Sometimes you just need a good lobster. I’m from Boston. Trust me on this.
Years ago, my wise and wonderful first year Contracts professor at Georgetown Law Center, the late Richard Alan Gordon, made a permanent impact on my conscience with a spontaneous rant. He was discussing a case involving a welfare recipient who had been sued by a Washington department store for failing to keep up with installment payments on a Hi-Fi system. The court voided the contract, saying that it was unconscionable for the store to intentionally create incentives for poor people to spend public assistance money on “non-essentials” like music systems. (I wish I remembered the name of the case, but then I only got a C+ in the course.)
As the students nodded their heads in agreement with the opinion, Professor Gordon cut them short and thundered (I am copying from faded old notes: Dick’s rants were always eloquent and memorable, and I began reconstructing them after class for posterity):
“Outrageous! Who are you, or a court, or a government, or any authority to tell another human being that feeding his body is more important than feeding his soul? Music is “non-essential”? I suppose that means that literature, culture, inspiration, wisdom, knowledge…or a moment of joy, the thrill of discovery, experiencing a concert, admiring a great work of art, or sharing an intimate and timeless moment with the love of your life is “non-essential” too! Neither the law nor any court nor a government authority has a right to dictate what is essential to any human being, whether he is receiving public assistance or not. Being poor imposes its own cruel restrictions on liberty and autonomy. Imposing more still is both an abuse of power and a violation of basic human rights. This is an assault on human dignity.”
Missouri Republicans, led by state rep Rick Brattin, are supporting state legislation that would ban using taxpayer dollars to buy “cookies, chips, energy drinks, soft drinks, seafood or steak.” The current system allows food stamps to be spent on anything with a nutrition label.
Their theory is that obesity and related ailments like diabetes are epidemic in poor communities, and that because taxpayers end up paying the bill, the frivolous and unhealthy choices of food stamp recipients should be forbidden. Yes, it is true: society always pays, in one way or another, for our poor choices, misfortunes and mistakes. The more the government intervenes in our daily lives, the more motivation it has to control our choices to minimize those shared costs, and the more power as well. Funny, though— I thought that Republicans and conservatives were the ones who believed in encouraging individual responsibility, liberty and autonomy. This proposed law not only does the opposite, it shows contempt for the poor, and seeks to institutionalize distrust of their ability to set their own priorities.
The proposal is unethical, and Professor Gordon, who was politically conservative, put his finger on why. The Declaration of Independence guarantees the natural right to pursue happiness, and poverty restricts that right too much as it is. If food stamps provide a recipient an hour of pleasure to consume a lobster or a good steak instead of canned tuna or Spam, that is as valid a use as any other. Respecting the autonomy of other human beings is a core ethical value, and one that the powerful, the wealthy, the privileged, the educated, the self-righteous and the influential increasingly ignore.
Ethics Alarms 
I guess I am obligated to point out that it’s almost impossible to get a good lobster in Missouri…
I should point out the relative health benefits of seafood… I also heartily agree. It’s not like people on food stamps are eating lobster every day, they still have a limited number per month; if they’re willing to sacrifice on other days to eat well one day, that’s their business and they’re not actually consuming any more of the State’s resources. Plans that limit what recipients can eat or purchase ultimately become arbitrary and riddled with bureaucratic red tape, not to mention having the potential for corruption as agricultural interests manage to get exceptions carved out. School lunches are a good example of this – well-meaning attempts to get recipients to eat healthier are defeated by loopholes and exceptions before they even reach the main floor. Remember when ketchup was considered a vegetable?
“cookies, chips, energy drinks, soft drinks, seafood or steak.”
I was going to point out that tuna, a staple second only to catfish for people with poor incomes, falls 100% into the category of seafood … even if Brattin is confused by its being packaged in a can. But that would be a minor quibble when I remembered that Brattin and his cronies have been in the mocking limelight before: wasn’t he the one who proposed legislation requiring women to get permission from men in order to have an abortion? If poor people and women are permitted to vote in Missouri — I’m not sure: are they? — then I can’t understand why he is still holding office of any kind.
“I was going to point out that tuna, a staple second only to catfish for people with poor incomes, falls 100% into the category of seafood” I wasn’t going to point that out because it seemed too obvious, but that’s another good example of how arbitrary these guidelines can be.
This sort of law is like the FDA telling us we need to cut back on meat consumption to save the environment…
This law is nothing like the FDA telling us that eating less meat would be better for the environment. Producing meat does indeed require an amazing amount of resources, including water and agriculture.
What it would be like is if the FDA rationed meat or told you you could not have meat at all. Informing people of the consequences of meat consumption is nothing like prohibiting them from purchasing meat.
If meat was bad for the environment, nature should not have evolved carnivores.
FYI—every time I criticize Republicans or a Republican, I lose 1-4 followers. Predictable as clockwork. Either my Democratic/progressive readers have thicker skin, or there just aren’t any left…
Think about it as letting the chafe flake off. If those people expected an echo chamber, they were mistaken.
Uh…did you completely forget the past 2 years of Lefties jumping ship?
They’ve left after being beat up and not being able to keep up. The knee-jerk conservatives just sneak off when I displease them. Fine with me: this isn’t a conservative blog. The fact that I end up agreeing with conservative positions just means that those positions are ethical valid, not that I signed on to any club..
1). I pay pretty close attention to the regulars and the semi regulars and the various political/religious/cultural leanings. I dont recognize any consistent conservatives who have a) put up a fight, b) received a beating because they put up a fight, c) most importantly, have stopped partaking in the discussions.
2). Not to say that they havent been weong when theyve been wrong, but i havent seen any bail or put up long term fights with your verdicts.
3). The last bit after “fine with me”, I don’t thjnk is relevent to my observation.
4) the wordpress app for iphone apprently doesnt support autocorrect.
4) not to rationalize all the typos. But in a rush, I had not the patience or time available to delete the dozen or so typos and re type after the first half dozen I did correct in such a fashion.
The regulars aren’t the ones I’m talking about—they let me know if they are leaving and why, and if they don’t, I ask. I’m talking about the follower count, which goes up and down predictably in response to stimuli. It just drives me nuts when I research and write a carefully thought out post and someone dumps the blog because it doesn’t fit their constructs.
Or I suppose they might be sick of the typos…
There is a depressing possibility that I frequent the blog so often that, during my industry’s spring flood of business and my associated decrease in participation that it only appears you’ve lost readership.
?
Can’t be that. Actually, March 2015 was the highest traffic month yet.
Well maybe my lack of participation has attracted crowds.
Just remind people that ethics requires exegesis not eisegesis.
Republicans seem to be just as determined to take us to the nanny state as Democrats are. Their motives are just different.
Since food stamps are given to people to buy food the choices they make should be their own. If they choose poorly they get poor results.
My parents gave me an allowance and they let me choose how to spend it. If I messed up that was my problem. They didn’t restrict how I could spend it.
But, and this is key, they didn’t bail me out when I made foolish choices either.
At some point personal responsibility to enjoy or suffer the consequences of our actions has to enter in.
The sand in the gears is the children who must suffer for the poor choices their parents make, and I don’t have a good answer for that except to hope that parents will see that their children are suffering and change their ways.
I’m not a Republican, but I am a conservative, and you ain’t getting rid of me that easily (Sorry. I tried to say ‘easy’ and I just couldn’t do it.). This, I think, is sort of like putting unreasonable conditions on an inheritance, isn’t it? Looks cute but won’t fly in probate. At least, I hope it won’t fly in probate. I can think of several conditions I’d like to put on my son’s for their inheritance, but all of them are silly, so I won’t. That said, Texas requires that you actually buy food with your food stamps, no alcohol, tobacco or lottery tickets, but there is still a bit of fraud with them. However, I don’t believe it ever occurred to a Texas legislator to limit WHAT KIND of food you could buy. Nor should it.
Issues like this separate true conservatives from opportunists, single-issue monomaniacs, and bigots.
Glad to see you on the right side of it, and thanks for the (not frequent enough) chance to agree with WyoGranny and Dragin_Dragon. 🙂
Conservatives always talk a good game about the free market — about how the decentralized decisions of the market are so much better than the centralized regulations of government bureaucrats — so you’d think they’d see the advantages of letting food stamp recipients make their own decisions.
Most conservatives, like most people of any ideology, are less devoted the underlying philosophy than they are following a series of cues that require little or now thought. This one is the “government caters to poor people who are lazy and dissolute, so lets at least make their rewards less easy to use” reflex. It’s not really a conservative instinct, just a lazy, mean and stupid one.
This conservative has issues with the idea of giving people things in perpetuity that they can earn but won’t. Once the thing is given without conditions the way it’s used should be the choice of the person who gets it. The issue is the unconditional gift of a permanent means to avoid personal responsibility.
They should have the autonomy to go out and get a flippin’ job.
The vast majority of SNAP recipients are children, the disabled and elderly who are not able to work. In fact, a majority of recipients who can work do work and continue to work after receiving SNAP benefits. The reason more people are qualifying for SNAP is because of the abysmal rate of wage growth.
Either shut up and keep up the good stamp program or be consistent and push for canceling it. But stupid nanny state restrictions like these are the worst of both worlds.
Personally I’d kill all entitlement programs and replace them with a 5,000 dollar per year allotment to anyone with a SSN, no strings attached. You don’t need it, sign a form and return whatever amount you want to the pool. Need more? A different form and you get extra from this pool. You say charity is good enough to keep people fed and off the streets, there’s your chance to prove it. Think freeloaders will be a problem? There will always be some, but I bet that will be fewer under this system.
That would be much, much cheaper than the cost of current entitlement programs, I’m pretty sure.
Surely somebody around here realises that George Orwell already covered all this, far better?
Well Jack, you’ve got the heads of the faithful bobbing just like your Contracts professor did before he pompously dropped his melodramatic guillotine on their tuition paying necks, but I disagree. I am okay with the department store plaintiff getting to sue the indigent guy but I don’t have any problem at all with administrators of a public assistance program attempting to effectively run the program in such a way that they can attempt to get the recipients back on their own feet or from falling into a diabetic coma. I’m pretty sure there are lots of things for sale in grocery stores that you can’t use food stamps to buy. I consider beer a basic food group, but I doubt I could use food stamps to buy a case of Schiltz. Is that Orwellian? Beer has provided me many moments of joy, and perhaps even inspiration. Is your Contracts prof available to go down to the local liquor store and argue my case (or would that be ‘for my case’)?
I think your arguments here are a little like the “over incarceration” arguments. “People are poor because they’re in jail in disproportionate numbers, therefore we should stop incarcerating people so they won’t be poor.” You’re saying “Society should stop trying to get people off public assistance because they’re poor and trying in some minute way to get them to not be poor would be being mean to them.”
I think public assistance began when a town council would take note of a poor family in town or the town drunk and try to do something to help them out. Which has grown into a massive, cumbersome government program spinning off all sorts of unintended consequences. I think you and all the other bobble heads should dismount from your high horses and give this a little more humane thought.
I have been on TDA here in MA for the last six weeks. Two days ago I had the worst lobster I have ever had in my life. How do you screw up a lobster?
On the other hand, I had one in St. Louis last year that was almost as good as the ones we prepare at home.
Now that I have that off my chest, I tend to think that the conservative approach to transfer payments should be to create incentives for recipients to wean themselves off of dependency – combining those incentives with work requirements would also give experience with market success that cannot be learned in any other way.
While punitive measures often seem to be sold as negative incentives, they are seldom as effective as positive incentives.
Great ideas, Phil. Only problem is, work requirements are considered punitive measures.
I work as a cashier at a grocery store, and I can completely sympathize with the impetus behind this bill. Most cashiers can actually predict with a decent amount of accuracy if an order is going to be paid for with food stamps based on the items on the belt. Tons of chips, cookies, candy, cases of soda, and name-brand boxed food? That’s a food stamp order. Any fresh veggies whatsoever? Cash or credit card. Lots of expensive, cold seafood? Food stamps. Giant decorated sheet cake? 50-50 chance that over-priced cake is being paid for with food stamps.
And it’s frustrating to see these people throwing away tax payer money on garbage and over-priced things. Have I, many times before, suggested that candy and soda should not be available on food stamps? Yes, absolutely. If I sat down and thought about it logically, would I actually draft and propose a bill to make that a reality? Probably not (and not just because I’m a mere grocery store cashier). Even candy and soda I can come up with justifications for buying on occasion.
Perhaps what’s really needed to solve this problem (and it is a problem, because many of these people are raising children who will, as a result of their inadequate nutrition growing up, be unfairly disadvantaged in life) is a basic education in healthy eating. Whether that’s provided when a person applies for food stamps, or if it’s provided in schools to all children (and let’s face it: schools act like they’re trying to teach kids to eat healthy, but they fail miserably because no one takes that class seriously, including the teacher), it’s got to be a better idea than limiting poor people’s choices.
Of course, this begs the question of why provide food stamps instead of paying the cash equivalent?
One of the purposes of food stamps is to encourage people to buy food. Food stamps already limit what could be purchased through them.
That is true, Michael. However, at least in Texas, the limit is sort of high…with your food stamps, you must buy FOOD. I can kind of see where this Rick Brattin person is going, and if he was smart, he would phrase it this way. He’s just trying to make the limited funds of the poor stretch further, by not allowing them to buy frivolous foods. My guess, however, is that that is actually NOT what he is trying to do. I suspect he is trying to make being on food stamps so onerous, people will be willing to give them up and go back to work. Unfortunately, IT WON’T WORK. Because the way he is going about it is WRONG.
But who doesn’t know that fruit and vegetables are healthier than cookies and soda?
I hate to sound cynical, Isaac, but I’d guess between half to three-quarters of the population.
Oh, anyone who takes the time to think about it knows they’re healthier, but they may not understand exactly why it matters to eat healthy foods, or (more likely) they have no idea how to quickly prepare fresh food to make a satisfying and healthy dinner. Cookies, chips, etc. can all be eaten straight from the packaging and your brain will tell you you’re satisfied. Boxed food has directions on the packaging that most people can manage to follow. A bunch of turnips or whatever will just sit there, mocking your ignorance, and people therefore don’t buy it if they don’t know how to make it. That’s where education comes in.
I think the underlying problem is, SNAP being manipulative is already “baked in the cake”. Forget about candy and soda, why is SNAP limited to edibles? How about using it to pay for Adult pay per view.
If we want to avoid these type of predicaments, then we should eliminate all of these alphabet-soup programs and just go with the left-libertarian model of a universal minimum income (another poster already alluded to this) and let them spend it on whatever they want.
Including adult pay per view? What happens when you get to the end of the cash, you still have a week left in the month, there’s no food in the house and your four kids are screaming for supper?
And that is the predicament – what if they spend all of their SNAP on expensive packaged foods and there is nothing left at the end of the month?
I am inclined to say that they will be less likely to spend food stamps, reserved for food than they will be to spend a check for $1000. You ever give money to a street person expecting it to be used for food? Guarantee you it wasn’t.
DD: You may find this strange, but I agree with you – however, the over-arching point-on-topic is that using public funds to manipulate the behavior of public charges is unethical. In that universe, only a universal minimum income would be ethical.
Bill, I do not agree with you on that. The over-arching principal, here, is that public money is being spent, presumably to insure that these people do not starve. Therefore, it is incumbent, and, therefore, ethical, on the folks managing these funds to insure, if possible, that the funds are being used in a manner they were intended. No ethics problem, there, at all.
They give recipients in Japan cash, and many of long-term homeless that they’re trying to get off the streets drink and gamble with it. They’re supposed to learn how to manage money, but there’s a high failure rate. We had a guy coming to the local clinic who got a packet of cash monthly, to pay the rent and buy food but he was sleeping in the station so he could go to the track. The clinic staff would give him a boxed lunch and some bread when he came in. So food stamps are good in that respect.
With food stamps you have to buy food. But, like the guys getting cash in our city, how can you expect behavior to change without education? People are going to keep on eating what they’ve always been eating unless they’re really motivated to change. Telling them they can’t eat seafood or steak is going to get them out of bad eating habits how? To me this ‘No seafood for you, you’re on food stamps’ has a punitive air about it. What exactly is it supposed to accomplish? Designating a certain portion of the monthly allowance of food stamps to be used to purchase meat or fish would have a better effect on health, wouldn’t it ?(although it too, is control of what people purchase which I am not crazy about) I really am puzzled about how they want to ban soda and snacks for people’s health but also ban two excellent sources of protein.
I think the idea of giving out cash as a panacea is delusional and a red herring. I suspect there is a very healthy secondary market in food stamps within which stamps can be readily traded for cash at some no doubt significant discount to their face value.
And you would be absolutely correct. Texas, at one time, had a thriving drugs-for-food-stamps black market. Going to the Lone Star Card, an ATM-like card, largely stopped that.
Funny, the debit card food stamps in Maryland haven’t stopped people from selling those cards (and providing the accompanying PIN numbers) for cash or drugs. A small grocery store in my town was recently busted for providing that extra “service” to its customers. I don’t know, maybe it does make the practice less common, but it’s still a problem.
It cuts it back, but as long as people would rather get high than eat, there will always be a problem. The debit card idea was for folks who still like to eat occasionally. If you sell the whole card, that option is gone, and there’s no way to rip a few stamps out of the book with a card. It’s mostly all or nothing.
I wasn’t advocating giving out cash. I was simply saying that food stamps are not a bad idea, as I have seen an alternative that doesn’t work.
My other point was that you can’t expect people on food stamps to suddenly know how to eat properly. If people buying nothing but junk on food stamps (or the cards) is a problem, why not educate people instead of just looking on and saying that since they don’t buy good food, you’re going to enact legislation to outlaw chips etc? It seems to miss the point.