registered dietician for the Salvation Army
Topics: Regulation
11 Jan 2007
From: Ervan Darnell
Reading through David Boaz's "A Libertarian Primer", I just finished the
chapter on how the government killed private charity. One tidbit was
that Salvation Army soup kitchens are required to have a registered
dietician plan the meals before they would be allowed to serve food.
It's a tidy example of idiot regulation:
1) Fewer people now get fed because of the overhead of paying for the
dietician, if indeed it doesn't shut down small scale soup kitchens
entirely. Nowhere in the liberal do-good formula is the real cost of
the idea accounted for. The frictional cost of regulation is always
left out of the formula.
2) It's a ridiculous requirement anyway. Most of us do just fine
without a registered dietician planning our meals. Why do the homeless
need one? Any real food is a likely huge improvement over their other
caloric intake choice. If it's anything like school lunches were (which
registered dieticians often oversee), the 'balance' is a bunch of
inedible crap that gets thrown out anyway. What's the point of that?
3) It's hypocrtical. The primary government food program, food
stamps/WIC, has no registered dietician overseeing what is consumed.
I'm reminded of a local charity, Project Open Hand, I used to donate
to. Originally, it mostly provided meals to people with AIDS who were
destitute and no longer able to work. With the advent of "cocktail"
therapies that group shrank in size. Project Open Hand shifted its
charity mission to include seniors and others. As I was less interested
in donating to those groups, I parsed the annual contribution request
carefully. Though it didn't say specifically, adding up the numbers, it
came to $30/meal served. That's huge, especially given that a good
piece of the organization is done with volunteer labor. I wonder how
much of that was regulatory burden (and how internal inefficiency) and
how many people now go hungry because of it? It would be cheaper to
give all of the recipients vouchers for Chinese delivery (which has no
dietician requirement).
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