Raising children on someone else's dime

[archerships]

Jane Galt writes:

children (and to my mind, the severely disabled), have positive rights. They have a right to be fed, educated, clothed, sheltered, and given medical care on someone else's dime. And if their parents abdicate this responsibility, then it passes onto the community, including the state, even if none of us asked said parent to reproduce. So arguing that educating poor children is immoral . . . well, I hardly know what to say, except remind me not to get into a lifeboat with you.

To which I responded:

No one objects to educating poor U.S. children. If that's an important value to you, then by all means, spend as much as you like of your own money educating them.

What I object to is your presumption that your preference for how I should spend my money supercedes my own.

For example, even if one grants that we have a moral duty to "educate poor children", it's by no means clear that the "poor" children of America are the ones who should be getting the money. After all, there are many more children outside the U.S. who are in far more dire straits. Perhaps I would prefer to spend my money helping them instead. On what ethical basis would you tell me otherwise?

Comments

[altamira16.livejournal.com]

I don't think it necessarily has to be an ethical basis. Good education in your area makes your place a desirable place to live for people with kids. This drives up the value of living in a place for all people. Kids who are in school are not breaking into your car.

It is like donating to your university so that it can maintain quality and name recognition thus enhancing the value of your resume.

[kindofstrange.livejournal.com]

I may be wrong, but I'm not really seeing that as the point of contention here. He's open for people donating as much of their own money towards better education, etc, if that's of value to them. What I'm seeing here is the issue of whether or not you should be able to demand that other people also contribute, whether they personally find it of value or not.

[altamira16.livejournal.com]

Yes, you should be able to demand that other people contribute due to Principle #1 & #3: Choices are bad & people are stupid.

[crasch.livejournal.com]

Yes, those are good arguments for funding education. However, I may feel that my security needs would be better spent by paying for fencing, guards, and so forth. Or I may believe that paying for anti-aging research is more important, so I give my money to that cause, and choose to live with the risk from feral kids. Or I may simply wish to spend my money on beer and hookers. Of all the things I could spend potentially spend my money on, I don't see why Galt's preferences should supercede my own.

[gentlemaitresse.livejournal.com]

I laughed at the term "feral kids". It's so descriptive! :-D

[drewkitty.livejournal.com]

This is probably the most politically contentious issue one can imagine, as it strikes at the legal and moral authority for involuntary taxation.

I note that a well regulated government ("Of, by and for the people") will often engage in activities that do not directly benefit the particular person paying a particular tax. My taxpayer dollars pay for roads that I will never drive, schools I will never attend (or send my children to attend), hospitals I will never use and paramedics who will never save my life.

I'm willing to pay towards all of these things because I want to travel on good roads (and don't mind if the goods I consume use the roads too), live in a community with good schools, and someday just might need a hospital THAT BAD, even traveling out of town.

I don't believe that taxpayer dollars -- which are effectively extorted from the body politic at gunpoint -- should be used inefficiently, callously, or towards narrow agendas that do not benefit the public good. In other words, your taxes are no longer "yours" to spend on beer and pretzels but belong to the community to spend in the community interest.

I also don't agree that poor children have a "right" to a good education, any more than a patient in cardiac arrest has a "right" to defibrillation. I think it's a social good well worth taxpayer dollars to have good schools and a good EMS system . . . but I stop well short of asserting these as rights.

Who decides how community funds are spent? You do, through your participation in the political process. If Galt does a good job putting her view out, and you sit on your couch with your beer, you lose your opportunity to complain about losing beer money to educate feral kids.

I don't expect agreement, but at some point a person chooses to be a member of society -- and cheerfully shoulder the burdens of membership -- or otherwise, and parasitically take advantage of society's generosity and/or have the occasional tax extorted from you at gunpoint.

[gentlemaitresse.livejournal.com]

Donating is not the same as taxation. Taxes are taken by force, and you have little say about how the money will be spent.

[altamira16.livejournal.com]

I know that donation is not the same as taxation, but I find flaws with both.

Donation:
-It takes time understand policy, research organizations, and measure their effectiveness.

Taxes:
-Someone takes your money and gives you no say

Taxes would be better if you had a little say. For example, I am sure that everyone of us would de-fund most government pork if we had a little say.

Donation would be better if organizations were more transparent. Charity navigator is a good start, but it would be nice to be able to see various things that charities attempted and how they failed or succeeded.

[gentlemaitresse.livejournal.com]

-It takes time understand policy, research organizations, and measure their effectiveness.

Government officials face those same problems.

And if you want to know more about a charity, you can research it the same way you'd research a corporation in which you would invest.

Also, "donating" doesn't have to mean to an official charity. It can mean helping out your neighbors, friends, and family.

[altamira16.livejournal.com]

Regulations force corporations to make a lot more information public than charities have to.

Most people in the other categories are well enough to fend for themselves for now.

on the nature of charities and "non-profits"

[danlyke.livejournal.com]

Remember that "non-profit" is a tax status, not an organizational goal. A donation to a "non-profit" is a purchase of services, and just as we have to be careful when purchasing objects or services in the real world, so too from so-called "charities".

Take, for example, The United Way: The organization exists for the sole purpose of skimming off donations before passing those donations through to more worthy causes.

In general, it's much better that we should take an active part in our communities than that we purchase by proxy good feelings and the warm fuzzy feeling that we're making a difference. Yes, it takes time to educate ourselves and involve ourselves, and really the difference is in looking at how much is getting skimmed off, and asking ourselves if the 5% of what we donate actually making a difference is worth more than putting in 3 minutes of actual involvement for every hour's worth of pay that we'd donate.

Re: on the nature of charities and "non-profits"

[altamira16.livejournal.com]

I have never given to the United Way and never intend to.

Re: on the nature of charities and "non-profits"

[danlyke.livejournal.com]

Yeah, they're a rather extreme example, but some of 'em are a lot less obvious. For instance, in the county I live in there's been a manufactured media scare about the prevalence of breast cancer. However, when you adjust for demographics (older population, wealthy, so higher than normal use of hormone therapy), it's pretty much inline with what you'd expect.

But by pumping the local paper full of bad statistics we've got several non-profits looking to "find the causes of the breast cancer epidemic in Marin County" that are paying healthy salaries to their directors and spewing bad numbers to the media, but doing little else.

Don't even get me started on some of the "public interest" groups like CalPIRG...

The list goes on. The primary goal of any business is to funnel money to those running it, and non-profits are businesses. Like all businesses, some of them produce something useful as a side-effect of that process, and I've got a few friends who have non-profits so that they can essentially better manage taxes on their hobbies, but we should be as critical of the services we get from any non-profit as we are of those we purchase from for-profit organizations.

[frauhedgehog.livejournal.com]

Actually, towns or neighborhoods with kids are financially undesirable places for low-income elders and singles because taxes tend to be higher, property values higher, and tax revenue spent on things singles and elders do not use (schools, playgrounds).

[gentlemaitresse.livejournal.com]

Does she actually claim to be libertarian?

[crasch.livejournal.com]

I think she claims to be libertarianish.

Re: no beef left behind

[crasch.livejournal.com]

Interesting! Thanks for the link!

Have you heard of Modest Needs?

http://www.modestneeds.org/

[kittles.livejournal.com]

And her moniker is Jane Galt? That's the part that really puzzles me.

[perich.livejournal.com]

She's explained this before: she adopted that moniker years ago on another BBS to annoy a particularly fervent Randroid and she kind of stuck with it.

She's libertarianish.

[perich.livejournal.com]

If I may devilishly advocate for a moment, I don't think that response addresses McArdle's point.

Her argument, if I read it right, is: "spending money to raise children trumps the usual concerns about coercing behavior or spending."

Your response, if I read it right, is: "why should money from me go to American kids, rather than, say, Sudanese kids?"

Framing the terms in that light, you'll see that you're already conceding the point to her. You're agreeing that, yes, children deserve money, but you're arguing for the right to determine which children get it - a right you would obviously retain if that money weren't taxed from you.

[crasch.livejournal.com]

I was trying to bring attention to the fact that if left alone, I may well spend my money in support of projects that have an equal or greater moral worth than hers (as judged by her own lights).

After all, unless she's a nationalist, she can't very well argue that relatively wealthy American children are more deserving of my money than starving African kids.

Given that she can't possibly know all of the moral goods that I and the millions of our fellow citizens would've supported had she not taken our money away, she can't possibly know that the value of her pet project outweighs the value of those other goods.

We do know, however, that tax collection and government bureaucracies impose large deadweight costs on all of us. In the absence of coercion that deadweight loss would be much reduced, and we would all have more money to support our favorite causes.