There’s also an issue of liability.
By giving food away you operate outside the various Consumer Protection laws that apply when you purchase goods and services (in this case, food). If an individual contracts food poisoning from food that was given away there may* be issues around liability that create major legal headaches.
*IANAL so can’t state for certain
There are more practical concerns. If you grow fruit for a living, just how do you “give it away to the poor” in any meaningful way? Fruit is bulky and doesn’t keep for long.
I imagine that most fruit sellers sell their fruit to a middleman of some sort, who then distributes it to retail outlets. They would not have much contact with ‘the poor’, other than those in their immediate vicinity - and I also assume that there is a limit to how much fruit these poor could eat.
Either the poor would have to come to your farm to collect the fruit (seems unlikely), or you would have to transport the fruit to where the poor are and distribute it yourself, all before it rots - which wouldn’t be “free” but actually an expense to you.
…and none of us is better than dogs. Maybe not as good; dogs don’t know class or prejudice.
Any growers burning their crops in the 30s were doing it because they’d been taught to hate poor stupid Okies, and taught that mass charity in such tough times might bring on Communism and destroy the country.
“If dog continues to eat dog, there will be only one dog left, and he will be sick to his stomach.” - E.B. White, 1933
I’m going to have to go ahead and disagree with you two on this. By simple virtue of the fact that someone is wealthy does not mean they owe the poor. Humanitarianism is great, but it is a mistake to call not giving your assets away for free inhumanitarianism (damn, wish a shorter word came to mind). How would you feel if you now must do pro bono work in your field every week for anyone who is poor? If you don’t already, by your definition, you’re already being a selfish jerk.
Right.
Much as my gut agrees with Der Tris about the apparent one-way-ethics of such situations, I suspect that this post more clearly explains the truth. The situation is as it is because people look out for their own self interest at all levels of society. People who have money to spare are still looking for a deal, and people on the borderline of economic ability are even more likely to do so. So they look for a bargain which (unwittingly, of course) harms the producer. The producer is looking out for himself because if he doesn’t, the people will look out for themselves. And the end result of overgenerous altruism may be no more apples, if the apple grower can’t afford to hire pickers next month because he couldn’t sell enough apples at a high enough price this month.
This is the kind of hypothetical that gets me mocked by my hippie collegues and branded a Conservative. It’s not that I don’t wish everyone would band together and help the guy pick his apples for free so he could give all of them away, but the realistic part of me goes “and how is he supposed to pay his mortgage again? I don’t think the bank takes apples…”
Yes, it does. Because they can help with little or no harm to themselves, and because they have lopsidedly benefited from society and should give some back, and because as fellow human beings they owe help to those in need. If they were standing by a lake with a man drowning in it and they have a rope, they’d have the duty to throw one end of the rope and haul the guy out. Same principle.
I do. It’s called ‘paying taxes’. A certain percentage of my money and yours goes to help the poor ( and I’d rather more went there, instead of corporate welfare and bombing brown people ). And unlike most Americans ( as far as I can tell ), I think that’s a good idea.
And another problem with your statement is that it doesn’t fit. The work was already done, and what they destroyed weren’t assets, but liabilities. It’s more like me, say, carrying out a box of books I’ve tired of and want to get rid of, and instead of donating or selling them I pile them in front of a public library that’s short of books and torch them.
Why should I respect the rules if the rules will let me starve in the midst of plenty?
If the man is standing alone on shore than yes. But he’s not. He’s standing on shore with the rest of America, yet this one farmer is morally bound to help and the others are not?
I believe corporations and farmers pay taxes as well. I mean you, personally, aren’t put out in any way to help the poor…nor should you be.
There’s no fluctuating price commodity in books. Growing fruit isn’t free, and so giving it to the poor isn’t free. If there are no market forces at play here at all then food would never go bad in America ever…which, clearly, it does. Then and now and often.
I don’t agree that it’s okay, but that might be exactly what they’ll do. A starving mob is quite capable of acting as though it can get bread by burning down the bakery.
The problem is that this wasn’t private owners destroying unsold crops. This was the government buying up unsold crops and destroying them in a futile attempt to keep prices up.
I was just going by what was said in the OP.
Well, I’m not a lawyer, but I used to work for the law dept of a major retailer. They had a program whereby their employees could hook up with those in need to perform pro bono work.
The point I’m making is that it’s good to help people in need. In my opinion, knowing there is a problem, having a solution to the problem (particularly an easy solution), and doing nothing to help, is a bad and selfish choice. If the food is going to be thrown away, and isn’t a donation that is costing you money, why wouldn’t you do it? Why wouldn’t you try to help the poor?
I agree, except that the big assumption in your sentence is “they can help with little or no harm to themselves”. As Tapioca Dextrin and **Shalmanese **have pointed out, they *cannot *do this with no harm to themselves. Sure, that one day they could do it, but the vary act of doing it will harm them in the near future, because people will take advantage of that.
ETA:
Because it *does *cost you money. It cost you the money to pick it and get it to market, and the action of giving it away will cost you sales later, as people decide to wait you out and take for free what they could have given money for.
That’s not to say everyone who can afford to shouldn’t give - they should. Those lawyers doing* pro bono* work are great - but they can’t afford to do more than a certain number of hours* pro bono* every week, right? Having a finite system of charitable giving lets you give, but also puts a limit on it. I might be able to give away 30 apples a week without harming my profits, but if I give away EVERYTHING I don’t sell, and people pick up on that, then I soon won’t sell anything.
If your lawyers offered unlimited pro bono work, they wouldn’t be able to meet their own bills, and then wouldn’t be able to do work for anyone, paying or not.
According to the Greater Chicago Food Depository’s site (you need to register for free), they pick up the food and distribute it to the needy:
It’s not a matter of people standing around waiting for you to give away food. You would have the truck show up each morning and they’d take it to another organization that feeds the poor.
I don’t think they were around in The Grapes of Wrath. 
…“that’s the last I’ll say about it.” :dubious:
Notice how the more hardass commentators on the thread tend to interpret oughts as musts, and instantly refuse to comply. If we indeed did have to rely on private charity in such situations, I hope to hell these people wouldn’t be in charge of it.
Every now and then I suspect some ivory-tower libertarians interpret the right to be a selfish jerk (which is inalienable) as an obligation. If not to society, then just to prove some high - or low? - ideal.
No, prolly not. 
I think I’m going to add them to my list o’ charities, though. From the looks of the website, they’re an effective tool in fighting hunger.
But according to your logic the lawfulness of an action is meaningless, your refusing to give it out is essentially the same as torching it. Therefore, you’d better get ready for a mob to some in and steal all your stuff.
So in other words, what successful people have is all from oppressing others, not from their own exertions? Everyone who succeeds does so only by breaking the backs of the poor? Nonsense. If I make my way up in the world, pay my taxes and my dues, I am not at all obligated to those who have failed to do the same, particularly when (as today, less so during the Depression) opportunities to do so are widely available.
Maybe you would deserve it maybe you wouldn’t. We live in a society of laws, and just because someone does something you find objectionable doesn’t mean we’ve entered a world where laws no longer apply. You have a right to your personal property, some guy out in front of your house doesn’t. The government has the authority to tax you, but some average Joe has no rights whatsoever to your property, and has no right to steal your property just because he wants it or needs it himself.
People burning crops in the Great Depression by and large was not done out of spite; they were in fact done because of the leftist Roosevelt administration. Roosevelt wanted to control the price of produce, because there was a problem with overproduction. Overproduction had driven the price of agricultural produce down to an all time low, so low that many farmers could no longer sell their products above cost, if you’re losing money on every sale you make it does not take a business expert to realize you are in a bad situation.
Roosevelt’s answer to the problems in the agriculture industry was to subsidize farming and pay farmers to put self-imposed caps on how much they would grow. The government would pay them for acreage that was left unused, and the government also paid farmers to destroy livestock and crops to keep agricultural prices up. It may have kept some farms solvent, but it was also incredibly inefficient economics that caused untold amounts of harm.
By and large the people who were getting screwed over by the Great Depression were the very farmers who you think should have been murdered simply because they weren’t willing to drive themselves out of business by giving away food. A few of the huge commercial farmers might have come out ahead, but only because of leftist economic programs that subsidized them extensively. The small farmers received none of the benefits of the AAA programs.