And then when we don't spend that energy it's a huge scandal!

I'm not sure what you mean - I'm using quotes because of the dubious definition of justice in the context of shared welfare, but obviously there are plenty of scenarios where more direct consequences for being more directly "bad", for various definitions, makes sense, or is at least unavoidable in a human society.

This is a huge part of why, perhaps surprisingly, libertarian think tanks in the US have started pushing for universal basic income. The sheer weight of the bureaucracy that has accumulated due to this way of thinking means that replacing it with a straight-up program of unflinching wealth redistribution would actually make the government smaller.

And also make markets freer. The amount of rent-seeking behavior around programs like WIC is just staggering. And it serves the interests of neither WIC recipients nor the general public; it's only there because pearl-clutching is easy to co-opt for financial gain.

this is an ideological argument devoid of meaningful goals to help residents and create a strong economy.

who cares, on the face of it, what size the government is? size is not the goal, it's at best a poor proxy metric for (in-)efficiency, which itself is a proxy metric for how much we help people via public goods (and thereby the whole economy).

rent-seeking around wic is a rounding error next to property & capital rent-seeking overall. moreover, the right place to place blame (and seek redress) is with the rent-seekers themselves, not the assistance recipients (or the associated governmental programs) being exploited by them.

I'm not sure I see why killing the engine that fuels the rent-seeking gravy train, and, in the process of doing so, taking a huge monkey off the backs of people who are receiving assistance, would somehow misplace blame on those same people. It's simply suggesting that perhaps we should address a cause of the problem rather than only focusing on its symptoms. And the way in which the market gets freer, in this case, is by taking away unnecessary and paternalistic restrictions that WIC imposes on where recipients shop and what they're allowed to buy.

Perhaps framing things in classical liberal terms feels like de-centering assistance recipients. I get that, but I'm not sure that's actually a bad thing, in this case. I can't imagine your average WIC participant actually wants to live under a microscope, regardless of the political leanings of the person who's looking through it.

you're mistakenly associating assistance programs with rent-seeking, and moreover focusing on an entirely irrelevant corner of it. rent-seeking will occur anywhere there is wealth to be extracted, which is basically everywhere else in the economy, so that association is unwarranted. you should be looking at where capital is concentrated and deployed if you're truly concerned about rent-seeking over "big government".

It's not that assistance programs are rent seeking. It's that the assistance programs, as they're structured, are a honey pot for rent seeking. A program that micro-manages what people can put on their table at home invites lobbying to influence those rules for one's own financial gain.

It's an example of how pearl-clutching attitudes - in this case, fears, based on deeply entrenched moralistic notions about less-wealthy people's ability to make decisions for themselves, that people might buy the wrong food - are easy to co-opt for mercenary purposes, to basically nobody's benefit.

yes, i understand your point, but again, that's literally a rounding error compared to other, much larger rent-seeking behaviors.

Sure. But that challenge smells of whataboutism.

And it's also looking at the finger rather than where it's pointing. I could just as easily have picked on health care, for example, or housing assistance programs. But I'm not trying to write a book, here.

I think the more interesting phenomenon here is that seeing the negative consequences of a largely fiscally conservative cause is bringing fiscal conservative thought leaders to the point of putting their support behind a traditionally socialist cause.

The above posters argument is very simple. These program's impact on inefficiency and rent seeking are négligeable. Their benefits aren't.

If so, then I guess we're arguing over a straw man? Because that argument would be a great response to a suggestion that we just end welfare, but it doesn't really make much sense as a response to a comment about the idea of massively expanding it by replacing it with universal basic income.

ubi would not change the dynamics. the same trivial rent-seeking would happen, but it’s still irrelevant if what you really care about is rent-seeking as economic drag/inefficiency, not ideological concerns.

UBI gives people control over their own money. Food stamps for example gives poor people a disproportionally large food budget which studies has shown makes them fat. People who are equally poor but aren't on food stamps are healthier than those who get it, even though their purchasing power increased.

So only reason to give them food stamps instead of just giving them money is to feed money into grocery stores and to create government bureaucracy jobs. If you scrapped the entire program and just gave people money poor people would be healthier, the government would be leaner and the poorer would have more money to spend on stuff they need.

>who cares, on the face of it, what size the government is?

Until the size stops correlating with the amount of resources that must be taken from people everybody with anything to their name cares.

but again, your concern then is efficiency, so let's look at efficiency metrics directly rather than the poor proxy that size is. that also neatly sidesteps the manipulative use of "big government" as a tool by politicians to deploy power against the common interest.

You make a valid point when considering the total size of governments at all levels. However, I think what people most want to avoid is specifically an excessively large government at the federal and (to a much lesser degree) state levels. This is a worthy goal. This is not unrelated to efficiency: the legendary inefficiency of the federal government is correlated with its bloat and unaccountability, problems which are much easier to address at the state and local levels (and you can move away from the failures).

power will always try to overflow its limits, no matter the size. the fed has a fairly limited mandate via the constitution, but federal politicians of all stripes are constantly grubbing for power, which is where the inefficiencies largely come from. the answer is not to focus on size, but how and why it's overflowing via power grabs. focusing on size leads to the wrong conclusions and the wrong responses. that's the point.