Farms and Food Stamps
I was going to break my summer silence to comment on an extraordinary example of modern Republicanism today, but Paul Krugman beat me to the punch.
Read his op-ed piece in today’s New York Times.
I am sick of hearing from Republicans I know about the ‘waste’ in government. That waste is invariably caused, in their minds, by an army of moochers and hangers-on who live a lazy, well fed, life by gaming the government’s various welfare and support programs. No amount of empirical debunking ever changes this attitude. Nor does the fact that some of these same folk have benefited from the system themselves during difficult times.
I can understand – sort of – the anger caused by forking over taxes to fund programs that are ill thought out or that have silly bureaucratic rules creating stupid unforeseen consequences. I too have a visceral hatred for dumb bureaucracy and for its all-too-often dogmatic overseers. But that is no reason to be shamelessly hypocritical.
When the Republican majority in the House finally acted and passed the recent Farm Bill they, for the first time in aeons, separated the Food Stamp half of the traditional bill and tossed it aside.
So it appears that they find nothing wrong with the bureaucratic subsidy of wealthy landowning farmers and mega-agribusiness corporations – the main recipients of Farm Bill welfare handouts – but cannot abide the bureaucratic subsidy of those whom the economy has left hungry.
As Krugman points out, at least one of the Farm Bill’s major supporters, and a major opponent of the Food Stamp program, is himself a long time beneficiary of farm welfare payments.
That is flatly and overtly nasty. It is mean. It is disgusting. And it is morally corrupt.
I imagine that the gentleman in question is a steadfast Christian as well.
Which makes it even worse. If that is possible.
I would have more respect – although still not much – for a purist libertarian position that advocated getting rid of all subsidies. That would render society null and void in a kind of Hobbesian mire. The conception of society as a mean, ‘everyman and woman for themselves’, competitive, and thus dystopian struggle for survival is utter nonsense. Especially so in a modern highly connected and complex world. And tempering that cesspool of a vision with a sprinkling of gentle charity to alleviate the nastiness of the entire thing doesn’t cut it.
The poor, the sick, and the hungry have, in a democracy, the power to correct the dysfunction of the libertarian marketplace without violence. It’s called voting. Not only this, but they have the right to protect themselves from exploitation by the John Galt’s of the world and their hypocritical sense of entitlement.
A hypocritical entitlement is amply displayed by today’s Republican party and its libertarian tendencies.
The problem is that libertarians cannot abide democracy. The great unwashed mob looms large in their nightmares. Thus Romney and his hauteur, his patronizing ways, and his easy dismissal of the 99%. Thus the recent spate of efforts to restrict minority voting. And thus the Farm Bill.
This is America’s dark side. Beware of it.
