Ironically, the answer is…markets. 
I hate to keep harping on this – I really do – and I don’t want to seem a pest, but this is so far off base that I really have to respectfully point out several things.
First of all, this is really ironic coming from someone who just finished telling us here that “seems like you are expecting to win the debate by accepting only one definition of the term ‘right’” and again here that “I recognize that your definition is OK, but not the only one. You are unwilling to recognize any definition but your own”.
Yet you are now insisting on an extraordinarily narrow definition of what “right” means and declaring that dammit, that’s just the way it is, here in the US! IOW, you are unwilling to recognize any definition but your own.
No, that’s just not how the language works, in the US or anywhere else. The default Google dictionary lists four definitions of “right” as a noun, of which either of the first two apply perfectly well to the way I used it:
[ul]
[li]that which is morally correct, just, or honorable[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]a moral or legal entitlement to have or obtain something or to act in a certain way.[/li][/ul]
Meanwhile dictionary.com lists no fewer than 7 definitions as a noun, many of which align with the generic concept of a moral principle as I had used it, and as the UN Declaration of Human Rights used it, and none of which denote a meaning as narrow and specific as the only one you seem willing to accept.
In a word, money. In two words, money money.
Sorry, but again I must refer you to the OP. He is specifically asking if Americans should have to rely on charity if they can’t buy food or whether the government should take care of this. I didn’t set those parameters, the OP did. That’s why I said in my very first post that it all depends on how one defines rights. This thread was not set up to discuss whether people can expect food from charity, but whether they can expect it from the government. And, of course, the whole interview referenced in the OP is in the context of food stamps, so yeah, the OP is about legal obligations, not moral obligations.
And checking back, I can see that the OP could not be arsed to return to the thread he started, so now I feel like a chump for even participating. The OP looks more like an attempt to continue the “gotcha” of the interviewer, only he’s not dealing with some tongue-tied Congresscritters, but people who are willing to call him on his “gotcha”. Hence the bit of the train wreck this thread has become.
Here’s the thing. You don’t get to define “mandatory”, “obligation”, “incumbent” or “civilized”, and assume that everyone else agrees with you.
Perhaps we could reconcile them the way all opposing views are reconciled in a free democratic society. Would this be the first time that opposing views have been reconciled through the exercise of democracy? Is that so strange?
That said, I would consider any of the three other options you listed to fail basic tests of morality and human decency. Going down the list in order:
This one seems like you’re riding your favorite “federal vs. state powers” hobby horse again. The trouble with this argument is that delegating a matter as fundamentally basic as food and the sustenance of human life to the states with no further ado implies a degree of arbitrariness whereby you implicitly condone a state deciding that, no, they’re not going to do anything about it and they’re going to let people starve. If a state can depart so far from basic moral values that they let people die in the street, then what is the point of having a nation at all?
Your “neighbor down the street” in the second one seems to embrace the idea that if he pays for your dinner because you can’t afford it, then you either owe him for it or must be made to suffer for it in some way, or be deprived of some basic right because you’re less than human. This was the idea behind 19th century debtor’s prisons – it didn’t solve any problem, but it did exact retribution. It was also part of the idea behind food stamps. It’s arguable whether preventing people from using the funds for non-food or otherwise unwise purchases had much merit, but the best part was the shaming every time they used them. Some people flaunt their platinum credit cards, others have to present food stamps. Perfectly acceptable if one doesn’t have human dignity as part of one’s value system. Maybe these folks should be regularly drug tested, too.
And the third one, the example of your other neighbor, just appears to be fine with letting people die. Just like Ron Paul, who suggested that an uninsured individual with a life-threatening medical condition should seek out friends and neighbors and his church for assistance.
I don’t see it that way – I see it as the OP asking the rhetorical question “Do we have a right to food in this country?” and the rhetorical question following about charity. “Rhetorical” because ISTM the answer should be obvious, and I interpret “right” in the broad sense of the dictionary definitions I cited, since there’s obviously nothing in the constitution about food. As for legal obligations, the provisions of law come from society’s moral values – the latter informs the former. If we believe that people have a moral right to basic income, food, and shelter regardless of their economic means, then the law will provide those things as a legal right.
Anyway, we’ve both clarified our positions on this, and that’s all I wanted to do.
I’ll bite. Why?
Seriously, why? It makes sense for states to run things that are exclusively relevant to the state and do not benefit from either economies of scale or routing of resources from other places. If this description does not apply, it does not make sense to parcel out the handling of the problem to local areas for them to fuck up individually. It divides the country and creates imbalances and efficiencies. And, as far as I can see, the only actual practical benefit it has for anyone is that it enables ignorant racist bigoted pieces of shit to continue being ignorant racist bigoted pieces of shit much more easily when they can, at a regional level, mandate laws and destroy social programs in a way that they wouldn’t be able to get away with if it people from outside the concentration of ignorant racist bigots got a say.
Now, there might be something I’m missing, but seriously, aside from obsolete abstract whims like “I don’t think the federal government should have power” or “I believe it’s still 1790”, how are things improved by leaving basic social services to be handled at the state level?
This person is an asshole and an idiot who probably wishes he could own slaves. I wouldn’t want to disenfranchise him, because I wouldn’t want to set fire to the constitution (like he wants to), but I really wish he’d freely choose to exercise his right not to vote, because he wants nothing good for the country.
Ah, the person who wants to claim he’ll help but then won’t do so! What a noble example of not-charity.
I’d like to calmly explain to him that nobody with any morals cares whether the charity is “meaningful” to the giver. The issue is whether the people in need are being provided for.
The guy who wants to deny people their right to vote can go fuck himself, but the other guy can raise his views for public discussion and vote fellow sociopathic selfish jerks into office. And he has!
Not at all!
And that’s what’s happening. States elected senators and electoral college members; districts within states elected representatives; the electoral college elected a president; the president proposed a budget. That budget includes a cut in food programs.
No state is letting people die in the street, or will even if this budget is passed.
Sounds like your opinion differs from his, and his differs from yours. I suspect, if I shared this conversation with him, he’d say that he doesn’t regard your view on what’s moral as persuasive.
Well, sounds like your opinion also differs from his.
Sounds like neither neighbor is persuaded by your assertion of a moral duty here.
Me also – I’m not swayed by your insistence in your authority to define moral duty.
And I wasn’t being hypothetical here: as best as I could, I have described the views of two neighbors on my street.
But that argument can be extended to other goods and services as well. And until we can eliminate human labor as a major component of production and have a very cheap source of useful energy than we need mechanisms to ration resources.
With a huge food surplus, I think very few are inclined to let people starve. But do we have a surplus of physicians? A surplus of mental health care professionals? A surplus of elderly care professionals? Many could argue those are rights in a “first world” or “civilized” country.
But who is going to supply physicians, nurses, etc?
Food stamps or government cheese is easy to provide but it isn’t a right. Thankfully, we have policy that help those with a lick of common sense and basic decency to acquire food for themselves and their children. Should it be expanded? I think so. I also think we should have school children care for their schools like in parts of Japan. If we are fine with demands from society and others efforts we should have obligations and responsibilities as well.
I wish there was some term intermediate between “right” and “entitlement”, because that would probably best describe the moral situation with regard to food.
Since time immemorial poverty has been an endemic risk of the human condition. Until the last century it would have been pointless to say that people have a “right” to food when there was no way to guarantee it. Every morsel of food came from the labor of people who could scarcely spare it, and people who would not or could not produce food or labor valued enough to trade for food could starve to death. Wrong? Unfair? Take it up with God. And yet certainly “feed the hungry” is about the oldest call to charity there is.
With the mechanization of food production beginning in the 20th century, the problem of being physically able to produce as much food as the populace could eat ended. But that didn’t end poverty or hunger. Food was plentiful in all but wartime conditions, but not free; hunger became a distribution problem- how to feed the people who had nothing to offer in return. The horns of the dilemma is the paradox of charity: how do you keep charity from punishing the productive and rewarding the idle? You don’t want to destroy the profit motive that makes food production possible and you don’t want people to become dependent on handouts. But that means some inevitable, unavoidable percentage of people will go hungry, quite possibly through no real fault of their own. Naive attempts to put the production and distribution of food on a command economy basis proved spectacular failures.
Given that we’re as close as humanity has ever come so far to effectively possessing a cornucopia, it seems obscene that something a vital as food isn’t absolutely guaranteed, and yet we still don’t know how to make it so without negative repercussions.
This is why I’m in favor of a basic income. Because productivity is being in many ways decoupled from human labor. But at some point population growth could be problematic.
TY to wolfpup for not making me go look up the exact portion of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that addresses humans’ right to food.
Somehow we live in a time when it’s a gotcha question to ask a pro-life member of the House Ways and Means Committee if people have a right to food?
If a Congressman can’t manage an answer to that, then he really probably isn’t qualified to oversee agricultural policy, which is a considerably more complex situation than “should we allow people to starve because they are poor?”.
And I might add, since this guy and his ilk “believe” that a clump of cells the size of a poppy seed residing in my uterus deserves legislative protection and a life, then goddammit, he needs to have the balls to stand up and say that the result deserves FOOD once it’s been birthed.
Also, the Congresscritter has had the job for a decade, so he didn’t just fall of the turnip truck. He didn’t want to answer it because the only morally correct answer would be attacked by those who really don’t give a damn if the poor die.
This is all true. It’s also one of the many reasons in the large and growing list of reasons for why said president is so loathed, not just around the world, but – to their credit – by a majority of Americans.
They already have, for many different similar beliefs and actions. Tens of thousands still die every year from lack of health care, and no doubt thousands have died due to rejection of Medicaid expansion. Every single state that rejected it had either a Republican governor and/or a Republican dominated legislature. Is it really a stretch to believe that people will die of malnutrition?
I’m not trying to persuade anyone of what their moral duty is, I’m defining what I consider to be an important aspect of a civilized cohesive society and the kind of society in which I wish to live. I suppose I may as well put the icing on the cake by saying that I also feel that universal health care is a basic human right, and so do the majority of voters in every democratic industrialized nation on earth. The moral principle there is much the same as not letting people die of malnutrition.
I don’t know if that’s supposed to impress me, but since this is not the nature of the society in which I choose to live, people like that would be a disturbing anomalous minority and probably considered to be sociopaths. It’s unfortunate that one of the effects of recent Republican madness is the normalization of that kind of thinking.
Leave those poor strawpeople be. Do you know anyone that wants the poor to starve to death?
Do you know anyone who wants the poor to die from lack of health care?
Not “somehow.”
In posts #5 and #8 I laid out, with some detail, how. So it’s unclear to me what might motivate you to express puzzlement now.
The complaint you make about his being pro-life also falls on deaf ears. He may well believe that a defenseless unborn child must be protected, but that adults who are unwilling to work not be fed from government coffers. Why did you reject that possibility in your analysis?
Yes.
I think that these are important goals, but not monolitically important. How we deliver them should be informed by other goals, such as fidelity to the bargain that was made in order to form this nation.
But the society in which you choose to live is also their society – they have just as much a voice in electing legislators as you do. There is no voter disqualification following a wolfpup diagnosis of sociopathy.
So you may well simply dismiss them as sociopaths, but that strategy seems not as viable as you might imagine.
Not that I can think of. But nor do I think that I know anyone who is willing to expend all their own savings to save random people either. So there seems to be a point at which people aren’t willing to sacrifice to save others. That point, naturally, is different for different people.