Victims of Benevolence: Part II

Yesterday I mentioned a plan spearheaded by the USDA to have all Detroit school children receive free meals each day. Included would be a breakfast, lunch and snack.

These meals will be presented without qualification. The story quoted one of the program's DPS supporters:

“One of the primary goals of this program is to eliminate the stigma that students feel when they get a free lunch, as opposed to paying cash.”

I thought about that a great deal and have a bit more to say.

This program presents charity without graciousness and it demands acceptance of charity without humility. It aggressively attempts to white wash the charitable transaction as if doing so will somehow be beneficial to the children, the school, and society at large.

Of course, the opposite is true. These sorts of situations will make needy (and not so needy) children and underprivileged (and not so underprivileged) parents feel entitled to what they routinely receive from the government. It will also further encourage bureaucrats to assume that they are the grand benefactors of children because parents, for whatever reason, have failed to step to the plate.

I would submit that parents have failed to step to the plate because government has interjected itself into every aspect of the family. It has encouraged fathers to leave, it has encouraged mothers to go it alone, it has encouraged single parenting for the financial benefits it incurs, and it has encouraged for decades the listless lifestyle that would keep disadvantaged families in a dependent and perpetual state of disadvantage. This program is just such an encouragement.

So we taxpayers will fund (or rather, borrowed Chinese currency will fund) this latest program which is in part designed to expunge both graciousness and humility from the fruits of the program. Taxpayers will not be thanked for the charity, indeed, the charity will not be acknowledged because its goal is to make the giving a non-charitable event.

Bureaucrats? They will have successfully shoved their noses further into the natural order of parenting. They will have disrupted the supportive acts of parents providing for their children and, more damagingly, disrupted the lessons that would have been learned from that nurturing.

No one wants to see children go hungry. Myself included. My biggest regret is that decades of government interference has created so many hungry children.