feed the birds

I've been having a disagreement with a friend of a friend on the role of government and at 1 point he said, "The government wasn't designed to be a charity Bob. If I want my money to help people with disabilities or feed the hungry or provide funds to people who need it, I'll donate my money to those people. And what people don't realize is that when you subsidize things, the prices go up. I.e. health insurance, expanding the money supply. How about drug testing people before they can receive a welfare check?"

well, the drug-testing question I answered quickly. but the rest of what he said left me thinking about what charity is all about. as I quickly explained to him, he might be willing to give his money to those worthy groups (although almost anyone who makes this argument seems to hold that "if" in abeyance so that he doesn't actually have to do it, making it more capriciousness than responsibility), but most people aren't, and it's an obligation of government to provide for the people who aren't covered by other people's charity. charities are designed to provide only for a small group of people--those who apply to it--and they tend to be people who need it but only in the short run. what about those people who need it for the rest of their lives? and what about those people who aren't very pretty charity cases: addicts, the mentally ill, criminals? these are members of our society as much as they're members of our families, and just like in families, many of them are shunted off for someone else to deal with or to sink or swim on their own. it's a rare family that doesn't have at least 1 member of each of those categories.

in the midst of all this I fed the birds. which provided my answer. I've written before about the responsibility I feel to help trapped birds and I reflected that when I do that, or put out seed and corn for them, I'm not only doing it for the songbirds or the chickadees which are cute and provide aural and visual pleasure. I put it out too for the jays and the grebes and the crows and the countless noisy, ugly birds that crowd around and gulp it down and fly off somewhere else. I can't discriminate, only letting some eat and others not. I put the food out and they come by and eat and when it's gone I put out more.

a better example may be the rabbits and mice I put cracked corn and peanuts and sunflower seeds for. they are actually a hassle in the spring and summer in my gardens and I might argue myself happy if they pulled up stakes and cleared off. but then they're someone else's issue, and besides, I like the sight of rabbits early in the morning eating on the deck. I'd feel as if some aspect of my life were missing if they weren't here, something inarticulate and inexpressive. I can't explain what they add to my life but I can say I would feel a void in their absence. I can't let them starve when it's in my power to help them. I don't feel a responsibility to answer to an outside power but if I did I would have a hard time justifying allowing that to happen.

government is in the same position. its responsibility is to all the birds and the critters, metaphorically speaking, not just the "deserving" 1s that others might care for. its role is to collect monies to distribute to people who will otherwise die. if the cost of other things goes up in relation to that (a tenuous connection that requires a lot of givens, but I'll pass on arguing the point), then that's the price we--by which I mean all of us, even those to whom the monies go; most people tend to forget they don't suddenly pay less than anyone else, it's just that we help to subsidize their share--must be willing to pay. history shows private charities can't help everyone, and sometimes they only help 1 or 2 people, usually those setting up the charity. if there is a single good trope to religions it is this: that most of them make an obligation on the part of those who have benefitted from society to help those in worse straits. distribution is a necessary government action.

sunday night reading

here is an interesting essay concerning the religious impulse in the us. it doesn't come to any new conclusions or make a staggeringly new case for the hypocrisy between what we preach and what we practice, but it does provide a startling series of statistics in which, unless you've taken care to pay close attention to everything, you're likely to find something you hadn't known before. as for me, the following is among the more disturbing information.

In one area, the United States is indisputably No. 1. The U.S. has the largest prison population in the world. Currently more than 2 million people are incarcerated; and according to the most recent figures, 1 in every 31 adults is in prison, on parole or probation, adding up to a total of 7.3 million at a cost of $68 billion annually. Criminologist Shawn Bushway at the State University at Albany reports that “by age 23, almost a third of Americans have been arrested for a crime.” Our nearest competitor for the No. 1 spot is China. Although China has a far greater total population than the U.S., its prison population is half a million less than ours. Next is Russia with 846,967 imprisoned.

there are many links to author bernard starr's sources available in the original and I encourage you to visit some of them. the essay itself, prone to the problems of most blogs--lack of editing and poor word choice as well as rampant grammatical issues--is still a fine read and should experience a greater audience.

the debt ceiling is an anachronism

I'm not terribly up on financial stuff--that's for my wife, who translates financial legalese into moreorless general conversation for a living after all--and although I did spend a semester studying economics before receiving my 1st adjunctship, it's something I'm happy to leave to her gentle mercies. but this explanation of the debt ceiling from a recent new yorker comes heavily recommended by her and it's understandable even to a money neophyte like myself. the lesson I come away from it with is that, like most gun deaths, the debt ceiling is something wholly within our political power to eradicate or at least to seriously curb and it's only lack of willingness or, as surowiecki puts it about ceiling talk regressivenenss, because "the republicans seem to be more willing than the democrats to let the country default" (read: "more willing to accept collateral civilian deaths") that our summer has been wasted with this irrelevent topic. as surowiecki also points out, "when some tea partiers said they wouldn't vote to raise the ceiling under any circumstances, they became irrelevant to the conversation." to our shame and discomfort we did not let them remain so.

73% of all statistics are made up on the spot

I don't teach statistics but I do teach research, and one of the things I press on my students is not to accept statistics at face value but to look at the questions asked and of whom they're asked. so when I heard about this report this morning, I had to look it up. among religious liberals we talk about budgets and taxes being moral statements about our priorities, and as with god and the devil, the point is in the details. I don't know much about who was asked beyond a generic picture I take away from the breakdown of respondents: married white women between 50 and 64 who graduated college and earn less than 70K. but 80% of us distrust the government? we must be on the cusp of another civil war! or at least another massive uprising on the order of the 1968 chicago democratic convention.

however, a quick look at the actual report shows that it's another case of god using statistics to teach americans how to read. here's the pertinent question from the pew questionaire and its findings (question 21). what you see is that reports are conflating the responses to both "only sometimes" and "never," which aren't really saying the same thing; but if we grant that they're close enough to be taken together, while the numbers in 2010 are higher than ever, it's not that those numbers have suddenly taken wings. they conform to a trend upward that made the jump in 1974 from 45 to 63%.

just as important is that responses never happen in a vacuum. what happened in the nation between 1972 and 1974? the 2010 poll results were gathered from march 11 to the 21st: what was happening at that time? things have settled down since the ugliness surrounding passage of the healthcare bill: would the question receive similar responses today? now that a majority of taxpayers have discovered that their taxes actually decreased as a result of the obama administration's legislation, would their responses reflect a sudden uptick in their trust of government? perhaps most importantly, if I'm answering the question "how much trust do you place in the government?" I'm thinking of the events just in my lifetime that have shown it to be least trustworthy: the inability to protect jfk, the gulf of tonkin incident, the vietnam war, the my lai coverup, the pentagon papers, spiro agnew, watergate, abscam, bert lance, the keating 5, irancontra, oliver north, wedtech, not funding aids research, the clarence thomas affair, dan rostenkowski, newt gingrich, bill clinton lying about a blowjob, the starr report, enron, ignoring warnings leading to september 11th, the war on iraq, the downing street memo, abu ghraib, lawyergate, the outing of valerie plame. THOSE events would color my view of the us government's likelihood of doing the "right thing" more than anything done in the past year, let alone a single week.