Government’s Free Lunch
February 3, 2025
By NZB3
“This week, headline after headline bitched about the new ‘free’ school lunch programme. ” wrote Lindsay Mitchell yesterday.
“School lunches are already well-catered for with $261.86 cash assistance. Parents are double-dipping.” So, this new solution makes no moral sense. It’s an example of the Amnesiac Samaritan principle where we have already solved a problem at least once but are demanded to do so all over again until we either learn how to set healthy boundaries or run out of money. Paying out is not a function of economics or morality, not genuine interest in the problem. Instead it’s a function of induced guilt.
For example, if you made full restitution to someone for making a mistake at their expense that would be the end to it. Or, you borrow their money or their property so you balance the transaction out by repaying or giving back their stuff. Done.
When it’s guilt though the giving back part might never end. A person, perhaps a woman, feels emotionally damaged and says X would fix things so you do X. Then, later, she brings it up again and again. She gets Y, Z, and all the alphabet. Never satiated. Many co-dependent relationships are like this with one partner around the little finger of the other. All the Taker needs to do in the transaction is to invoke guilt and the Giver is their ATM.
Child Hunger is such a trigger. Amnesiac Samaritans will keep on paying out over and over because they remember, and are reminded on cue, their guilt. They don’t remember that they already resolved the issue. After all, such resolutions are acts of connection and humanity. Reconciliation. These are not sentiments that government institutions and corporations are capable of.
So Child Hunger has been made into yet another political football. An ATM. And excuse to funnel money. To employ bureaucrats in place of parents. Labour 6.0 created the school lunch program. Why would National 6.0, or David Seymour’s ACT, give up this power?
I realise, now I’m an Anarchist, that all the politicians are up to mischief. If they can capture any institution and make it ‘theirs’ then they always will. Even if it is losing money or doing evil. Or, if not, they destroy it no matter if it is making money or doing good. Control is the only thing.
Another easy rule is: “The delegation of particular tasks to technical bodies, while a regular feature, is yet only the first step in the process whereby a democracy relinquishes its powers.” – Friedrich Hayek (paraphrased)
Foolish people are constantly begging The State to make things into political institutions. They don’t understand that this only makes them playthings for this game of political football.
Only last month I heard Cassie Jeffries from the Professional dog Walkers Association on the radio. In the guise of what’s best for dogs she was seeking government licenses for her particular economic enterprise. Naturally she assumed that she and all her tribe would get licences and the competitors she disliked would be cast out at gunpoint by Big Brother.
Naturally the voice actress (Francesca Rudkin) playing the role of radio host (also called Francesca Rudkin) was all in favour of easing the way to this government-dog courtship. Media, the Fourth Estate, plays an essential role in politicising parts of humanity and making them part of The State Machine. Once they are part of the Statrix it’s very hard to get them back. The State grows and humanity shrinks.
We should depoliticise everything and not stop until government it out of lunch, dog-walking, and everything else too.
Or, for the Libertarian, at least start with a Sunset Clause every time a new bit of humanity is appropriated into yet another government program!
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Ref. Hayek and sunset clauses, Daniel Hannan
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