Tag Archives: Private charity

Human Potential Exceeds the Human Burden

30 Friday Nov 2018

Posted by in Abortion, Mobility, Redistribution

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Are human beings a burden, and in what way? Between two camps of opinion on this question are many shades of thought, and some inconsistencies. But whether the discussion is centered on the macro-societal level or the family level, the view of people and population growth as burdensome promotes centralized social control and authoritarian rule, with an attendant imposition of burdens on human freedom and productive effort.

Naysaying Greens

The environmental Left views people as a net burden on resources while failing to recognize their resource value, without which our world would yield little in the way of food and other comforts. It is mankind’s ability to process and transform raw materials that makes the planet so hospitable.

The world’s human population has increased by a factor of 18 times in the last 400 years, but food supplies have grown even faster. Each person has potential as a resource capable of a net positive contribution to societal and global well being. If we wrongly conclude that people are burdensome, however, it offers a rationale to statists for regulating the lives of individuals, preventing them from producing and consuming as they would otherwise choose.

Sirens of Dependency

There will always be individuals who cannot provide for themselves, sometimes due to temporary circumstances and sometimes as a permanent condition. If the latter, these individuals find themselves in the lower tail of the distribution of human productive capacity. The undeniable burden of this lower tail for humanity can be dealt with through various social support structures, including family, religious organizations, private social organizations, and the public safety net.

People of true compassion have always helped to fill this need privately and voluntarily, but “compassionate” motives can be a false and corrupting when the public sector becomes the tool of choice. Actual and potential beneficiaries of public largess can vote for their alms at the expense of others, along with those well-meaning partisans who confuse forced redistribution with compassion. And benefits and taxes often create disincentives that undermine a society’s productive dynamic. Under such circumstances, the lower tail and its burden of dependency grows larger than necessary, and society’s ability to carry that burden is diminished.

Burdensome Children

Children are unable to provide for themselves up to varying ages, so they do create an economic burden for their parents. That burden might loom large in the event of an unexpected pregnancy, but most parents find the burden well worth bearing, whether planned or unplanned, ex ante and ex post, and for reasons that often have little to do with material concerns. But many individuals and families in the lower tail simply cannot bear the economic burden on their own; others not in the lower tail might simply find the prospective burden of an unexpected pregnancy a bit too heavy or inconvenient for non-economic reasons.

Solutions are available, of course. They range from sexual abstinence and prophylactics to adoption services, as well as hard sacrifice by new parents. And then there is abortion. The pro-choice Left makes the argument that children are so burdensome as to justify the termination of pregnancies at almost any stage. The ease with which they make that argument and traffic in the imposition of that burden upon the innocent is horrific. Furthermore, regimes dominated by the Left have often instituted formal population control measures, and Western leftists such as the late Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, have advocated strenuously for eugenics.

Burdens at the Border

Are migrants a burden or a blessing? In general, the latter, because mobility allows individuals to exploit economic opportunities, with consequent gains to themselves and to those who demand their services. This is generally true from the perspective of nations; it is the basis of the traditional economic argument in favor of liberalized, legal immigration to which I subscribe. But some partisans on both sides of the immigration debate accept the idea that immigrants impose a burden. That may be correct under some circumstances.

Opponents of immigration reform certainly identify immigrants as a burden to productive citizens and taxpayers. Critics of border control, on the other hand, are motivated by compassion for political refugees or economically disadvantaged immigrants, whether employment opportunities exist for them or not. In fact, would-be immigrants are often attracted by generous public benefits in the receiving country, and so they are likely to add to a country’s lower-tail burden, as I’ve described it. But the no-borders crowd insists that society must shoulder any burden created by the combined effect of an open border with generous public benefits, and even immediate voting rights.

The Burdens of Overbearance

The Left imagines that people create many burdens, but the Left is happy to impose many burdens in pursuit of their “ideal” society: planned by experts, egalitarian, highly regulated, profit-free, and green. They wish to “save the planet” by imposing burdens, regulating and restricting economic growth and sparing no expense to minimize the human “footprint”. They wish to fund redistributive social programs by burdening productive resources with taxes, while crowding-out private efforts to provide charitable relief. They wish to prevent the perceived burden of children by offering, and even funding publicly, the “choice” to impose an ultimate burden on those too weak to register a protest. And they wish to burden taxpayers by availing all potential migrants, without question, of generous public benefits.

Burdens are a fact of life, but people with the freedom to exploit their own effort and ingenuity for gain have increasingly shouldered their own burdens and much more. Over the last few centuries, human ingenuity has expanded the effective quantity of all resources by many orders of magnitude. In so doing, the scale and scope of real poverty have been reduced dramatically. But those who would deign to manage our burdens for us, under the authority of the state, are more threatening to our well being than beneficent.

Charitable Intent

31 Saturday Dec 2016

Posted by in Charity, Redistribution, Socialism

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I’m not accustomed to writing about religious matters, but I must say that I’ve never been persuaded that Jesus himself approved or advocated for socialism and state-enforced redistribution of wealth. Instead, I believe that Jesus would have endorsed the message above: charity inheres to individuals, and it lives in their hearts. It is not a concern that individuals can ever satisfy by promoting public tax and transfer policies, pressing claims on the resources of others.

This week, an essay on this topic caught my eye. It appeared in Lawrence Reed’s “Cliches of Progressivism“, at the Foundation for Economic Education: “#42 – ‘Jesus Was a Progressive Because He Advocated Income Redistribution  to Help the Poor’“. It covers a number of Biblical scriptures sometimes quoted in support of this notion, and Reed’s considered refutation of each. I provide just a few of Reed’s examples below, but read the whole thing, as they say:

“Make my brother share the wealth“:

“In Luke 12: 13-15, Christ is confronted with a redistribution request. A man with a grievance approaches him and demands, ‘Master, speak to my brother and make him divide the inheritance with me.’ The Son of God, the same man who wrought miraculous healings and calmed the waves, replies thusly: ‘Man, who made me a judge or divider over you? Take heed and beware of covetousness, for a man’s wealth does not consist of the material abundance he possesses.’ Wow! He could have equalized the wealth between two men with a wave of His hand but he chose to denounce envy instead.”

“Sell all your goods and share“:

“What about the reference, in the Book of Acts, to the early Christians selling their worldly goods and sharing communally in the proceeds? … In his contributing chapter to the 2014 book, ‘For the Least of These: A Biblical Answer to Poverty,’ Art Lindsley of the Institute for Faith, Work and Economics writes,

‘Again, in this passage from Acts, there is no mention of the state at all. These early believers contributed their goods freely, without coercion, voluntarily. Elsewhere in Scripture we see that Christians are even instructed to give in just this manner, freely, for “God loves a cheerful giver” (2 Corinthians 9:7). There is plenty of indication that private property rights were still in effect….’“

“Render Unto Caesar…“:

“‘Wait a minute,’ you say. ‘Didn’t He answer, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s’ when the Pharisees tried to trick Him into denouncing a Roman-imposed tax?” … It’s found first in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 22, verses 15-22 and later in the Gospel of Mark, chapter 12, verses 13-17. But notice that everything depends on just what did truly belong to Caesar and what didn’t, which is actually a rather powerful endorsement of property rights. Christ said nothing like ‘It belongs to Caesar if Caesar simply says it does, no matter how much he wants, how he gets it, or how he chooses to spend it.’

The fact is, one can scour the Scriptures with a fine-tooth comb and find nary a word from Christ that endorses the forcible redistribution of wealth by political authorities. None, period.“

While I generally agree with Reed’s analysis of this last point, I believe he missed the real message regarding any legitimate claims Caesar might have possessed. It is a statement about the value of material goods relative to faith and acts in the name of God. Obviously, as Reed says, it is not an endorsement of a power to tax and transfer.

The teachings of charity in the Bible have to do with the goodness of voluntary, self-motivated generosity. There are no lessons advocating compulsory taxes and transfer payments. If you say that Jesus would have supported such programs as deeds of a caring society, I would question your logic on several grounds. First, there are always political motives at play in crafting such policies, which usually include vote-buying and scapegoating. In that respect, those policies fall short of the standard for “good works”. Second, as already noted, the power to tax is backed by the police power of government, not quite the sort of “giving” about which Jesus preached. And, by extracting resources from those in a position to give unto others, tax and transfer policies reduce the capacity for private generosity. Granted, a charitable tax deduction might establish an incentive strong enough to encourage a level of continued giving. But then, the “noble” social deed becomes the hostage of tax policy, administrative definitions, rulings relative to recipient organizations, and the whims of self-interested politicians. A presumption is that individuals will not perform good works in sufficient amounts. Therefore, the state must step in, along with an army of bureaucrats and lobbyists who can be counted upon to feed off the taxpayers’ largess. The individual acts of charity encouraged in Jesus’s teachings could hardly be subject to greater convolution.

Poverty Maintenance Is Not A Win

01 Wednesday Apr 2015

Posted by in Poverty, Uncategorized

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obama-new-normal

Merely keeping a patient alive is inferior to curing the disease. Likewise, merely allowing the impoverished to live under tolerable conditions is inferior to eliminating the underlying causes of poverty. Evidence for the former is used by Harvard Professor Christopher Jencks to proclaim the war on poverty a success. That is the upshot of his recent article in The New York Review of Books. But does the maintenance of a permanent dependent class constitute success? I believe that our goals should be loftier, and President Johnson’s original goals for the War on Poverty went much farther than Jencks suggests.

Ostensibly a review of other work by Martha Bailey and Sheldon Danziger, Professor Jencks devotes most of his essay to arguing that the official poverty rate published by the Census Bureau is distorted, and that a “corrected” measure has declined since the “war” was initiated by Johnson in the 1960s. The official rate has fluctuated in a range of 11-15% since the mid-1960s. Jencks corrects the 2013 rate of 14.5% for 1) the value of non-cash benefits received by certain program recipients (-3%); 2) the omission of refundable tax credits from the official incomes of employed individuals below the poverty line (-3%); and 3) a change in the price index used to adjust the official poverty thresholds over time to one that does not overstate changes in the cost of living (-3.7%). These three adjustments would reduce the poverty rate in 2013 to just 4.8%.

Taken at face value, that reduction is impressive, but the third adjustment is not directly attributable to antipoverty programs. It could also be due to economic growth or other factors. Jencks notes the following:

“Both liberals and conservatives tend to resist the idea that poverty has fallen dramatically since 1964, although for different reasons. Conservatives’ resistance is easy to understand. They have argued since the 1960s that the federal government’s antipoverty programs were ineffective, counterproductive, or both. 

Liberals hear the claim that poverty has fallen quite differently, although they do not like it any better than conservatives do. Anyone, liberal or conservative, who wants the government to solve a problem soon discovers that it is easier to rally support for such an agenda by saying that the problem in question is getting worse than by saying that although the problem is diminishing, more still needs to be done.”

For my own part, I believe that many antipoverty programs succeed only as palliatives. They have not succeeded in breaking the cycle of poverty and dependence on the state. In other words, successful programs must foster self-sufficiency, which is a superior goal from a humanitarian and a Libertarian perspective. Jencks plans a follow-up on the “successes and failures specific anti-poverty programs”, but merely paying alms to the poor establishes a very low threshold for success.

In fairness to Jencks, anti-poverty programs serve a large number of individuals who are incapable of providing for themselves for a variety of reasons such as age, physical and mental disabilities. While it is beyond the scope of this post, some argue that private charities are more effective at providing for these individuals as well as the able poor. A greater role for charity could even be facilitated via public funding, but in any case, a larger role for private charity should always be on the menu of policy options.

A basic failing of many welfare programs is an incentive problem: able recipients perceive a penalty for work effort (additional hours or even kinds of employment) if rising earned income is associated with reduction or elimination of program benefits. This means that participants face a very high effective marginal tax rate on earned income.

This article from The CATO Institute contains a good overview of the federal welfare system, which consists of 126 separate programs. The article contains somewhat more detailed on the largest anti-poverty programs, such as Refundable Tax Credits (the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), and Child Tax Credit (CTC)), Supplemental Security Income (SSI – for aged, blind and disabled), SNAP (food stamps), housing subsidies, child nutrition (WIC), Temporary Assistance For Needy Families (TANF) and unemployment insurance. Social Security is also included since it pays benefits to many low income seniors.

The CATO analysis shows that by one measure, refundable tax credits are by far the most cost efficient at lifting people out of poverty at a point in time, at least among the large programs, followed by SSI and using subsidies. In-kind programs such as SNAP and WIC tend to be less targeted and less effective by this measure. There is fairly widespread agreement that the tax credits have better incentives for work effort, but there are still high marginal tax rates in the phase-out range, a marriage penalty, and the credits are paid only once a year as tax refunds. Some contend that the phase-out of the EITC discourages labor supply even more than the credit increases labor supply at lower incomes. Still others believe that adding certain work requirements would make the EITC a more effective measure:

“The [EITC] clearly does reduce poverty, but it raises work levels far less than some of the statistical studies of the past decade claim, and it appears to do so by encouraging working people to keep working, rather than driving the non-working poor toward jobs. If we wish the credit to promote work as well as raise incomes, we … must add other suasions to promote and enforce work, such as those found in the more successful work-incentive experiments…. These include mandating participation in work programs and setting some threshold of working hours that claimants have to achieve to get benefits.”

The incentive effects of other programs are more negative than the tax credits. This paper found that the food stamp program reduces employment and hours worked. The TANF program, which was the successor to Aid To Families With Dependent Children (AFDC), also exposes recipients to high marginal tax rates. While CATO has been criticized for analyzing the combined impact on marginal tax rates of up to eight different programs, there is little question that the incentive problem is compounded for participants in multiple programs.

There are many different approaches that can be explored for eliminating poverty, supporting those who can’t work and ending dependency for those who can. Certainly, the work incentives of existing anti-poverty programs can be improved in a number of ways. More inventive approaches can be tested at the state level. However, programs such as guaranteed incomes should be eschewed, as they tend to aggravate the incentive problem and encourage dependency.

There are many other approaches to attacking poverty and its causes that do not strictly qualify as “welfare reform.” These include measures that would improve education and employment prospects, including apprenticeship and other training programs. School choice is a fundamental reform with enormous potential to improve the quality of education among poor children. Transitioning to market-based health care reform, including competition among health insurers, would reduce medical costs across the board. Eliminating costly regulation of business can encourage economic growth, which is basic to lifting the incomes of the working poor. Minimum wage legislation should be avoided as it simply eliminates opportunities for the least productive members of society and it is not well-targeted at the poor. Tax reform that encourages saving and investment, including corporate tax reform, will increase the economy’s long-term growth potential, as would a general reduction in the size of the public sector. An end to wasteful subsidies to “privileged” industries can minimize malinvestment and release resources to uses that pass a true market test, leading to a more general prosperity.