Is Healthcare a Human Right?

Humanity still has not come to a consensus on what are entailed specifically within the rubric of human rights. Even in terms of those specifics that have come to be generally held to be human rights, such as in designated war crimes and crimes against humanity by international agreement, the lack of de jure and de facto enforcement render such agreement nugatory in practice. As a result, calls for human rights are in effect calls for warring to stop. The enforcement that goes along with laws legislated by governments render any consensus on what constitutes human rights more substantive in practice. This is undercut, however, in empire-scale polities of polities, such as the E.U. and U.S., to the extent that human rights are carved out at the federal level to applied across differing cultures. Such ideological diversity between the American member-states has triggered drastically-different notions of just what are included as human rights to be played out in Congress. The debate over the government-financed health-insurance program for the poor in 2025 illustrates such a lack of consensus, which in turn suggests that the member-states should play more of a role in how or even whether to provide free insurance to the poor. Sometimes, one size doesn’t fit all. In short, the matter of federalism is very relevant up front, before matters of the proper role of government itself and of human rights are decided. In other words, the qualitative and quantitative differences between a union of states and a state are very relevant up front, lest states eventually peel off in utter frustration with a one-size-fits-all approach to policy-making to fit an empire composed of member-states.

As the U.S. Senate considered changes to the Medicaid program, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley acknowledged “that the main cost-saving provision in the bill—new work requirements on able-bodied adults who receive health care through the Medicaid program—would cause millions of people to lose their coverage. All told, estimates are 10.9 million fewer people would have health coverage under the bill’s proposed changes to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act.”[1] Millions would be relegated to not getting medical attention or going to the emergency rooms of hospitals mandated to treat the uninsured, who would be strapped with unaffordable medical bills and thus bad credit-reports.

That a significant number of poor people in the United States would lose health-insurance was known and anticipated by the legislators. Speaking on the bill as it was taking shape in the U.S. Senate, Sen. Hawley said, “I know that will reduce the number of people on Medicaid.”[2] What, then, justifies the loss of health coverage? The senator answered this question by adding, “But I’m for that because I want people who are able bodied but not working to work.”[3] In other words, being able to have access to medical services should be conditional on having a job. The conditionality itself means that health care is not a human right because such rights are inherently unconditional.

Some or even many of Sen. Hawley’s constituents doubtless favored excluding medical services from being included among other human rights, perhaps in the belief that people who are able to work but refuse to work do not deserve to be kept alive if they fall sick, which in turn can be based on a belief that only the strong of any species should survive. Sen. Hawley represents Missouri, when is generally conservative. Sen. Warren of Massachusetts, on the other hand, would find that the conditionality and thus the exclusion of medical care from human rights much less popular in her member-state. Such a wide divide by state on this question would be unlikely in the E.U., even between the states of Hungary or Poland and Sweden or the Netherlands. The European notion of subsidiarity would thus be more applicable in this case to the U.S. than the E.U., given the greater diversity of ideology on the question in the United States. In other words, federalizing universal healthcare would come with less ideological tensions between E.U. citizens in different states than between U.S. citizens in different states; there was more consensus within the empire-scale European Union than within the American bloc.

The imposition of work requirements as a condition for the poor having access to medical treatments may be just fine with most people in Texas and Utah, for example, and yet be very objectionable to most people in Vermont and Connecticut. To conflate these various member-states as being ideologically and culturally homogenous is suboptimal and comes with political costs as opposition pressure is likely to result where the federal policy is unpopular; more optimal politically would be transferring the program of Medicaid to the member-states so their respective peoples could tailor the program—or even cancel it—according to their respective political ideologies. The notion that policy in another state should reflect one’s own views is anathema to federalism, and even to there being empire-scale unions of states. Toleration within a union is thus necessary lest one size be applied throughout and eventually republics break off in frustration, as Britain did from the European Union due primarily to anti-federalist sentiment.

In short, finding a large gap from consensus in Congress (or in the E.U.’s legislature) can be an indication that a policy question would be better resolved by the member-states than at the empire-level, given the heterogeneity between states on the question. Congress and the federal president applying work requirements on what most people in some states regard as an unconditional human right may be intolerable emotionally to those people, but so too, Obamacare had been viewed as an intolerable overreach of government to most people in some other states. Behind this chasm, ideological and thus as emotional as cognitive, lies a basic disagreement on just what should constitute human rights, and thus be an obligation of government. In other words, besides different political philosophies of the proper role of government, different moral principles are involved on the question of whether government should pay for healthcare for the poor. In a federal system, the matter of where such a divisive policy question should be decided should be decided before both the proper-role-of-government and the human-rights questions are decided, or else the federal system itself would be compromised and thus put at risk.

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1. Leah Askarinam, “The GOP’s Big Bill Would Bring Changes to Medicaid for Millions,” Apnews.com, June 15, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.

The U.S. Government’s Debt: Federalism Unbalanced

On May 5, 2025, the debt of the U.S. Government stood at $36.21 trillion, $28.9 trillion being held by the public and $7.31 trillion being intragovernmental. That total is $1.66 trillion more than the total federal public debt on May 5, 2024. Projected interest payments of $952 billion in fiscal year 2025 would be 8 percent higher than the interest payments made in 2024. By comparison, the U.S. budget for national defense in fiscal year 2025 totaled $892.6 billion. Whether going to investors of treasury bonds or defense contractors and other corporations, the combined $1.85 trillion for fiscal 2025 represents a transfer payment to the wealthy from American taxpayers rich, middle-class, and poor. Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill in May, 2025 that would subject Medicaid and food assistance to significantly less money and subject the States with having to spend more on the administration of those programs. Principles of political ideology reside just below the surface. My task here is to flush them out and relate them to each other, rather than to impose my own ideology.

Fresh out of the Trump Administration, billionaire Elon Musk called the tax and spending bill a “disgusting abomination.”[1] Presumably this condemnation has to do with the “multi-trillion tax breaks” and the raising of the debt ceiling an additional $4 trillion, but the CEO of SpaceX would hardly object to the increase for defense.[2] Musk wrote that the “outrageous, pork-filled” bill would “massively increase the already gigantic budget deficit to $2.5 trillion” in spite of the cuts to healthcare and food for the poor that Musk supported.[3] U.S. Sen. Rand Paul promised to vote against the bill unless the debt ceiling would not be raised.

As of early June, 2025, who could say whether Republican opposition in the U.S. Senate would actually materialize beyond the rhetoric designed to give an impression of objection to voters back home. The Republican lawmakers in the House had quickly closed ranks to pass the House bill. Behind the numbers are values and ideological principles that can be difficult to see. Cutting federal programs that help the poor with subsistence living, such as with food and healthcare, can be said to imply a lack of compassion, especially if defense contractors would be getting more business from the federal government, but two political principles are also in play.

One is the belief that the role of government should not include providing even the basics to people; charities and families should supply basic needs to the poor. Overlaid with that principle is one concerning American federalism, wherein the federal government was originally intended to have very limited powers, and one way of limiting them was to make regulating interstate commerce and providing a common defense primary, with other domains of power being handled by the States. This principle is in accord with the differences between States in an empire-scale federal union of states because the state governments can more tightly match social programs with the political ideology of a majority of the voters in a state than can be done by Congress.

These two principles—the first being more general and the second more particular to the American federal philosophy—are not fully consistent, for according to the federal principle, Congress should take care that the state governments are not crowded out in taxing more so as to take on more in domestic programs—domestic being here within a given state. Whereas the view that the proper roles of government do not include making goods and services available to citizens applies to the States too, the principle of federalism favors expanding the taxing and spending abilities of the States according to how much of an entitlement-providing responsibility each state government wants, as per the relevant political ideology of the majority of the citizens of a state.

Re-balancing American federalism so the States regain some of authority that they once had should include managing the transition especially concerning programs relied on by the poor because they are vulnerable to suffering and even dying by slipping between the cracks. Relatedly, because in at least some of the several States, the majority of people believe that government should supply the poor with necessities, the more general political principle that government itself should not supply goods and services to individual citizens should give way to the second, federal principle. Put another way, were Congress to vote to restrict government itself, then more expansive ideologies in at least some States would be choked off. The general government principle should be decided therefore on the state level rather than by Congress.

Taking a page from the E.U., the U.S. member-states could conceivably be given more responsibility in funding defense beyond just militias, which are armies that the U.S. President can borrow. Not that the head of state of California should step over the federal president on defense policy as Macron of the E.U. state of France did in trying to head the E.U.’s defense policy against Russia in 2025. The defense budget of the U.S. Government could be reduced and the states could do more without the latter superseding the former. Together with transferring more non-interstate-commerce domestic programs to the states, the federal deficits could be reduced. President Reagan failed to rebalance American federalism because he favored the more general restrictive-government-role principle and thus did not facilitate states making up for federal cuts in domestic spending. To be sure, the state governments would have done so to various extents, given their distinct political climates.

Restoring power to the member-states heeds the fact that over a continent and beyond, one size (of public policy) does not fit all (States). Curtailing both federal defense and domestic spending while reducing federal taxation by less than the combined cuts but enough that state taxing abilities would no longer be crowded out from expanding to meet the incoming transfer of programs would put the federal government on the road to fiscal responsibility—meaning being able at some point to pay off its debt—while giving the state governments back more of the authority they had when the federal system was designed and put into operation. The horrendous fiscal imbalance of the U.S. (federal) Government can be interpreted as pointing, in effect, to how imbalanced the federal system itself has become. No one at the U.S. Constitutional Convention envisioned the federal level as handling everything of substance while the state governments become like municipal governments, so it should be no surprise that such a lack of fit would be reflected in a massive fiscal imbalance on the federal level.

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1. Bernd Debusmann, “Musk Calls Trump’s Tax Bill a ‘Disgusting Abomination’,” BBC.com, June 3, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.

Raising Retirement Ages in the E.U.: The Case of Spain

The New York Times reported in 2012, “Spain has a stubbornly high budget deficit, its banks require tens of billions of euros in rescue loans and the government may soon have little choice but to request bailout funds” from the E.U.’s “TARP” program. Nevertheless, the state government’s “budget would actually increase pension payouts 1 percent [in 2013]. The money includes not only pensions for former public employees, but also the social security payments that go to all retired [residents].”[1] Pension expenditures represented nearly 40 percent of the state's budget and 9 percent of the state’s economic output, so one would think that line-item would have been first up on the chopping block. To be sure, cutting sustenance programs such as pensions could actually exacerbate a government's debt because if a resulting decline in demand adds to unemployment. In this case, the politics in the state seems to have gone along with the economics. I submit that Spain could have gone further economically were it not for entitlement politics interlarding the retirement-age issue.
Delaying the increase in the retirement age in Spain from 65 to 67 until 2027 could be seen as a case of politics operating at the expense of what was most needed economically. Given the advances in modern medicine and the universal health-care systems in the E.U., even 67 have been too low and too late. 
Firstly, in the 2010's, the E.U. would struggle with immigration even as more workers were needed. The failure of politics in the state of Spain to jack up the retirement age significantly as early as 2013 may therefore have been a contributing factor in shortchanging the local residents from satisfying the state's need for labor. 

Do the state governments have too much power at the federal level? If so, are Greece and Spain paying the price of the self-interest of more dominant states?  

The E.U. state of Greece demonstrates that going just from 65 to 67 can indeed be accomplished legislatively in a year, even with political protests. “For Greece, the longtime generosity of its pension system — in which large numbers were previously allowed to retire at 50 and younger — came to define the bankrupt condition of the Greek state. In the years before the crisis hit, pension payments in Greece totaled as much as 14 percent” of the state’s economic output.[2] Spain too could have used the decrease in pension costs that a relatively quick raise to 67 would have engendered. Raising the age is distinct from cutting pension amounts, yet the austerity-bred entitlement politics may have spilled onto the age issue. 
Raising the retirement age can be distinguished from the cuts in monthly entitlement programs, such as in the lender-imposed austerity program in Greece. If heath-related exceptions can be made to a higher retirement age based on a generally longer human lifespan, then cutting entitlement programs more than raising the retirement age puts lives at risk. This difference may have been lost in the politics of raising the retirement age in Spain.

1. Landon Thomas, “Pension Dilemma in Europe’s Debt Crisis,” The New York Times, September 30, 2012.
2. Ibid.

Beyond Collectivism and Individualism: Freedom from Fear

In his speech on April 13, 2011 on reducing the U.S. Government deficits, President Obama identified two strains that had run through the country’s political history and thus informed the American political culture. “More than citizens of any other country” he said, “we are rugged individualists, a self-reliant people with a healthy skepticism of too much government. But there has always been another thread running throughout our history – a belief that we are all connected; and that there are some things we can only do together, as a nation.  We believe, in the words of our first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, that through government, we should do together what we cannot do as well for ourselves.”[1]  These two strains can be identified as individualism and collectivism, respectively. I contend that collectivism enables both individual and collective security. Individual security is oriented to a person’s survival and collective security is exemplified by national defense. 

In his speech, the president explicitly placed individual security within the collectivist strain. “Part of this American belief that we are all connected also expresses itself in a conviction that each one of us deserves some basic measure of security.  We recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, hard times or bad luck, a crippling illness or a layoff, may strike any one of us.  ‘There but for the grace of God go I,’ we say to ourselves, and so we contribute to programs like Medicare and Social Security, which guarantee us health care and a measure of basic income after a lifetime of hard work; unemployment insurance, which protects us against unexpected job loss; and Medicaid, which provides care for millions of seniors in nursing homes, poor children, and those with disabilities.”  That is, limits to rugged individualism exist, whether in the state of nature or in an interdependent economy, and collectivized programs can bridge the gap on an individualized basis such that individuals can continue to enjoy liberty. The individualist/collectivist dichotomy is thus not so clearly dichotomist.

According to Obama, societal connectedness with others, something limited to the family or clan in the state of nature, implies the societal duty of individuals with economic surplus to contribute to the survival needs of other individuals, especially those who cannot fend for themselves. Individuals pay taxes and individuals receive sustenance benefits—the collectivism seems in actuality to mean systemic.

I have noticed that rich Europeans tend to acknowledge both that they too may someday be in need of such benefits, and that, under the principle of solidarity, a duty exists to pay higher taxes than otherwise so other people may survive rather than perish. As the American president pointed out in his speech, hard luck can befall each of us; no one is immune from calamity and ruin. Europeans seem to get this; American’s don’t.

Europeans also seem to recognize a basic psychological ease of mind exists in knowing that even in the worst-case scenario, a safety net exists. Even if a rich or middle-income American never needs to draw on Social Security and Medicare in retirement, whether due to age or disability/illness, the psychological security afforded by this recognition through life is surely worth something to the individual. Such a person (i.e., with economic surplus year to year) can justify on self-interest alone paying more in taxes to feel even this subtle peace-of-mind (i.e, individual security) through life. In other words, the narrow breed of self-interest (i.e., selfishness) that exists in American culture as a common trait among individuals is not even in the individual’s own interest. Such individualism is thus faulty.

I have not come across many rich Americans who recognize that they too may need such services (ignoring the stock market crashes of 1873, 1929 and others); such people thus view sustenance-oriented taxes as paying for lazy people to play or do drugs. Should such people therefore die? As disgusted as I am with the American inner-city “ghetto” mentality that potential employers justifiably eschew, I believe that to say people with such entrenched mentalities should therefore die for want of sustenance violates human rights, which are not conditional. Too many Americans may be guilty of an entrenched selfishness whose greed knows no bounds even at high levels of wealth. The selfishness that sees narrowly only that earning or amassing more wealth is possible at any level is utterly blind to the foundational peace of mind that comes with having confidence that a safety net even for oneself exists.

Together, callousness toward others less fortunate and selfishness concerning wealth are, I submit, just as ugly as a “fuck society, the rules don’t apply to me” ghetto mentality. A bad odor surrounds both even if some noses are immune to their own smell. In contrast, imagine a society in which the fear stemming from a recognition that survival itself is conditional even out of the state of nature, in “advanced” societies, is absent. The psychological effects even from the removal of such a subtle, subterranean fear, can be significant. My dad used to refer to “quality of life” as being an important attribute of reaching an old age. Yet the importance of obviating a sustenance-conditional fear in a person’s quality of life even when the quality is otherwise good tends to be missed by most Americans in their prime. The Titanic can’t sink!

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[1] Barak Obama, “Text of Obama Speech on Deficit,” The Wall Street Journal, April 13, 2011.

Congressional Cuts to Food Stamps: Violating a Human Right?

The natural right to food unconditionally in society is based, I submit, on the assumption that it is because a person without food is in society that he or she is without food. Were the person in an agrarian economy in which people live off the land, having enough food to eat would not be such a formidable problem. Rousseau makes this point in his Discourse on Inequality.[1]  Hence, Mandeville's finding of an equal distribution of food among city dwellers because farmers sold their surplus crops to buy frivolous vanities can be viewed as highly optimistic, and, along with that account, so too Adam Smith's claim that competitive markets satisfy the food needs of specialized factory-laborers by means of competitive markets. Hence the need for governments to supply food to the most vulnerable, whose incomes and other expenses, such as rent, keep people from being able to participate in (competitive?) food markets. 

During the debate in the U.S. House of Representatives in June 2013 on a proposed $20.5 billion in cuts over 10 years to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), otherwise known as the food stamps program, proponents of the cuts denied that they would make it more difficult for the poor to feed themselves. Rep. Rick Crawford claimed that the cuts would be “eliminating abuse.”[1] For example, some drug addicts sell their “food stamps” for something like half value and use the cash to buy drugs. The addicts manage to get their food at pantries and soup kitchens. While such fraud exists, the proposed cuts would have hit bone. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, nearly 2 million people would lose SNAP eligibility were the cuts to become law.[2] After the debate, “Tea Party” Republicans wanting even more cut combined with Democrats against any cuts defeated the proposal. Three months later, the U.S. House voted 217 to 210 to cut food stamps by $40 billion.  Obama had already promised a veto, which the tally could not overcome. Even so, that no vote had been taken to suspend or end foreign aid to Egypt on account of the military coup or to cut corporate welfare is telling in what this says about priorities. Even as some House supporters of the bill insisted that the innocuous decrease in federal funding merely reflects increased enforcement of existing income limits, still other House supporters admitted that the cuts are oriented to getting as many able-bodied (i.e., non-disability) recipients as possible to get a job. "If you're a healthy adult and don't have someone relying on you to care for them, you ought to earn the benefits you receive," said Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-Kan.). "Look for work. Start job training to improve your skills or do community service. But you can no longer sit on your couch or ride a surfboard like Jason in California and expect the federal taxpayer to feed you."[3] That is to say, rather than being a right, sustenance ought to be contingent on work. To the extent that the bill reflects this aim, more was involved in the cuts than merely strengthening enforcement of existing caps. In fact, the proposed decrease in funding could even take a pound of flesh out of the human right to sustenance in a society of interdependence.

I suspect that part of the argument on behalf of earning as a prerequisite reflects a failure to realize that the increased number of food recipients since 2007 was in large measure due to the post-financial-crisis economic downturn. In 2012, for example, the SNAP program spent around $80 billion on about 47 million Americans—one in seven.[4] According to the Congressional Budget Office, the increased cost and usage of the program over the previous few years was due to the recession following the financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent nearly-jobless recovery.[5] Nevertheless, the ballooning cost made the program vulnerable politically to being “downsized.” Hence the debate on the U.S. House floor in June 2013 and the claim on the Hill that too many Americans had become dependent on the federal government for food. Meanwhile, people on food stamps were wondering how they were supposed to get off the aid when “there are no jobs.”[6]

A similar catch-22 or double-bind would also apply to the proposal by Rep. Steve Southerland “that would allow—but not require—individual states to test work requirements.”[7] The 1996 welfare law had included work requirements for food-stamp recipients, though most states would be granted waivers by the Obama administration. Getting recipients to attend mandatory weekly “check-in” meetings and fill out weekly job search forms, let alone actually find a job, turned out to be a lesson in futility for state employees. Members of Congress and the Clinton administration had put the front-line employees at the local level in an impossible position of fitting a federal uniform requirement with the actual conditions of the recipients. In regard to Southerland’s proposal in 2013, while it would accommodate the different conditions of the states and respect their portion of sovereignty, a work requirement would not fit with the children, elderly and disabled, who make up a significant number of the recipients. Again, it would seem that members of Congress are out of touch, with ordinary people potentially at risk of having to pay the price. Rather than expecting an answer from reason to unravel the "earnings/no jobs" double-bind, we need to look at the passions whose role is hinted at by the existence of the logical contradiction itself.

I contend that the earnings-rationale is in part actually exaggerated anger at real abuses. That is, the work ethic is in part a front here for an instinct to retaliate. Plato would point out at this point that a person talking reason to one's own undisciplined passion is necessary to render such a psyche just (i.e., passions and courage ruled by reason). Moreover, a polis (i.e., society) is just if and only if it is ruled by reason rather than passions such as resentment. As is often the case with vengeance, collateral damage unforeseen by the hypertrophic passion would result. The vote had the potential of triggering a wake-up call of sorts concerning the realization that what happens in Congress can really hit home on Main Street. Sadly, the most vulnerable can indeed fall through the cracks, with the resentment rejoicing as the human right takes a hit.

Even reducing the funding of the SNAP program by a certain percent can set in motion consequences unknown to members of Congress. For example, well into a month in which the state had halved recipient food benefits, I went to a food pantry. The place was inundated with people who had run out of food funds unexpectedly early. SNAP recipients who had never been to the pantry had to wait two hours just to be registered, after which they were told to go to the end of the “regular” line.  The pantry ran out of food, rationing portions to most of the first-times and turning away still others. Recipients I spoke with scoffed at the notion that they were enjoying “being dependent,” and, moreover, had much choice in the matter, given the lack of jobs. As for the pantry’s volunteers, they admitted that their procedure for the first-timers was unfair; however, this did not keep the volunteers from using the occasion nevertheless to spread their Christian beliefs to the frustrated first-timers standing in their second line. Were Congress to reduce funding to the states for the SNAP program, it would not take much for the situation on the ground to get out of hand. From my observations, food pantries should not be relied on to fill up the slack.

Fundamentally, because food is a daily requirement for human beings, I contend that a daily supply of food is a human right. To make fulfilling that need contingent at all does not match the lack of contingency in the daily need. Subjecting it to the politics in Congress or a work requirement essentially holds the SNAP recipients hostage. Even just referring to food as nutrition is problematic, as the latter is not strictly speaking as much of a need as food itself. Eating more nutritious food is a worthy goal, whereas eating food is a daily requirement. Distinguishing, or bracketing, those things that are necessary for daily sustenance from all other budget items can thus be justified on the basis of human physiology—and thus human rights.

In dealing with something as necessary and individual as food consumption, small changes in a federal law can have huge, unexpected consequences as front-line state employees translate the changes as they affect particular lives. For this reason, Rep. Ryan’s proposal to move the SNAP program to the states in a block grant makes sense.[8] Besides state legislators being closer to the local contexts, a fixed block grant is more in line than Congressional programs with the dual-sovereignty feature of modern federalism. To be sure, the state governments would have the sole responsibility to see to it that the most vulnerable are not inadvertently blown over by violent political winds making even minor state-wide changes to the programs. As a rule of thumb, representatives in Congress could do much worse than treat food as unconditional in terms of human consumption. Hence, if a person cannot secure enough food on his or her own, the role of government would be to make food-sustenance as close to unconditional in practice as possible.

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1. Ned Resnikoff, “House Debates $20.5 Billion Cuts to Food Stamps,” MSNBC, June 18, 2013.

2. Dottie Rosenbaum and Stacy Dean, “House Agricultural Committee Farm Bill Would Cut Nearly 2 Million People Off SNAP,” The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, May 16, 2013. “By eliminating the categorical eligibility state option, which over 40 states have adopted, the bill would cut nearly 2 million low-income people off SNAP.”

3. Arthur Delaney and Michael McAuliff, "House Votes to Cut Food Stamps by $40 Billion," The Huffington Post, September 19, 2013.
4. Associated Press, “House GOP Considers Food Stamp Work Requirements, Cutting Spending for Feeding Program,” The Washington Post, July 24, 2013.

5. Dottie Rosenbaum and Stacy Dean, “House Agricultural Committee Farm Bill Would Cut Nearly 2 Million People Off SNAP,” The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, May 16, 2013. “By eliminating the categorical eligibility state option, which over 40 states have adopted, the bill would cut nearly 2 million low-income people off SNAP.”

6.  I heard this complaint from several people when I visited a food pantry run by a non-profit organization.

7. Associated Press, “House GOP Considers Food Stamp Work Requirements, Cutting Spending for Feeding Program,” The Washington Post, July 24, 2013.

8. Ibid.

Democracy and Over-Population in India: Foreign Direct Investment

How well can the democratic form of governance serve as a means by which a society is circumscribed, or restricted in some way? In other words, can self-government be used to enact self-discipline on the body politic itself? Adding another level to this question, can elected representatives be expected to go beyond fixes that are perceived societally as sufficient to redress the underlying causes of governmental, economic, or societal problems? Far from urging or implying the supremacy of non-democratic forms of government, such questions invite improvement in democracy itself. In this essay, I reflect on these questions using India’s industrial policy as a case study.

Faced with economic growth below 6 percent, a budget deficit expected to breach 6 percent of India’s GDP, a possible downgrade in the country’s credit rating to junk status, and the rupee hitting record lows, Sonia Gandhi, the head of the Congress Party, spoke for the first time in late 2012 in support of allowing foreign companies such as Wal-Mart into India. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and others had been urging her to embrace the reform. Appealing to Sonia Gandhi’s passion for social welfare programs, the prime minister told her that more foreign direct investment would be necessary to expand them. Most notably, the Congress Party boss was pushing a $5.6-billion food-security bill and a rural employment-guarantee program. According to the Wall Street Journal, there was already “high spending on subsidies” at the expense of “growth-generating capital projects.” In effect, the latter get “sub-contracted” in foreign direct investment.  Relatedly, the finance minister, P. Chidambaram, issued a plan to reduce the federal government’s deficit and sell stakes the government has in state-owned companies.

 

Singh and Gandhi at a rally. It is clear who's the boss.   AP

 

Lest Sonia Gandhi’s support be viewed as a panacea, other reforms, such as making it easier to acquire land, remained “stuck in the bureaucracy,” according to the Wall Street Journal. The government’s “mind-set is I will not fix the cause of the issue, I will put a Band-Aid on it,” Rahul Bahsin of Baring Private Equity Partners India said. Indeed, although Walmart would doubtless hire local labor both in the construction and retail-operations of the stores, that foreign-direct-investment alone would not be large enough to make a dent in the social welfare needs of India’s poor. Additionally, the company’s aversion to workers’ rights (not to mention unions) and the related low compensation and benefits for in-store employees could mean additional troubles for Sonia Gandhi as worker groups seek protection from the federal government.

 Moreover, with over a billion people at the time the policy was being considered, the prospect of employing all able-bodied people of working-age in India was undoubtedly a daunting task in the midst of a global recession following the financial crisis of 2008. It was not as though the Indian government could simply invite hundreds of millions of Indians into computer-science and engineering classes and then into high-tech ready-made jobs. Over-population could have been the long-standing underlying problem, or cause of the unemployment and related subsidies.

 The bureaucracy and coalition in-fighting, as well as the “Band-Aid” approach oriented to incremental additions in employment through FDI could be a reflection of India’s over-population—a more basic problem that eludes mere policy prescriptions increasing foreign-direct-investment. Especially if a given  over-populated area has a disproportionate number of unemployed people, tackling the underlying problem could be expected to relieve the pressure on policies such as foreign direct investment to make up the difference. Meanwhile, other symptoms, like global warming and food prices, would be redressed. The question may therefore be whether a democracy is a feasible venue for such “cause-oriented” legislation to be enacted.

 Whereas government officials in China did not have to worry about a democratic backlash from the government’s one-child policy in the late twentieth century, the case of India raises the question of whether a self-governed people can regulate their own society by democratic means. A democracy may be hard-pressed in putting into effect painful legislation to curb excesses such as over-population—literally to restrict rather than promote a basic sort of growth. The value put on that value alone since the mercantile days could give legislators an implicit mandate to foster rather than retard population growth.  Furthermore, the “Band-Aid” approach might be more in line with the workings of a democracy if apparent measures are sufficient to get one re-elected. One could point to the perennial “fixes” in the U.S. regarding entitlement programs and deficit-cutting as other examples, and to the efforts of the E.U. to bail-out heavily indebted states as yet another example. Elected representatives seem to prefer to take little bites, incrementally, rather than enact fundamental laws that are oriented to causes rather than symptoms.
In contrast to these questions, an uncritical approach to the spread of democracy around the world, such as potentially in the “Arab Spring,” could actually exacerbate global problems. If the species continues “un-self-regulated,” meaning more and more over-populated, nature will undoubtedly step in at some point and impose restraint (e.g., famine, climate, war, disease). It may be an open question whether we as a species can stave off such a verdict from Mother Nature. Ironically, our consensus form of government may lessen the odds.

 

Source:

Romit Guha and Rajesh Roy, “India’s Gandhi Now Backs Overhauls,” The Wall Street Journal, November 9, 2012.

Sustenance: A Human Right in America?

In the fall of 2010, the following was said on Fox News: “The government should spend more on the war in Afghanistan in order to fight terrorism. The problem is that the government has gotten into entitlements.”  The latter presumably includes food stamps, public housing, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.  To say that government ought to be engaged in defense and not in supplying needy citizens with food, shelter and health-care is distinct from saying that the federal government should concentrate on foreign policy and defense, while entitlements are formulated and funded by the state governments as their domestic programs. In other words, advocacy for a certain priority in government and for less government is distinct from advocacy for restoring balanced federalism.

Most Europeans in the E.U. undoubtedly view the redistributive right for sustenance resources as founded on human rights and thus as a legitimate part of government.  In contrast, Americans do not typically apply a human rights justification to entitlements for other Americans even as foreign aid may be justified in part on this basis.

For example, on June 3, 2011, Donald Trump told a forum in Washington, D.C.: "A certain Republican representative, two nights ago -– I watched on television -– Representative Cantor, who [sic] I like, said we don't want to give money to the tornado victims, . . . (a)nd yet, in Afghanistan we are spending ten billion dollars a month but we don't want to help the people that are devastated by tornadoes -- wiped out, killed, maimed, injured. We don't have money for them but we are spending ten billion dollars a month in Afghanistan. We are spending billions of dollars in Iraq where they have the second largest oil fields in the world … and we can't help people that got flooded in Mississippi that got hit horribly by tornadoes." The U.S. House Majority Leader was holding up funds for basic necessities at home as leverage in debt-ceiling negotiations with the Democrats, while allowing billions of dollars to continue to flow in foreign aid (and to the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan).  Canter’s antipathy toward government aiding citizens who would otherwise be left to the state of nature represents a rather warped understanding of a social contract.

People such as Eric Canter believe that the market mechanism trumps any right to have one’s basic needs satisfied. Resources are viewed as commodities produced and distributed by private enterprise, even though the market does not guarantee that every citizen’s basic needs are met. Even so, it can be asked whether the right to survival (i.e., life) is part of the American social contract. If so, then relying on the market mechanism alone is not sufficient.

If life is not part of the social contract, then the hungry and homeless, as well as the untreated sick, are (and can legitimately behave as if) in the state of nature. As much as some of the rich do not want to be taxed so the least fortunate can survive, the prospect of the latter behaving as if in the state of nature must surely be even less palatable.

James Madison writes in Federalist #51, “the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger” in the state of nature. Nor is the weaker secured against starvation and sickness.  Without the police to protect their property, are the rich sufficiently strong to ward off the hungry and homeless? Who is the strong and who is the weak in a dog-eat-dog contest between two human beings—one with a bank account and the other with a left hook? Life, Thomas Hobbes writes, is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” in the state of nature are all equal in the sense that any one of us can be killed in our sleep. Suddenly having some of one’s tax directed on a human-rights basis may not sound so bad.

What keeps those whose survival is so tenuous from simply taking from the rich is of course the funded social contract that protects property with police force even as there is no guarantee for survival. Such a warped social contract is an aberration in terms of social contract theory.

  The social contract undergirding a political society is meant to alleviate the fear of the want of necessities (and self-defense) while working for the happiness of the members.  In other words, there is a right to shelter, food and medical care. Otherwise, the society is only marginal or partial in obviating the insecurity that exists in the state of nature.

Therefore, to say that government should merely defend citizens from the insecurity of foreign invasion does not go far enough from the standpoint of why government is instituted as part of a social contract that takes people out of the state of nature. However, to say that an empire-level government ought to be charged with protection from foreign invasion, while the individual republics are tasked with ascertaining their citizens with protection from starvation, the elements, and sickness. Without anxiety, foreign or domestic, every citizen—rich or poor—would be freed up from a basic insecurity that without a viable social contract is simply part of life.

Sources:

The Federalist, ed. Jacob E. Cooke, Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan Press, 1961.

Sam Stein, “Trump Takes Aim at Cantor, Krauthammer, U.S. Foreign Policy,” The Huffington Post, June 3, 2011.

Political Staying Power: Ethanol Subsidies

“A broad bipartisan majority of the Senate voted [on June 15, 2011] to end more than three decades of federal subsidies for ethanol. . . . [At the time,] Gasoline blenders [received] a tax credit of 45 cents for every gallon of ethanol they blend[ed] with motor fuel. The amendment would have repealed that as well as a tariff of 54 cents a gallon on imported ethanol. . . . The tax breaks . . . cost about $6 billion a year. The House [was] expected to reject the repeal as unconstitutional because tax bills must originate in that chamber, and the White House opposes it. But the 73-27 vote signals that once-unassailable programs could be vulnerable.  [The intent was] to end subsidies for wealthy interest groups and [to make some] cuts before slashing social-welfare programs. [Thirty three] Republicans joined 40 Democrats and Independents in supporting [the] repeal. (E)thanol has come under increasing fire from diverse groups, including food industry groups concerned about rising corn prices and environmentalists who had concluded corn ethanol wasn't an effective way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

At the time of the vote, much of the gasoline sold at service stations across the U.S. contained up to 10% ethanol, in part because of federal regulations that effectively require it. The Obama administration “proposed pushing the blend limit to 15%, despite objections from auto makers worried that higher ethanol levels would damage engine components in cars. Auto makers design many so-called ‘flex fuel’ vehicles to run on ethanol blends up to 85%. But few service stations outside the Midwest offer such fuels.”

“The ethanol industry and its supporters, who have been bracing themselves for an end to the tax break, were critical of the vote. ‘We need a glide path, and not a cliff, for the only alternative to oil,’ said Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.). ‘We're talking about pulling the rug out from an industry that provides 10% of the nation's fuel supply.’ . . . The Renewable Fuels Association, an ethanol industry group, criticized the action, noting that the Senate ‘voted less than one month ago to preserve billions of dollars in taxpayer handouts to the oil industry.’ . . . The tax break benefits the ethanol industry, which is dominated by commodity giants” such as Archer-Daniels-Midland “by sweetening the financial incentive for gasoline retailers to use ethanol.”

“Repeal supporters said the $6 billion-a-year subsidy amounts to wasteful support for a fuel whose promises of cost savings, lower pollution and energy efficiency have not materialized. ‘This industry has been collecting corporate welfare for far, far too long,’ said Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.), who's been fighting the subsidy for years. Mr. McCain offered another measure, to block federal funding for ethanol pumps and storage facilities, which failed 41-59. The House adopted a similar amendment.”

“Food companies and livestock farmers “have complained that their costs have exploded as five billion bushels, or 40% of all the corn grown in the U.S. last year, was consumed in ethanol production. The price of corn has traded above $7 a bushel for much of the spring [of 2011], twice the year-ago level. Some economists doubt that the tax credit is now crucial for the industry. The ethanol industry only began to grow rapidly five years ago when new energy legislation required gasoline retailers to use corn ethanol: 12.6 billion gallons [in 2011], moving to 15 billion gallons in 2015. The tax credit is part of the reason the gasoline industry buys more than one billion gallons a year than required by federal mandate. But if it expires, ethanol demand wouldn't fall below the mandate, preventing financial calamity for producers, said Bruce Babcock, an Iowa State University economist. ‘The ethanol industry doesn't need the tax credit anymore,’ he said.”

It is remarkable that even though the ethanol industry did not need the tax credit, it could still count on the White House and the U.S. House of Representatives to keep the benefit around. This was in spite of the inefficiency of ethanol, the negative impact of ethanol on food prices, the existence of the duplicative mandate, a U.S. budget deficit of over $1 trillion, and a contentious budget-cuts/debt-ceiling debate going on in which cuts were being sought by legislators. The size of the deficit alone (and the accumulated U.S. debt) should have made the affordability of the tax credit a foregone conclusion, yet astonishingly denial seemed sufficient to enable the status quo to continue unabated. That is to say, if a current U.S. Government deficit of over $1 trillion didn’t make the non-essential subsidy a non-starter, what could suffice to do so? To be sure, that the U.S. Senate voted by a substantial margin of senators to end the credit was notable. Politically, however, it merely reflected the split of the agricultural interest on the issue due to the impact of ethanol on the price of corn.

Even considering the U.S. Senate’s action, the staying-power of the status quo in the face of the unsustainable U.S. Government debt of over $14 trillion is truly remarkable in what it says about the ability of a political union based on representative democracy and federalism to deal seriously with dire problems. In other words, one might reasonably ask whether a republic is capable of change sufficient to avoid a train-wreck. Can a people govern themselves when it really counts, or is democracy a matter of convenience? Perhaps part of the problem lies in priorities.

As the U.S. Senate was voting on the ethanol subsidies, the U.S. House was simultaneously rejecting attempts to reduce farm subsidies while cutting the Women, Infants and Children program, “which offers food aid and educational support for low-income mothers and their children,” by $868 million (which represents a 13% cut), and an international food programs that provides emergency aid and agricultural development by $50 million (which represents a 33% drop), according to USA Today. In a governmental context in which budget cuts were very much in the air, the staying power of the ethanol subsidies in the House even as food for the hungry was deemed expendable reveals questionable priorities in terms of budget policy, unless it is the case that large corporations are more in need than women and children. That is to say, if House Republicans were voting in line with an ideological preference for less government, wouldn’t that proclivity apply to corporate subsidies as well as food aid?

Ethanol subsidies, international food-aid, and aid to impoverished people domestically can be prioritized in terms government. For example, it can be argued that feeding citizens (or residents) who are otherwise without enough food is more of a government’s responsibility than is either giving corporations subsidies or sending food aid abroad in exchange for influence in foreign governments. The distinctions between foreign and domestic and necessity and profit are useful in isolating core from peripheral functions of government. In times of budget-cutting, the core should be treated differently than the peripheral. Additionally, it might be asked whether in a federal system the subsidies and food-aid are properly federal or state domains. It could be that federal food aid should be cut completely in order to be picked up differentially at the state level.

Sources:

Naftali Bendavid and Stephen Power, “Ethanol Suffers Rare Loss in Senate,” The Wall Street Journal, June 17, 2011.

The Associated Press, “House Spares Farm Subsidies, Targets Food Aid,” USA Today, June 17, 2011.

Russia's Putin and Big Tobacco

In political economy theory, democracy is said to have the drawback of excessive consumption of public revenues at the expense of investment, such as in infrastructure relevant to foreign direct investment. Latin American countries were contrasted negatively with the Asian newly industrialized economies, whose relatively strong states could buffer popular calls for more in entitlements so that more could be invested in infrastructure attractive to foreign multinational companies. The implication is that a trade-off exists between democracy and economic development.
Apart from the economic aspects, the question may be whether a representative government can resist popular calls for more money to be spent by the government on popular consumption. In the U.S. case, it can be asked whether the fiscal stresses on Social Security and Medicare are due more to demographic factors (i.e., an aging population) or democracy itself. The ability of representative democracy to maintain a viable economy and republic in the long term is at issue.
Accordingly, Putin’s less than democratic approach to ruling Russia may have a bright side. Even though nearly 40% of the population smoked in 2012 and the world’s four big tobacco companies controlled 90% of the Russian market, the Kremlin was pushing strong anti-smoking legislation through the legislature. Besides the question of whether such legislation should be at that level in an empire-level federal system (there had been legislation at the republic level), the fact that the government was standing up to big business and 40 percent of its population (60% of Russian men) can be attributed to a strong state resisting popular pressure literally for consumption. This is not necessarily bad, as people do not always know what is best for them.

Even in democracies, checks exist against “excessive democracy.” The Electoral College and the U.S. Senate are two such institutional checks at the federal level in the United States. The electors in the College were to check popular pressure to elect someone who is not in the best interest of the people. In the wake of an attack, for instance, the people might want a president who will invade the offending country (or another). The electors may say, “hold on, that’s not in your own best interest so we are going to elect someone else—someone who will resist that momentary urge.”

Popular passion can also have considerable sway in the U.S. House of Representatives because each member is up for re-election in two-year intervals. It was to be annual, but in the eighteenth century travel time made that unrealistic at the empire level (whereas annual elections suffered no such obstacle for state legislatures). The six-year term in the U.S. Senate was meant to check the influence of the passions of the moment that can sway the House. So, too, the appointment of U.S. Senators by the state governments rather than directly elected by the people was so designed. The subsequent popular election of the senators has thus weakened this check.

In short, if it seems that elected representatives, including the American president, cannot say no to additional entitlement programs or to Wall Street, the relatively-undemocratic federal government of Russia might be found to have a few pluses even though putting down the democratic impulse of protest is hardly laudable. Perhaps the ideal is a government that is democratic yet of a strong enough state to withstand or at least check the passions of the people to consume more. Smoking is indeed a case of consumption that is not in a person’s or society’s best interest. Putin can indeed be credited if history will show that his government did indeed stand up to big tobacco and the large minority of smokers in Russia.

Source:

Lukas Alpert, “Kremlin Cracks Down on Big Tobacco,” The Wall Street Journal, October 16, 2012.

California’s Turnaround in 2013: Brown’s Budget Surpluses

By early 2013, California had turned the corner from deficits—$9 billion in 2011 and $25 billion in 2010—to anticipated surpluses—$785 million for the fiscal year ending June 2013 and $851 million in the year thereafter. The lack of balance between billions and millions suggests that Keynesianism may contain a fundamental imbalance in favor of consumption, at least in a democratic context. The prudent proposals by Jerry Brown, California’s head of state and chief executive, point to the ability of a republic to responsibly manage its fiscal business even within the overall imbalance.

Unlike a prime minister, Jerry Brown is not in the legislature, but in addition to being the chief executive he is also the head of state.

Specifically, Brown proposed raising total expenditures by 5 percent, which would not absorb all of the surpluses. Even though his plan would increase spending on education and healthcare, he “vowed to push back at legislators eager to raise spending quickly.” After years of cutbacks, it was undoubtedly very tempting to spend all of the surpluses while still being able to brag about a balanced budget. Yet giving into such temptation would entail considerable risk. “I am determined to avoid the fiscal mess that the last few governors had to deal with,” Brown told reporters as he introduced his budget proposal for the 2013-2014 fiscal year. That he was willing to hold even himself back from additional spending in education and healthcare is a testament to his sense of fiscal responsibility over even his own political ideology.
Put another way, Jerry Brown put his role as head of state above furthering a partisan agenda. That Democrats had won a supermajority in both chambers of the legislature makes his self-restraint all the more laudable. Indeed, Connie Conway, the Republican minority leader in the Assembly, said she supported Brown’s messages of fiscal restraint and support for education. Generally speaking, the voluntary self-restraint of the majority party for the good of the whole is supported by the minority party.
Brown’s attempt to set up a “rainy day” fund is prudent and thus in the interest of the republic. The minority party could hardly object. Even so, the proposal could have been improved by dedicating a sizable portion of the surpluses to reducing the government’s accumulated debt. Being debtless is itself a sort of “rainy day” fund in that the government would have greater leeway in raising new debt in a crisis. In Keynesian terms, taxes should even be raised as an economy improves—all that revenue going to paying off all the debt incurred in the last downturn. Whether stemming from an imbalance between booms and busts or in democracy itself, the tendency for government debt to accumulate even between cycles is a serious problem that not even Jerry Brown’s prudence fully answers. Even so, Brown could have done much worse in spending away the anticipated surpluses.

Source:

Jim Christie, “California Budget Surplus? Governor Introduces Plan That Eliminates Deficit,” Reuters, January 10, 2013.