Time to “go John Galt” on them

I find it astonishing that there really are people who would base a life philosophy on that piece of adolescent-fantasy drivel.

[...] Weblog {January 17, 2009}   Check it out, I have a fan! This guy has the biggest crush on me. And James Rummel, too. Kinky! I’ll update this later when my [...]

Before writing this little rant, Kevin, you really should have bothered to read the reply I left to your comment on my blog.

The Supreme Court ruled that an emergency call from any cell phone, whether it has paid minutes or not, has to be put through. So why is the tax payer ponying up for minutes, anyway? If the purpose is to provide connection to emergency services, that is already mandated by law.

I have also never noticed a scarcity of cell phones in poor neighborhoods. Like you pointed out above, prepaid phones go for less than $25, and I constantly see them for less than that in convenience stores that cater to low income neighborhoods. Passing out phones is a waste of money, money that can be better spent elsewhere.

I am also not impressed with your insistence that the program is limited, and I don’t see the logic of your position. Are we supposed to be grateful that the government is only burning small buckets of our cash for no discernible benefit?

James

I read your response there; it didn’t make any more sense than it does here.

Your response implicitly concedes that the service is a useful one. You simply claim that the government doesn’t have to provide it because the recipients can provide it for themselves, and therefore the program provides “no discernible benefit” (I presume you mean “no discernible benefit that would not otherwise be available without hardship”). This is an empirical claim – a claim of fact about how easy it is for these program beneficiaries to meet this need on their own. You base this factual conclusion on your observations that many of the the poor people you’ve seen have cellphones.

Given that the program is limited to the most needy people – people living below 135% of the poverty line and who have no phone service at this time, or people on Medicare – there is at least reason to believe the program addresses a real need. Your observations are anecdotal, and I would guess probably don’t include many from the target population for this program (most people living at the government poverty line have jobs – this program is aimed at people who are essentially desperate, and in many cases disabled). You could be right, but you have no real reason for thinking so.

You have essentially conceded that this program would be reasonable if it were aimed at people who couldn’t provide for themselves. You have essentially no evidence that it isn’t, and the program eligibility criteria make me think it probably is. At the very least, they don’t make me feel that “my head is going to explode” or that the program is “sheer stupidity”, even if it bumps the standard of living of some of the poorest people in the country by an entire hour’s worth of phone time that they could have scrimped for on their own.

Menken defined Puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy”. Today’s Puritans didn’t notice that he meant it as a criticism. Conservatives are people haunted by the fear that someone less privileged than themselves, somewhere, is not miserable. Just calm down and try to be a better person.

quote – The Supreme Court ruled that an emergency call from any cell phone, whether it has paid minutes or not, has to be put through. So why is the tax payer ponying up for minutes, anyway? If the purpose is to provide connection to emergency services, that is already mandated by law.

You don’t call 911 to get a ride to kidney dialysis. Or to go and pick up one’s prescription drugs. Living 135% below the poverty line has to be awful. I think the poverty threshold is something like $10,700 a year. 135% below that would be, what, $4,000 a year?

Whoever said “Really makes me want to continue busting my ass working at my job.”, get fucked…

Conservatives are people haunted by the fear that someone less privileged than themselves, somewhere, is not miserable.

I love you, man.

“Your response implicitly concedes that the service is a useful one. You simply claim that the government doesn’t have to provide it because the recipients can provide it for themselves, and therefore the program provides “no discernible benefit” (I presume you mean “no discernible benefit that would not otherwise be available without hardship”).”

It is interesting how Liberals constantly insist that what I said isn’t actually what I said in order to make their point. So let me try to be even more clear.

I don’t concede that the service is a useful one. Far from it! I clearly state that what the program is trying to provide, is something that everyone already has.

You can contact emergency services at any time, whether or not you have outstanding minutes on your cell phone. If the intended purpose is to provide a way to call for help, then it is a waste.

“Your observations are anecdotal, and I would guess probably don’t include many from the target population for this program (most people living at the government poverty line have jobs – this program is aimed at people who are essentially desperate, and in many cases disabled). You could be right, but you have no real reason for thinking so.”

Ah, I see what the problem here is. You have no idea who I am! So let me explain.

For the past 18 years, I have run a charity self defense course for violent crime survivors. I specialize in the elderly and disabled, desperate and helpless people that no other instructor would touch, and the vast majority of my students were the poorest of the poor. Every single penny has come out of my own pocket, and I have spent more than $70,000 over the years to help people live without fear.

I have paid a heavy personal cost as well. I have a regular job, but the time spent helping my students meant that I would spend at least three days a week without any sleep at all. My health has gone downhill in recent years, and I am suffering from high blood pressure and a heart murmer. I have received death threats, and the neighborhood where I live isn’t the best. About twice a year, someone tries to rob me. Sometimes it is worse.

But, even though I have been in some of the most broken down apartments and houses imaginable, I have never come across anyone who didn’t have some sort of phone. Stolen cell phones, for example, something you could get from a street corner junkie for a buck, would still work fine and dandy if used to call 9-1-1. This is why I make sure that all of my students have a cell phone.

So far, they all have. And long before I ever showed up.

“Conservatives are people haunted by the fear that someone less privileged than themselves, somewhere, is not miserable. Just calm down and try to be a better person.”

So, tell me what contributions you have made to help desperate people. How much of your own cash have you spent, how much time have you invested, how much did you sacrifice to make better the lives of those less fortunate?

The problem with trying to claim the high ground, Kevin, is that I’m already King of the Hill when it comes to that particular patch. No matter how you try to climb, you would have to point a telescope straight up to even see the bottom of my shoes.

James

Just a test.

I’m wondering why the comment I wrote a few minutes ago isn;t showing up.

James

I came here via SecretLivesofScientists. I’d be very interested in your thoughts on this:

http://borepatch.blogspot.com/2009/01/im-here-to-help.html

Compassion is a very easy motivation. What’s more complicated is anticipating what the unpleasant consequences of well-motivated actions might be. There’s a lot of Great Society in particular that has simply ruined people’s lives, despite the best of intentions.

I’m not trolling for hits, and am not interested in name calling. I am interested in a reasoned discussion on the subject. There’s a lot that goes wrong in Big Government programs, and folks on the left have a real stake in seeing it fixed.

James: I’m wondering why the comment I wrote a few minutes ago isn;t showing up.

I don’t know. There were a few comments caught in the moderation queue (I don’t know why – it seems to catch things randomly). I’ve approved those – they appear above.

But unless you were commenting with a different name and e-mail address, there was no other comment from you in the queue. Are you sure you didn’t cancel out of it accidentally?

UPDATE: OK, here we go: yours was caught in the spam filter, not the moderation queue. I still don’t know why. But it’s approved now. Sorry for the delay.

F-stop: The eligibility criteriaon for income is 135% of the poverty line – that is, 35% above it. (You can’t be more than 100% below it unless you actually have negative income.) But even that standard is dire (the federal definition of poverty is set without any reference at all to the actual cost of living).

Aside from that, you discussion is exactly on point.

Secretlives: Do you always interpret “dismissive contempt” as “having a crush on”? I’m suspecting the answer is “yes, and frequently”.

James: You may not understand your own argument, but I can only respond to what you said.

At your own blog, and here, and again in your second comment, you have repeatedly insisted that there are ways for people to get the service in question, and that you insist that they do so. It hardly seems unreasonable to conclude that you regard the service as a useful one.

What you apparently object to is that that service is provided through a government program explicitly designed to provide services to people who can’t afford them. Your objection, again, then, is not to the service but the way it is administered. Your argument consists entirely of the empirical claim that the people in question can afford it, and therefore the administrative program is unnecessary. Your evidence consists entirely of an anecdotal story (which appears first on your own blog) to the effect that you hang out out with poor people and the ones you hang out with have cellphones. When an objection is raised to the comprehensiveness of anecdotal evidence, you repeat exactly the same anecdote, apparently in the belief that saying it twice makes it more convincing.

(By the way, there is a famous witticism to the effect that “the plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘data’”. It would be applicable here, except that you don’t even have more than one anecdote; you have the same one twice. I suppose in your case it has to be pointed out that “the singular of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘datum’”.)

I am happy to acknowledge that you are the King of the Hill. So happy, in fact, that I cannot keep from smiling while saying it. Quite a lot.

As for the prima facie likelihood of your plan being better than the government plan you object to, I can only note that a plan to establish basic and emergency phone service for the poor that includes the advice to “buy a stolen phone from a crack dealer for a dollar” is really hard to endorse as public policy. The fact that you apparently aren’t kidding also makes it really hard to take any of your observations on the subject seriously.

As to why your insistence that there is just no need for any program of this kind, or that stolen or inactivated phones acquired secondhand are a substitute for actual phone service, I can do no better than refer you to F-stop’s comment above (making allowances for an adjustment to the income estimate).

The bottom line: Your only argument appears to be that the poor can afford their own phones, and your only evidence is that you know some who can. But as I have pointed out, that is no evidence, and this program addresses people who are so poor they can afford almost nothing and in some cases may be shut-ins, which makes it likely that there are some, at least, for whom it is beneficial. Also, your proposed alternative – leave people to their own random and possibly dangerous or illegal devices to obtain a phone that is only good to dial 911 and no other number, if it actually works – seems so bizarrely unrealistic that it could only have come from . . . well, someone like you. Also, you are the King of the Hill.

I think the spam filter picks up comments that have greater than a certain number of links in them, especially to the same site.

The post in question had three links to the poster’s blog, that was probably the issue. Once in one of the sports-related threads, I wrote a long post with a bunch of links to stats (all at the same site) that disappeared after I submitted it.

Ted:

Your link is to your blog post on the downside of government programs, essentially focusing on “unintended consequences”.

While that is an important issue in analyzing any program or policy – and has nothing to do with government programs per se – I have some objections to your post. You give a few examples and seem to take it for granted that the “unintended consequences” of certain programs is obviously bad and obviously renders those programs unjustified. I don’t think either conclusion is obvious in any case you cite.

The first is a foam-core surfboard manufacturer who complains he is being harassed out of business by government inspectors. But if you Google around and find his original letter, even taking his (somewhat vague) descriptions of events at face value it’s obvious that the actions he complains of are not arbitrary and not necessarily a bad idea (even if you admit the enforcement is frustrating and hostile, which we have only his word for). His plant uses multiple carcinogenic and flammable solvents, among other things, that are subject to strict regulations that he can’t meet, including restrictions on air emissions and water runoff which he freely admits he engages in. He also admits there are others in the industry who do meet these standards, but he can’t compete with them. There appear to be other problems, too: he states he has had three employees disabled for life and one dead of cancer. And he complains that he is being unfairly held to “standards” which he does not describe but apparently have to do with the design or safety of equipment in his shop; he also states that he designed and built the equipment himself, so there are no standards for it – which he regards as evidence that he is being unfairly persecuted, but which in fact is evidence that he can’t show that his equipment is safe to use (and he freely admits that it is dangerous). In short, he is being held to exactly the same environmental and safety regulations as every other business, and he can’t meet them, largely because his shop uses highly toxic chemicals with home-made equipment and he has not modernized. It’s cool that he’s an old throwback to the 50s surfer scene, but that doesn’t give him the right to run an unsafe shop. I have no opinion on whether he’s being treated fairly, but the regulations he complains are killing him are not unreasonable (I suspect his dead or crippled employees would agree, and they get more of my sympathy than he does). At any rate, this does not appear to be an “unintended consequence” of the regulations – stopping toxic emissions and unsafe business practices is the purpose of the regulations. If anybody “didn’t see it coming” that they would affect Moondoggie and his crew of lovable beach rats, it would only be because they weren’t paying attention to the fact that he was gassing off 4,000 pounds of styrene and some untold amount of toluene per year, while three of his staff were crippled clambering around on homemade pipe racks without engineering ratings.

The second example hinges on the hoary, and discredited, claim that AFDC “destroyed the institution of marriage” by enticing black teenagers into having babies in order to scam all that munificent childcare money and sweet, sweet government cheese. Leaving aside the fact that everybody who uses the phrase “the institution of marriage” unironically, and/or is named Megan McArdle, is a risible crank, the basic factual claim behind the argument has been refuted many times. (The actual unintended consequence in question is that of the War on Drugs, coupled with longstanding black economic depression arising directly from slavery and segregation. And I’ll agree those were policies that should probably not have been enacted.)

The last example is of gun control regulations. The claim is that limiting guns will reduce overall violent deaths. This may or may not be true – it’s a perennial hot topic in that subject – but your objection is that your (imaginary?) debate opponent doesn’t have an estimate for the impact on one specific population subset (women using guns to defend against spousal abuse, or something like that). Are you suggesting that if the overall policy is a net positive but not for that specific population sub-group, you would oppose it? It’s not clear why that group’s safety trumps everyone else’s. It’s not even clear that there is any “unintended consequence” here, since you offer no evidence that the result, even for that one group, would be worse than the alternative. It sounds like you’re just nit-picking as a way of derailing the policy discussion – throwing up a demand for a prediction that is too narrowly tailored to be answerable, and then claiming the policy is bad because it doesn’t address that specific point. And even if your suspicion regarding that issue turns out to be correct, that by itself is not conclusory about the policy, it’s just another value issue to be weighed in the balance.

In short, the examples you give of “unintended consequences” seem to me either to be incorrect or factually flawed. But, interestingly, they are all flawed in distinctly conservative ways, such that, if your analyses are accepted, the fault lies with a suspiciously convenient set of familiar stereotypes: jack-booted environmentalist thugs hounding cool, hip businessmen into bankruptcy; black welfare cheats, enabled by do-gooder white liberals, living sinful decadent lifestyles that “destroy the sanctity of marriage”; and gun-grabbers who only care about stopping the onslaught of criminal violence, accidental deaths, and impulsive murders and suicides, but whose anti-liberal hypocrisy is shown up by the fact that they really don’t care about all those dead battered women who could have shot their way to freedom. Since none of those scenarios seems reasonable or likely, and the examples you give are mostly not “unintended consequences” in the first place, I am not inclined to regard them as definitive.

But all this is not to deny that the problem of unintended consequences is important. It is an issue that has to be addressed by anyone contemplating action that has broad public impact. And it is difficult (the unintended, by definition, is hard to plan for). All that is true.

What I really don’t get is how it relates to the issue at hand. Granted that there may be “unintended consequences” of giving lifeline phone service to the poor, and granted also that the fact that the unintended is not foreseen does not mean it will not occur, what are the worst such consequences, anyway? The program costs, probably, well under $100 per year per person, is so far available in only a handful of states to only a tiny subset of the population, and consists of nothing more than giving cheap cellphones and a tiny block of airtime – both of them bulk-purchased – to the neediest of the most needy population already on government aid. Assuming that a program to give free disposable cellphones and 68 calling minutes to kidney dialysis patients goes as wrong as it could possibly go wrong – what exactly is going to happen? What are these Medicare patients and impoverished aid cases going to do with the phones? Use them to call Al Qaeda and plan a jihad? E-mail phone-cam pictures of their genitals to each other? Rush the HHS offices and club the administrators to death, one tiny little bruise at a time, then steal government cheese? Really, I’m not much worried about it. And I don’t begrudge the service to those who need it, and my head’s not going to “explode” at the thought that some of them might not need it.

James,

Again, refer to F-Stop’s post. Are these people using the cell phone to call 911, or is it some other “lifeline?” My assumption is the latter. If we’re talking about 911, then you have something of a point, and those providing the phones would also not need to provide minutes.

Many local police precincts have programs where the distribute non-activated older cell phones to the elderly, or women, or whomever, for the purpose of having a device to contact 911 in the case of an emergency. I would think that if this was about 911 there would be a way to do this through either cell phone companies, or the police or whomever, that would be free, save the cost of administation. But again, I doubt this is the case. (Whether your local police are any more moral than your local crack dealer is a question for another thread – and one for which I have numerous different anecdotes.)

Anyway, here’s something to think about. Assume for a second that in the absence of this service a would-be service user use a disabled cell phone to call 911, because that call would go through while the call to the lifeline service would not. How wasteful would that be? First, you’d have emergency resources in use for (in some cases) non-emergencies, which could result in unquantifiable consequences in terms of potential delays when responding to real emergencies. Second, it’s over a grand just for an ambulance to show up and for you to be looked by anybody in the hospital. And, since these people don’t have any money, who is going to have to pay for that? You. And it’s gonna be a lot more expensive than just giving out a few thousand cell phones.

To add to the string of cliched witticisms, I’m thinking your position is of the “penny wise, pound foolish” variety.

KTC, you raise some solid points, although I don’t thik it’s accurate to call Megan McArdle a crank. She well may be wrong on some topics, but it’s not clearly dumb. Quite frankly, there were a bunch of AFDC regulations that did in fact discourage women to live with the fathers of their children. They were designed to reduce cost/fraud/whatever, but it’s a plain fact that women would lose at least some of their benefits if they married.

Reasonable people can debate the relative impact of the regulations, but you can’t simply dismiss it.

The point of my post is that there are indeed unintended consequences to actions. Nobody sees how history will play out. As a thought experiment, nobody would have designed Social Security the way that it’s grown over time. This is not to say that we should get rid of Social Security, but it pretty clearly could use some straightening out. The fact that very few people under 30 years old think that they’ll see benefits is simply a fact, because the numbers are unfortunately the numbers.

A lot is broken, and needs to get fixed. The left should be invested in a well functioning public sector – I’d expect them to be much more invested than the right. For better or worse, Bush tried to implement some reforms to Social Security four years ago; these were immediately shot down. OK, fine.

But the fact remains that Social Security is headed for the largest financial collapse in history (the numbers again, and as I said, simply dismissing them won’t change the coming collapse). The unintended consequences of that collapse will be pretty hard on groups that the left likes to think that they champion.

My thought is that there are a lot of folks in the middle, and even on the right, who would support real reforms. If the left doesn’t like Bush’s proposals, fine. But they need some proposals of their own other than raising taxes and throwing money at the problem.

You’ll find that a lot of conservatives are indeed compassionate. They just have very little faith in particular strategies. To a certain extent, that lack of faith is justified.

Two last things: I believe that it’s extremely important for the left and the right to work together. There’s too much damage that would occur from major collapses like Social Security going down the tubes, and the problem is too big for one side to deal with by themselves.

Also, I’m not a conservative. I posted about it here:

http://borepatch.blogspot.com/2008/11/im-not-conservative.html

Oh, Kevin. You had me at “cheap” and “wheepy.”

hubba hubba

Please clarify this:
“That’s why we’re slowly dying as a nation – we’ve made it so incredibly attractive to live at the lowest economic level in America that the affluent are actually quitting their jobs to go on that famously welcoming and generous dole.”

The first part of this sentence is quite agreeable to me. I think that making it attractive to live at a low economic level is very bad for our country. Does this not also apply to offering people at the lowest income levels cell phones?

The reason I “snarkily” (as you said. You clearly haven’t read much of what I write, and I’m not saying you should, but this was *hardly* snarky) spoke out against this program is that I believe that it serves as an incentive for the poor not to work as hard. Soon we’ll have government subsidized healthcare, just one more thing people won’t have to work to afford. I don’t believe this will have an overall positive influence. Why work for something when by working less gets you that same thing for free?

Scoff if you want to, anyone with a basic understanding of psychology can understand that this only fuels the entitlement mentality. The spoiled undergrads I have the pleasure of teaching (some, not all are spoiled) are a fabulous example of this. They have been given everything on a silver platter by their rich parents: education, cars, money, frills and spoils. The result is that they believe they do not have work for these things, and it comes as no surprise to me that college students in general are very liberal and tend to feel that no one else should have to work for these things either. Instead, they think they are entitled to receive these things. They don’t come to class, they turn in the worst kind of slop for homework (at a supposedly reputable university), and they call me a bitch on the end of semester evaluations because I wont give them a nice grade for shitty work.

Mr. Keith, if you are surrounded by a different breed of person who is in fact grateful for the government subsidies they receive, who is inspired to work by receiving a helping hand whoopdeedoo. But not all low income people are like this. I wish they were, but they aren’t. You’re probably like my mother in that she cannot comprehend a student not being grateful for a free ride to college because she has such a high value for education. She assumes other people are just like her and would never piss something like that away.

As for the idea that ” Conservatives are people haunted by the fear that someone less privileged than themselves, somewhere, is not miserable,” eat my butt. I live in 450 sqare ft 1-bedroom apartment next to the barrio. I don’t own a television because my last one broke and I can’t afford to buy a new one. I don’t have a washer and dryer; I cook dinner for a friend once a week and in return, I get washer-drier privileges. I have student loans and car insurance to pay for out of my measly research assistantship. But guess what, I don’t find my anything but privileged lifestyle depressing at all.

Minimum wage jobs were never intended to support an average lifestyle. They were designed for low income people to use as a stepping stone to better opportunities. If a person is still working for minimum wage jobs after 2 years, they’re either a mental midget, or they they haven’t figured out how to show up to work not-drunk.

Shoothouse Barbie (Secret Lives of Scientists)

a whopping 68 minutes per month

Either this is inaccurate (and you mean per year) or your “12 minutes per month” snark is inaccurate.

“You may not understand your own argument, but I can only respond to what you said.”

Condescend much, Kevin?

“Your evidence consists entirely of an anecdotal story (which appears first on your own blog) to the effect that you hang out out with poor people and the ones you hang out with have cellphones.”

It is more valid to say that my conclusions are based on 18 years of careful observation. PhD’s are earned with less thorough data sets.

“I am happy to acknowledge that you are the King of the Hill. So happy, in fact, that I cannot keep from smiling while saying it. Quite a lot.”

And you are deliberately dodging the question. What have you done to help those in need? What sacrifices have you made to improve the world? I blog under my own legal name, everything I do is in the public record. Where is your accomplishments?

You directly insulted me, impugned my character, and tried to claim that your own character was superior simply because of your political beliefs. Either prove your point or concede that you are outmatched. It is as simple as that.

If you were really interested in integrity, then you would have already answered this question.

“As for the prima facie likelihood of your plan being better than the government plan you object to, I can only note that a plan to establish basic and emergency phone service for the poor that includes the advice to “buy a stolen phone from a crack dealer for a dollar” is really hard to endorse as public policy.”

No, you have gotten it all wrong. (As usual.)

Yours is the claim that this must be a matter of public policy, since you are the one defending a new scheme to provide free cell phones and minutes. I am pointing out that the the benefits the program is supposedly trying to provide already exists.

Remember when I said that Liberals cannot engage in a debate without lying about the position of their rivals? You have just proven it once again.

“Your only argument appears to be that the poor can afford their own phones, and your only evidence is that you know some who can. But as I have pointed out, that is no evidence,…”

18 years of observation, remember?

But if evidence is what you want, then turn this around. Where is your evidence that this program is needed? Where is your data about the number of lives this would save? How many people die every year because they don’t have cell phones, with minutes still available? Point to it, link to it, quote some hard data.

If you have nothing then your entire argument falls apart, just as your assertion that you are somehow morally equal to myself falls apart the instant anyone glances at my record of achievements.

Ted: Your comments are well taken, though I still don’t get what you’re worked up about. A few quick responses:

- I am consistently underwhelmed by McArdle, but nevermind.

- You are right that some child-support programs did encourage mothers to remain legally unmarried, because they automatically cut off aid to married mothers. That has nothing to do with whether aid programs in general literally encouraged teenagers to get pregnant in the first place, which is the explicit claim McArdle makes (as evidence of the impact of child support programs on “the institution of marriage” – further evidence of her critical thinking skills). First, to the extent that such programs did discourage legal marriage, as opposed to actual parenting relationships, and to the extent that matters, it’s obvious that the problem was the fault of the enforcement regulations, not the aid program itself – specifically, conservatives’ insistence that everybody’s families had to conform to their preconceived pattern, and their stereotyped beliefs that poor single mothers were “victims” while poor married mothers were “undeserving”. Second, the claim that black teenagers deliberately got pregnant in order to collect monetary aid that did not cover the cost of raising the children that resulted is still idiotic, and racist.

- Again, the fact that every program has unintended consequences is important, but it does little good to keep pointing that out. Basically, everything that happens has unintended consequences, because the future is not very accurately predictable. Those are simply the conditions we live under. It is certainly not a reason not to enact any given program (if for no other reason than that the do-nothing alternative also will have unintended consequences that are no more predictable than those of doing something).

- For the same reason, it makes no sense for anyone to say they “have no faith in particular solutions”. That’s certainly not any kind of moral, political, or even practical principle. It’s just a way of making indifference or incompetence sound high-minded. You have to do something in whatever circumstances you find yourself, even if that something is just to continue doing what you were already doing. The only reasonable course of action is to make the best decision possible and carry it out – including by trying to anticipate possible consequences and account for them. Whether the decision is to maintain the status quo, or to change, it still requires reasonable thought and a reasonable justification, and you’re still responsible for what results.

- As regards Social Security, the problem is real, and has been raised to crisis level by Bush spending the legally earmarked trust fund for other purposes and refusing to replace it. But it is not as bad as has been advertised, and it is not unsolvable. And the program is certainly not in danger of collapsing, unless it is killed off by deliberate political action. Financially, there is no reason it cannot continue as long as we choose – even if benefit levels drop in the short term. Even then, there is no reason they have to – that also is simply a question of political will (specifically, the will to tax those who benefited from the raid on the trust fund previously in order to replenish what was taken and to make up the projected shortfall thereafter).

The Social Security problem, at bottom, is simple: every generation pays for the SSI payments of the previous generation, from its current SSI taxes; because the Baby Boom generation is much larger than the immediate next generation, the “Baby Bust” taxpayers (the relatively small cohort born after the Boomers crashed like a wave on US society, but before the Boomers became parents themselves) would be stuck with disproportionately large taxes; that was anticipated long in advance, and a large trust fund was built up to bridge the gap; Republicans stole the trust fund, and Congress didn’t have the will to stop it or make it up later; now the Boomers are entering retirement with not enough money immediately on hand to cover their earned SSI benefits. So: First, this problem is self-limiting. It will last for only about 20 years, and the Buster generation will reap the benefits of the reverse phenomenon, as the “Rebound Boomers” (kids of the Boomers – another big population wave, though not as large as the original Boom) start paying in loads of SSI taxes to support the relatively few Busters in retirement. That totally sucks for the Boomers, whose retirement exactly coincides with that 20-year period, but it is not the death of the system, it is a temporary cashflow problem. Second, the problem is solvable, by . . . putting the money back! Yes, it would certainly have been better to stick to the original responsible plan to save up in advance for what we knew was coming, and especially to take advantage of the tech boom to build up the trust fund, as Bill Clinton did, and especially not to steal the money afterwards as George Bush did, but there you have it. Bush screwed us, and, in this as so many ways, we’re going to be paying for it for years to come. We’ll need to supplement SSI taxes with corporate taxes, eliminate the cap on SSI taxes so the rich pay tax on all their income, not just some, and maybe issue bonds. If worse comes to worst, we may have to cap SSI benefits in some way. But there is no reason to kill the program, and most especially no reason to let the Republicans use their own fiscal mismanagement as an excuse to let them succeed in killing the program as they deliberately intended from the beginning.

- Finally, I also don’t get why you keep encouraging “the left” to be so concerned about “unintended consequences”. Yes, “UC” are an important phenomenon, but there are many important phenomena that have to be planned for in devising any program, public or private: free riders, economic fluctuations, efficiency/inefficiency, security of resources, competition, moral hazard, and on and on and on. In fact, “UC” is not really a distinct phenomenon in its own right – it is just an expression of the fact that every program has consequences or side effects, and some of them may turn out to have been . . . unintended (and usually unanticipated). You have to specify exactly what “UC” you are referring to before criticizing a program, and even then, it is not the “U” but the “C” itself that matters. More importantly, all that is no more an issue for the left than for the right – with the exception that the negative consequences of conservative programs, such as the SSI shortfall or the incarceration of huge numbers of black teenagers for nonviolent crimes, are as often the intended consequences of their policies as unintended.

But your concerns seem to me to amount to nothing more than “be careful, and try not to let bad things happen when you act” – which I would think goes without saying. I seem to get an implication that you think most government programs, or at least most “liberal” ones, have been unjustified because of their unintended side effects. If that is what you think, I couldn’t disagree more. Most of the classic, major progressive programs have been huge successes, or at the very least helpful to some degree. The worst thing that can be said about many of them is that they cost a lot of money – though even there, that is often true only in isolation, without consideration of the consequences if the programs had not been enacted. Whatever nit-picking anyone cares to do, there is no question but that Social Security, Medicare, the WPA and its like organizations, the FDIC and its protective regulations, the VA, public education in general even with all its faults, the FDA, the EPA, OSHA, and most of the rest of the progressive program have been immense successes. It’s hard to imagine America without those programs, or what it would be like if the problems they were each enacted to address had been left untouched, or in the hands of “the market” alone. And it’s frightening to imagine what would happen if the right-wing alternatives to some of them had been chosen instead, or left in place: entirely market-based individually-managed retirement accounts with no benefit entitlement; entirely market-controlled food and drug safety standards (as was the case when Upton Sinclair was writing about rats in the meat grinders); entirely market-based healthcare (oh, yeah . . . we’ve seen what happens there . . .).

The admonishment to beware unintended consequences is a good one, of course, but it’s good just because it’s so obvious. It doesn’t seem to me to be any kind of barrier to progressive policymaking, specifically, let alone any indictment of progressive policies as they have been made in the past.

James: (James . . . James . . . James . . .)

It’s hard to even keep track of all the things that seem to make you upset, though that does rather bring us full-circle, since your original objection to the program in question – the one I responded to, which started all this business – was, in its entirety, that the phone program “might not be a secret, but certainly should be”, and that your “head might explode from spiking blood pressure” just thinking about it. Now, it turns out, you’ve got a PhD in high dudgeon and low-rent ass-kicking. Congrats.

To clear up, for the last time (really, no more of this now . . .), a few irrelevant bits:

- It is true that I am sometimes condescending. You qualify.

- I did not insult you. I just tell the truth and you think it’s insulting. [Hat Tip to Harry S Truman!]

- I did impugn your character. By quoting your beliefs and statements. Feel free to redeem yourself in the obvious way.

- I did not claim that my character is superior to yours. You are welcome to believe so, however.

- I gather that you have a great deal more experience than I in volunteering with low-income populations, and I regard that as commendable. Indeed, you are the King of the Hill.

- Your understanding of your own words comes once again into question. It is a relatively extreme case of Conservative Reading Comprehension Disorder, but otherwise not unusual – indeed the condition is pandemic in the susceptible population. The comment you objected to was:

[“As for the prima facie likelihood of your plan being better than the government plan you object to, I can only note that a plan to establish basic and emergency phone service for the poor that includes the advice to “buy a stolen phone from a crack dealer for a dollar” is really hard to endorse as public policy.”]

No, you have gotten it all wrong. (As usual.)

Yours is the claim that this must be a matter of public policy, since you are the one defending a new scheme to provide free cell phones and minutes. I am pointing out that the the benefits the program is supposedly trying to provide already exists.

Remember when I said that Liberals cannot engage in a debate without lying about the position of their rivals? You have just proven it once again.

Note, first, that I have nowhere made the claim that the program in question is even a good one, let alone that it must be publicly enacted. Neither have I defended the program beyond saying that I thought it was not worth objecting to. (To forestall the inevitable confusion: I have strongly criticized the objections to the program that you and others have lodged, on the grounds, among others, that “it makes my head explode” is not a coherent criticism. I have also stated that I suspect the program addresses a population in actual need, and that I am content to let it continue because it is inexpensive, the service it provides is important, and I’m not so cheap and nasty as to object to it without reason. None of that means what you said.)

Regarding your own “argument”, you say “I am pointing out that the the benefits the program is supposedly trying to provide already exists”. (Actually, you said that after it was noted that the argument that “my head explodes” was not exactly Oxford Union quality. But we’ll accept it.) Your evidence for this argument was that “Stolen cell phones, for example, something you could get from a street corner junkie for a buck, would still work fine and dandy”. My response was to reject a plan that includes the advice to “buy a stolen phone from a crack dealer for a dollar”. You characterize that as “lying about [your] position”. I can do no more than to note that my characterization of your alternative to the government program is an all but verbatim quote of your evidence for your argument against the government program.

But all this is superficial. The substance of the debate is, secondarily at best, whether this program makes sense, but primarily, and much more directly following from my original post, whether the conservative objections to it make sense.

It seems obvious to me the answer to that latter question is “No”, most obviously because the objections to which I originally responded were contentless, incoherent one-liners based only upon some sort of dog-whistle right-wing codewords (“sheer stupidity”, “your tax dollars at work”). Only when called to account for themselves did one of the two original critics (you, Your Majesty!) even offer anything that sounded like an argument against it. (The other chose to interpret my criticism as “having a crush on” him, which is, simultaneously, sad, creepy, and embarrassingly familiar.) And that argument is directed only at the empirical question whether it is cost-efficient, not the value question whether it is an important service, and is based only on personal and idiosyncratic evidence (PhD quality personal and idiosyncratic evidence, of course). This makes it even harder to understand why anyone’s head would explode in response to the unknown empirical facts of a minor program the critic has no direct knowledge of, and again encourages one to conclude the critic is objecting to the idea of the program and not its substance, inasmuch as that is the only thing the critic actually knew about the program.

My criticism, then, was aimed at both the paucity of compassion the critics displayed in objecting to a program with an obvious beneficial goal about which they otherwise knew nothing, and at the generally ugly mindset that would motivate such behavior. Later events, of course, created opportunities to mock the amusingly lame empirical defense that was attempted of the original knee-jerk rejectionism displayed.

None of this, I emphasize again, has anything to do with whether the program is any good or not. That issue did surface, but only because you attempted to inject it after your first ignorantly dismissive stance was questioned. It is not an issue I originally took a position on, for or against, other than to note that to object to the program’s obvious benefits and remarkably low cost was “goddam cheap”. Nothing I’ve said above, and almost nothing in this entire thread, would change even if the program turned out to be a total boondoggle, which, again, given its small size and cost, it almost can’t be anyway. But, just to beat that tired horse one more time, and in the obviously delusional hope that continually saying it might gradually drive it home, let me point out:

- Continually repeating that you have whatever amount of experience doing one thing in one location with one group of low-income people is no evidence at all whether the particular group of people this program addresses have a need for this service or not. I am frankly incredulous that you have actually collected 18 years’ worth of PhD-level data on cellphone usage while smacking the beef ribs in Rocky’s meat locker, or whatever it is you’re doing, but far be it from me to question the King of the Hill. Even if that were true, it would be meaningless (for reasons, I have to point out, that would be obvious to anyone who actually did know anything about population surveys): the group is self-selected from a non-representative sample of the community; your stated population definition (low-income people who have suffered violent crime) is completely different from the target population for the phone service; you don’t even live in a state that participates in the program, let alone work with any of its members; etc.

- Since the program is aimed at people who don’t already have phone service, and presumably those people would certainly have run to their local corner junkie to set up an account if they’d been able to, before now, there is at least prima facie evidence for believing the program is actually serving a population at need. (Apparently it will allow them to trade a public carrier Lifeline phone program for the subsidized phone program, so in that sense it may be providing free phones to some people who already had “cheap” phones – but in a population in which that sounds like a good deal, I’m still willing to count that as being “at need”.)

- The program apparently costs peanuts, in realistic terms, and provides services that may be vital to dealing with beneficiaries’ health, family or social work needs, or even emergency services.

Given all that, and as I’ve said before, I am content to let the program run and see if it turns out to be useful. As long as it’s not run by a Bush appointee, in fact, I suspect it will be OK. But I’m still not taking a position on whether it is in fact good or not (and I gather it’s still in the pilot phase anyway). That’s because, like you, I’m totally ignorant of how it actually works, what it actually costs, how many people it serves, what their living situation is otherwise, and what kinds of benefits they’re deriving from it. Unlike you, I think my ignorance should influence my willingness to criticize the program.

Where is your evidence that this program is needed? Where is your data about the number of lives this would save? How many people die every year because they don’t have cell phones, with minutes still available? Point to it, link to it, quote some hard data.

No.

Again, the question is not whether this program is a good one. It is whether you have grounds to reject it, given that you know almost nothing about it and there is at least some indirect reason to believe it might help. (Aside from the fact that the actual professionals, some with actual PhDs, whose job is to actually administer programs for this actual population, do actually believe that this program will actually help.) The fact that you do object, vehemently and intemperately, on the basis of no knowledge at all – that you declare that the program constitutes “sheer stupidity”, while knowing nothing about it – establishes your stance, not on the empirical questions of who and how many this program helps, but the general question whether the government should help the neediest people at all.

On the empirical question about this program, you have embarrassed yourself. On the value question about the role of government and the relations between citizens, you have shamed yourself.

That brings us back to my original, and still main, point: it hardly matters whether this tiny phone thing works or not. What matters is who we are as a people, and what we’re willing to do for each other. If they spend $100 each, for one year, on 10,000 people, that will cost you personally 1/2 of one cent in taxes. It’s literally not worth complaining about even if the whole thing is a total waste, which it surely won’t be. But you say losing that 1/2 of a penny is going to drive your blood pressure up and make your head explode.

Dude:

(1.) Decaf. Seriously.

(2.) Try not to jump to conclusions.

(3.) Lighten up.

(4.) Become a liberal. It will make you a better person, and the world will seem like a better place. Really.

Hey guys,
I think my comment might be in your spam filter. Just a test; it hasn’t showed up.

~ S.L.O.S.

Coming in at the last minute, as usual, being behind in my blog reading, as usual, just some observations for Ted.

Ted -

Condescend much, Kevin?

Coming from someone who ended their previous comment with “you would have to point a telescope straight up to even see the bottom of my shoes,” that is truly hilarious.

The thing is, Ted, no matter how you try to base your argument on claims to authority, it still is argument by anecdote. It comes down to the assertion that you haven’t come across a poor person without a phone and therefore every poor person can afford a phone. Which is not an argument but an assumption, one not even backed up by your own statements: One of your linked posts talked about urging people to donate phones to those without them and your comment here, despite your attempt to run away from it, did raise the option of buying a stolen one “from a street corner junkie for a buck.” Together, those are a clear admission that some folks can’t afford a phone and must depend on the kindness of strangers – or criminals.

But I think the real misunderstanding here comes from your apparent belief that the purpose of the program at issue is to enable people to call 911. It’s not – or, rather, that’s not all it’s for. It’s an example of what are known as “Lifeline” programs and this one is intended to help people be able to do the minimum things most of us use a phone to do.

F-stop mentioned a few; there are many more. You can’t call 911 to talk to your doctor or your pharmacist. You can’t call 911 to get Dial-a-Ride to get you someplace you need to be. You can’t call 911 to complain to your landlord about a broken toilet or the electric company about a problem with a bill. You can’t call 911 to resolve an issue with Social Security or disability or Food Stamps.

You can’t call 911 just to hear the voice of your son or your daughter who’s moved away or some old friend in the next state or maybe a nursing home.

You’re looking at cell phones for the poor solely as a means of self-defense, or to provide assistance, in a crisis. But telephone Lifeline programs are about more. They are about enabling poor people – who by their very poverty tend to become isolated – to continue to have contact and deal with (and in) the larger community. And that’s something your $1-street-corner phone just won’t do.

Please excuse me for jumping into the middle here, but I couldn’t help but notice that you and James were carrying on two different arguments.

What you apparently object to is that that service is provided through a government program explicitly designed to provide services to people who can’t afford them.(1) Your objection, again, then, is not to the service but the way it is administered.(2) Your argument consists entirely of the empirical claim that the people in question can afford it, and therefore the administrative program is unnecessary.(3) Your evidence consists entirely of an anecdotal story (which appears first on your own blog) to the effect that you hang out out with poor people and the ones you hang out with have cellphones. When an objection is raised to the comprehensiveness of anecdotal evidence, you repeat exactly the same anecdote, apparently in the belief that saying it twice makes it more convincing.(4)

Addressing each of those points in turn, adding my own opinion to James’.

1) What he objects to is the government coming in and providing, at additional cost, a service that all people (including poor people) already get for free – cell phone access to emergency services, because those calls are already required to be put through by phone service providers, even on phones that do not have an active minute plan. And when I say “free” I mean paid for by other people who pay for their own service.

2) Yes, because it is administered at additional taxpayer cost by a government bureaucracy. Yes, becuase it is another example of forced charity. Additional expounding on this point after the next quote from you, below.

3) Interesting that you call 18 years of charity work “an empirical claim” from “an anecdotal story.” Tell me, do any liberals actually work with the poor, or do they only pass laws and require others to work with the poor and the needy? Do any liberals give voluntarily of their time and money to charity causes, or do they only give to causes mandated by law and administered by the government?

4) The utter irony of this statement is how you so casually dismiss all of James’ years of experience working with thousands of people as irrelevant to knowing anything about the necessity of this phone program, and yet your only experience with the cell phone program (correct me if I’m wrong) is having read the website for the program. But you apparently didn’t read much of it, because you repeatedly seriously underestimate the cost to taxpayers of the program. Go find the portion of the website where they say how it is funded, and see if you can figure out how much the program costs.

Sadly, I doubt you’ll bother, because understanding the cost of their programs seems not to be one of the strong points of liberalism. Last month, I chipped in $0.90 to the program.

That brings us back to my original, and still main, point: it hardly matters whether this tiny phone thing works or not. What matters is who we are as a people, and what we’re willing to do for each other. If they spend $100 each, for one year, on 10,000 people, that will cost you personally 1/2 of one cent in taxes. It’s literally not worth complaining about even if the whole thing is a total waste, which it surely won’t be. But you say losing that 1/2 of a penny is going to drive your blood pressure up and make your head explode.

Sadly, one of the things conservatives (and I mean Constitutional conservatives) and liberals will never see eye to eye on, is liberals are willing to expand governement at any cost, whether or not the programs work or provide any benefit, as long as it feels good; “what we are willing to do for each other.” Constitutionalists would rather personally pay, out of their own pockets, as James did for 18 years, for a program that actually works, without requiring other people to pay for it if they don’t want to.

Also, you seem to believe that the there is no cost to the government administration of the program, that all the federal and state employees involved in tracking the phones, plans, payments, budgets, etc, are all working for free. When you say “If they spend” do you not realize that “they” have salaries and program expenses which dwarf the costs you are estimating?

You say: “What matters is who we are as a people, and what we’re willing to do for each other.”

But what you mean is: “What matters is who we are as a people, and what we’re willing to force other people to do to support what we think are good causes, whether or not they personally support those causes.”

You think sharing my cake with someone who lacks cake is such a great idea that you send the police to my house to cut my cake and take a slice to the needy. And then you claim that makes you a better person and makes the world seem like a better place. In my eyes, it makes you seem like a tyrant and makes the government more oppressive, and the world a worse place. You are so amoral that you think stealing is OK as long as it is for cause you personally approve of and if you can get government to take money by force to fund it, from people who may not agree with the cause. You don’t even realize it’s stealing to take money against someone’s will even when it’s done by vote! And then you think yourself a better person because of it. I find it appalling, and I bet this is what makes James’ head explode.

But back on subject, Do you not realize that there are already charity groups out there providing cell phones and service to the needy? Oh right, you don’t believe in non-governmental charity groups, those are “anecdotal stories” and “emipircal observations.” Well here’s another: my last employer was a very large high-tech firm, and had boxes in every lobby for people to donate old cell phones. The cell phones were given to women’s shelters and other needy people, and they could use them, for free, to call 911 for emergency services. They recieved and passed out a whole lot of cell phones. None of those were stolen or bought at a street corner.

Private charity works. Try it sometime for a change of pace. It may make you a better person!

LarryE, I assume that your comments were meant for James, not me.

KTK, the left is more invested is a well functioning public sector than the right. There’s a lot in the public sector that I’m sure we can all agree doesn’t run the way we’d like. Schools are one example, where performance doesn’t make anyone happy. High visibility corruption and incompetence is another – here in Massachusetts, the Turnpike Authority is a billboard for smaller government.

Which is not to say that there’s no use for a TA, but when it costs almost 80 cents of every toll dollar, you have to ask yourself what’s the point.

I’d be much more comfortable with some of the left’s proposals (e.g. healthcare) if I thought that problems would be aggressively fixed. Again, Massachusetts’ experience (implemented by a “Compassionate Conservative” republican, for whatever that’s worth) is instructive.

For a group that calls themselves liberal, you sure are intolerant of others’ views.

Although the impetus for this article (linked below) is a different topic, the differences between the left and right, such as pc rhetoric and moral preening versus un-pc stuff that sounds blunt and bigoted but holds a factual basis.

“Pretty Talk and Ugly Realities” by Dr. Thomas Sowell.

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell011309.php3

[...] interesting back-and-forth in the comments of that blog-post (you can find the link at SLOS), but here’s the best one I think: You think sharing my cake with someone who lacks cake is such a great idea that you send the [...]

[...] bookmarks tagged austere Compassionate Conservatism is Calling – Just Wante… saved by 3 others     jotifman bookmarked on 01/19/09 | [...]

Ted -

I assume that your comments were meant for James, not me.

They were. My apologies. We’ll argue about MA’s health insurance (not “care”) programs another time.

Barbie -

No one who claims Thomas Sowell as a source of factual information deserves further response.

Le Bolide -

It seems you’re operating under the same misapprehension as James: the idea that the LIfeline phone program is solely intended to insure availability of 911 service.

That’s simply wrong. The idea is to insure (or at least seek to insure) that everyone has at least minimal access to a public utility which for most of us has become a necessary part of daily life: a telephone. In that way, it is no different from those programs that provide assistance to those who have difficulty paying winter heating bills.

On another point, no matter how many times the argument about James’s experience is repeated, it still is argument by anecdote and therefore fails at its purpose.

What it says, in essence, is “I haven’t experienced it personally, therefore it does not exist.”

Well, I’ve been a museum educator for over 20 years and it’s safe to say that in that role I’ve dealt with well over 10,000 people, probably a good number more. Not one of them has been unable to afford the cost of admission. Therefore, I can, by James’s (and your) logic, conclude that no one is unable to afford the cost of museum admission.

The conclusion, I think we’d agree, is invalid, but the structure of the argument is identical to James’s: I have experience and I have not seen this, therefore it does not exist. Which is precisely why argument by anecdote is improper: It is not a reliable guide to sound conclusions.

And that is why James’s years of experience, as admirable as they may be, are not evidence for the argument he’s making.

Actually, when you are given the cake, it is with the understanding that a portion of it will be redistributed for public services (many of which you use or benefit from directly or indirectly, but some which you don’t, or only might). Objecting the program is objecting to whom the tiny crumb is given to, not the fact that is given period.

Shoothouse Barbie,

The spoiled undergrads I have the pleasure of teaching (some, not all are spoiled) are a fabulous example of this. They have been given everything on a silver platter by their rich parents: education, cars, money, frills and spoils.

You use this to make draw an apples-to-apples connection between publicly-subsidized health care. That’s not apples to apples, that apples to kumquats. Frankly, it’s slightly disturbing that such an egregiously short-sighted comparison can be made by one is entrusted to with the weighty responsibility of teaching higher education. In fact, better than apples to kumquats, we’re talking tetanus shots to Manolo Blahniks.

I’m don’t even want to get into the examples of your students, but fuck it, right…

1. The spoiled children with entitlement issues you refer to are, by your own admission, the offspring of their wealthy parents. The are squandering the wealth of their parents who, presumably, earned that wealth in the capitalist marketplace and are paying their taxes. They can distribute their disposable income as they see fit, including by buying Buffy and Beamer. The fact they feel unduly entitled to good grades and material items is a general failure of both the parents and society. But, this is not grounds to attack a “liberal” set of values and the relation of those values to work ethic. In fact, while they may be lazy, spoiled, teenagers, I highly doubt the children of the wealthy disproportionately self-identify as “liberal” anyhow.

2. Feeling entitled to publicly provided health care is a far cry from feeling entitled to Yves Saint Laurent. We are the only society in the world that sees ones health, not as a part of the public good, but as a commodity one must purchase on his or her own. It’s not an outlandish notion. I don’t say this to spark a debate, just to call attention to the fact that what parents do or do not buy their children needn’t directly determine their opinions on much more complex issues.

3. Since anecdote is apparently acceptable here… I’m further to the left that KTK, most of the regulars would say. I came from a working class background. I paid my own college tuition (b/c I fucked up in high school instead of working for a scholarship). I didn’t take college any more seriously than high school for the first year or two, but upon making that commitment I was nothing but an exemplary student. I completed my graduate program with a perfect GPA, at a pace so accelerated I had to repeatedly get special permission to carry course loads. I work a normal job, about 45-50 hours a week , as well as second job of about 20 hours a week for half the year. Nobody resents the students you describe more than I do. In many ways I represent their polar opposite. Yet, I’m almost certainly profoundly further to the left than any of them. Explain that.

4. Teenagers and early-twentysomethings are commonly shallow and materialistic, suffering from self-entitlement issues. Wow! Alert the press…

“No one who claims Thomas Sowell as a source of factual information deserves further response.”

*raises eyebrows*

Well, then…you’ve really shown your true colors there. Thanks for proving my point.

Thanks for proving my point.

You’re falsely assuming you had one.

“Actually, when you are given the cake,”

Given the cake? By whom? Did the government decree that I should receive that cake? “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”?

It does put a very nice commentary on the whole difference in mindset, though.

Personally, I view my charity as *my* responsibility, not yours. It is up to me to follow my standards and help people as I can. I don’t like it when other people start telling me that I *must* give to *their* pet cause(s) of the day, particularly when said cause (as is often the case) is fulfilled by a bloated, inefficient (and often corrupt) organization. At least when I control my own charity, I can oversee it more directly and make sure that it is being used well and not simply wasted.