25th March 2011
Bryan Caplan has a nice little puzzler for you.
This entry was posted on Friday, March 25th, 2011 at 11:01 and is filed under Think about it..
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.
March 25th, 2011 at 14:55
I have no problem with anyone helping the poor.
I have a huge problem with institutionalizing (and thus politicizing) the process of helping the poor.
I’m not entirely sure where Mr. Caplan was taking this idea (other than to stir up some healthy replies), but ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ are cold and not useful factors for charity. A more accurate and useful metric is to look at the circumstances and determine what is the best response to the need. e.g., The best thing I can do for a slacker may be to let him get hungry enough to decide to support himself. A drug addict may need certain help, but certainly doesn’t merit the same level of charity afforded an orphaned baby.
While we’re on the subject, let me grouse about another destructive problem arising from the left’s determination to institutionalize charity. (And, yes, I used the word, “Charity” at least in part because that pisses liberals off.) When you remove the people being helped (the needy) from those supplying help (i.e., taxpayers), you remove the connection that makes charity work. Those who actually work with the needy are the only ones equipped to understand them and to put in the kind of effort that makes a difference.
Barbara Streisand loves to complain about how we aren’t taking care of the homeless, but she has a 110 room house (or so I’ve heard). If she actually gave a rats-ass, she’d have 109 people move in off the street and live comfortably. In effect, she doesn’t so much love the homeless as she hates the conservatives.
March 25th, 2011 at 18:47
The value of the distinction between the deserving poor and the undeserving poor drops like a stone when you put two undeniable facts together.
1. The largest category of the deserving poor are the children of the undeserving poor, and
2. We give government checks to adults, not minors.
March 25th, 2011 at 18:48
“Don’t say that, Governor. Don’t look at it that way. What am I, Governors both? I ask you, what am I? I’m one of the undeserving poor: that’s what I am. Think of what that means to a man. It means that he’s up agen middle class morality all the time. If there’s anything going, and I put in for a bit of it, it’s always the same story: ‘You’re undeserving; so you can’t have it.’ But my needs is as great as the most deserving widow’s that ever got money out of six different charities in one week for the death of the same husband. I don’t need less than a deserving man: I need more. I don’t eat less hearty than him; and I drink a lot more. I want a bit of amusement, cause I’m a thinking man. I want cheerfulness and a song and a band when I feel low. Well, they charge me just the same for everything as they charge the deserving. What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything. Therefore, I ask you, as two gentlemen, not to play that game on me. I’m playing straight with you. I ain’t pretending to be deserving. I’m undeserving; and I mean to go on being undeserving. I like it; and that’s the truth. Will you take advantage of a man’s nature to do him out of the price of his own daughter what he’s brought up and fed and clothed by the sweat of his brow until she’s growed big enough to be interesting to you two gentlemen? Is five pounds unreasonable? I put it to you; and I leave it to you.”
— Alfred Doolittle, *Pygmalion*, George Bernard Shaw
March 26th, 2011 at 06:37
I remember a case that we dealt with in my Torts class in law school, regarding the concept of ‘contributory negligence’, in which an appeals court reversed the judgment of a trial court that, because a man who had fallen into an excavation in the street was drunk at the time and therefore contributed to his own injury and therefore couldn’t recover anything. The appeals court said in relevant part ‘A drunk man has as much right to a safe street as a sober man, and greater need of one.’ I don’t know whether any of the judges was named Doolittle, but it occurred in the 19th century, so probably wouldn’t happen today.