Re: self destructing cities

Topics: Welfare
30 Jun 1993

From: ervan

> [ paying city employees competitive wages is okay, but if
> they strike ....]

The nature of the political process is such that voting will almost
never succeed in reducing government union wages. Government unions
have a captive buyer and a monopoly, unlike private labor unions.
The only threat that works is cities competing with each other for
citizens. Pro-active annexation gives ever bloating bureaucracy
a method to cover all of its failings at the same time it denies
people the chance to 'vote with their feet'.

> [ cutting social services to let the poor starve is another matter.
> They do keep some people from starving. ]

Social programs at the city level are rarely aimed at food. You're
searching desperately here. They are aimed at things like subsidizing
garbage, subsidizing bus fare, and building Mercado Del Sol to buy
Hispanic votes. Dumping that nonsense would not be letting people
starve. These are the sorts of things cities compete on the basis of.

Lots of people without jobs live where there are zero social services and
they don't starve. In part, they get help from relatives, in part from
food stamps (not a city service), in part from working at jobs the
government would not legally let them have.

As for food stamps, I looked up the numbers in the statistical abstract.
Unfortunately, it does not cover a wide range of years for all of the
tables in question. Anyway, the bottom line is that population growth
* food cost inflation = 1.34 for '80 to '89. The malnutrition rate
over the same period went from 1.2 to 1.2 /100K pop. The amount of money
spent on feeding people went from $G 13.8 to $G 20.2 (for food stamps
and school lunches), an increase of 46%. That's a negative correlation
between money and starvation. The data is not sufficiently strong
to actually draw such a conclusion. But, it does cast doubt on your
belief that it obviously works. In any case, only about 3,000 people
die of malnutrition in the U.S. every year, hardly any big deal.
Even if that doubled without food stamps (which I don't believe for a
second), it would cost $M 6 per person. That's a very bad investment.
'Starvation' just is not a real problem.

In any case, my argument against pro-active annexation is different
than the one against food stamps. There are more or less three
people of interest in this debate:
1) the poor welfare mother in the 5th ward
2) the yuppie in the Woodlands
3) the engineer living above Silicon valley
My claim is that the (2) no more owes (1) a handout than (3) does.
Your claim seems to be that (2) for some reason owes more. Why?

> [You don't even believe there is a problem. ]

Tsk, tsk. I want everyone to be a billionaire. It's not possible.
What's the best we can do? My claim is that letting some people
fail utterly is the best we can do. That doesn't mean I want it
to be that way or that I think it won't happen in Libertaria.
Utopia is not an option.

> [ Social programs reduce civil unrest by preventing starvation. ]

This would be tolerable if true. I keep hearing the claim that
social programs are necessary to reduce crime. I used to even
believe it myself. It seems so obvious. It just turns out not
be true (in any cost effective sense). I'm still waiting for some
positive evidence. Even the much vaunted Head Start has recently
been shown (even the New York Times agrees) to produce no educational
benefit and therefore (by liberal reasoning) no effect on the crime
rate.

----Ervan

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