Some gems from Michael Cannon at Cato-at-Liberty about how taxpayers are footing the bill for Nadya Suleman’s octoplets and six other children:
A reasonable person might ask, “So what? Poor kids need help. Would you rather let them die?” That certainly does not seem to be the answer. Yet there are perils inherent in having government come to the rescue.
One challenge confronting both public and private charity is known as the Samaritan’s dilemma: any effort to help the needy inevitably discourages self-help. People at the margins don’t work as hard, or even take deliberate advantage of others’ altruism, which increases the number of people “in need.” …
The First Peril of Public Charity is that government does a relatively poor job of discouraging such opportunistic behavior. Food stamps, Social Security disability payments, and Medicaid benefits are entitlement programs. So long as Suleman meets the statutory eligibility criteria, she is legally entitled to benefits no matter how much she may be milking the system. It is extremely difficult to tailor government eligibility rules (whether statutory or regulatory) to prevent all the possible forms of abuse. …
If somebody is abusing generosity, the appropriate response is not to take away their rights but to take away the generosity. (Some curtailment of parental rights can be justified if the children are in danger. But we don’t yet know if Suleman is going to get a reality-TV deal out of this.) Private charity can do that. Government is ill-equipped to do so, and so our rights come under attack.
The irony is that the Left’s adamant support for government charity is eroding smokers’ rights, property rights, dietary rights, medical rights, and now even the Left’s cherished reproductive rights — making the Left less and less liberal by the day.
Read whole post here.
