Helping those who don’t help themselves…

Posted by Marc Hodak on June 14, 2008 under Unintended consequences | Read the First Comment

…because they are being helped.

Here is a more recent example of getting what you pay for, in this case FEMA supporting Katrina victims (yes, they’re still out there):

The scorching heat puts many at the Quality Inn poolside, but for Gwenester Malone, she chooses to beat the heat by setting her thermostat to sixty degrees. Malone’s room for the past three months, along with three meals daily, have all been paid for by taxpayers.

“Do you work?” asked NBC 15’s Andrea Ramey.

“No. I’m not working right now,” said Malone.

Malone says she can’t drive and it’s too hot outside to find work within walking distance. “Since the storm, I haven’t had any energy or pep to go get a job, but when push comes to shove, I will,” said Malone.

HT – Instapundit

The difference between private charity and public assistance:

With private charity
– You have to ask for help, often from somewhere within your community.
– The help you get depends largely on the charity’s individualized estimation of your need, which they will modify based on your willingness to help yourself over time.
– Most people, especially men, tend to understate their need to others, even when in dire straits
This latter is especially true when dealing with someone within your community. Most people don’t like feeling needy, even in today’s culture of victimhood.

Public assistance is a totally different kettle of fish:
– The process for obtaining help is made to be as impersonal as possible. You don’t know the bureaucrat behind the counter, and they don’t know you. (Both sides actually prefer it that way, contrary to bleeding heart aspirations about how we should all care about each other.)
– Because the recipients don’t care about the ultimate providers of the aid, and consider the proximate providers of that aid as a bottomless pit of money, they have no compunction about overstating their need.
– Because the state’s agents are using money from people they don’t pretend to care about to give to people they might pretend to care about, it takes a ponderous bureaucracy to minimize the leakage inherent in the system. (Before the 1996 federal welfare reform, government was spending over $24,400 per poor family on anti-poverty programs–enough to bring every family above the poverty level. Needless to say, the typical family in need saw less than a quarter of that in money or in-kind.)
– Aside from the raw bureaucratic costs, the state-driven aid process necessarily suffers from the knowledge problems of central planning. (For example, only 43 percent of all poor families received food stamps, and 23 percent of food stamp families had incomes above the poverty level.)
– Last, but not least, the incentive effects: because the payments are institutionalized and impersonal, they are far more likely to drive behavior that warrant the payments. In other words, the thing that we are paying money to get rid of (e.g., single mothers in poverty, or homeless people in hotels), we are actually paying to get more of.

That last point is much larger than redistributionists ever wish to acknowledge, and why after spending trillions of dollars on means-tested, anti-poverty programs over the decades these program were in place, the poverty rate actually went up.