier than when relief was local and primarily private. The average income, adjusted for inflation, increased sevenfold during the Twentieth Century. We’re wealthier, healthier, have more opportunities, etc. There are more resources available for charity because we’re better off, and were it still conducted sensibly, there would be less need.

The expanding attitude of entitlement endangers our very national ethos. America should never have embarked on this wretched journey which may soon smother the private sector. Only the creation of wealth can truly overcome poverty and this depends on individual effort.

Americans must quickly restore our self-reliance before we drown under egalitarian collectivism.

http://blogs.forbes.com/billflax/2011/04/21/does-limiting-government-really-condemn-children-to-starvation/

As part of the Left’s ongoing quest to make every attempt at welfare reform look like the opening scene from Oliver Twist, Susie Madrak of Crooks and Liars has written a profoundly misleading and wrong-headed piece that might better have been entitled “Please Sir, Can I Have Some More Cash?”

Relying heavily on unimpeachable sources such as FightBack!News (”News and Views from the Peoples’ Struggle”) Ms. Madrak weaves a tale in which Minnesota has surpassed Fascist Arizona in sheer villainy with its now infamous “Show Me Your Paper Money” law. On the off-chance you haven’t heard of this law, and aren’t already vibrating with outrage, Ms. Madrak is quick to enlighten you.

They’re not just crazy, they’re evil — and un-Christian, should they have the audacity to claim otherwise. If only we could force them to live like this, they wouldn’t last a week:

“St. Paul, MN - Minnesota Republicans are pushing legislation that would make it a crime for people on public assistance to have more $20 in cash in their pockets any given month. This represents a change from their initial proposal, which banned them from having any money at all.”

[From "Minnesota Republicans say: Poor people with money should be outlaws" — FightBack!News]

The apparent source of this whisper down the lane exercise was one Angel Buechner of the Welfare Rights Committee who testified on March 15 in front of the House Health and Human Services Reform Committee:

Buechner told committee members, “We would like to address the provision that makes it illegal for MFIP [one of Minnesota’s welfare programs] families to withdraw cash from the cash portion of the MFIP grant - and in fact, appears to make it illegal for MFIP families to have any type of money at all in their pockets. [Emphasis mine.]

It should be axiomatic by now that what appears to be true to groups like the Welfare Rights Committee isn’t necessarily the reality of things, and that rhetorical flourishes — to put the most charitable face on Ms. Buechner’s remarks — such as these should not be presented as undisputed fact, but I don’t get the feeling Ms. Madrak and her comrades spend a whole lot of time pondering issues of logic.

Instead, like other such sober and measured assertions (”Republicans Want to Beat Poor People with Flat Stick!” comes to mind) this one predictably went viral more or less immediately. Unhappily for the Keebler cookie elves who dutifully reproduce such things the story is palpably false.

Not that a web site offering “News and Views from the Peoples’ Struggle” shouldn’t always be taken at face value, but perhaps if Ms. Madrak had taken a quick peek at the actual bill – before picking up the cudgels — it might have dawned on her that the chroniclers of the peoples’ struggle had let her down this time.

Section 1. [256.9870] ELECTRONIC BENEFIT TRANSFER DEBIT CARD.

Subdivision 1. Electronic benefit transfer or EBT debit card. (a) Electronic benefit transfer (EBT) debit cardholders in the general assistance program and the Minnesota supplemental aid program under chapter 256D and programs under chapter 256J are prohibited from withdrawing cash from an automatic teller machine or receiving cash from vendors with the EBT debit card. The EBT debit card may only be used as a debit card.

Beginning July 1, 2011, cash benefits for programs listed under paragraph (a) must be issued on a separate EBT card with the head of household’s name printed on the card. The card must also state that “It is unlawful to use this card to purchase tobacco products or alcoholic beverages.” This card must be issued within 30 calendar days of an eligibility determination. During the initial 30 calendar days of eligibility, a recipient may have cash benefits issued on an EBT card without the recipient’s name printed on the card. This card may be the same card on which food support is issued and does not need to meet the requirements of this section.

Notwithstanding paragraph (a), EBT cardholders may opt to have up to $20 per month accessible via automatic teller machine or receive up to $20 cash back from a vendor.

Please note the remarkable absence of references to grandpa shelling out $21 in crumpled one dollar bills for the kids’ ice-cream (in the same imaginary Baskin Robbins where our president spends most of his time) and suffering a living hell of prosecution and public humiliation as a consequence.

In fact, you can examine this passage with any number of decryption algorithms and you won’t find anything remotely resembling a penalty on how much cash a public assistance recipient can have on him at any given time. What you will find is an altogether sensible, and probably way overdue, prohibition against converting the electronic equivalent of food stamps into untraceable cash.

Put more bluntly, when abuses — like using the EBT card to get tattoos — are so flagrant that local news outlets are catching on, people’s noses — especially those people whose taxes are actually paying for those tattoos — get out of joint. It’s nothing personal, it’s not about your body design decisions. It’s just that if you want “Born to Raise Hell” carved into your arm you should pony up the cash yourself, as well as sufficient cash for whatever distilled beverage makes that seem like a good idea.