It is estimated that up to half a million people visit food banks every week, and the left, predictably, is outraged: it is a sign of unacceptable poverty that food banks exist at all, they say. Of course, the very idea of food banks is to alleviate poverty, ensuring that people can eat without being constrained by poor finances. But if there were no need for food banks would that really mean that there was no poverty in the UK? The way to stop people from having to rely on food banks, according to the left, is to expand the welfare state – but really, is that not just replacing reliance on one form of alms-giving with another?
Think about it: either “can’t afford” means that you cannot acquire enough purchasing power in the voluntary market place to buy whatever it is you want; or it means not being able to get the purchasing power in any which way, including by forced redistribution by the state. In other words, there is no difference in the aim of food banks and benefit payments; they both address the problem of people having insufficient funds to obtain a certain standard of living. The two methods of alleviating poverty do differ, of course, and mainly in two ways: 1) private food banks are funded by voluntary contributions, whereas benefits are coerced via taxation; and 2) food banks address a specific need – to eat – whereas benefits are available to be spent as people see fit (and, incidentally, the people who use food banks may well be do so because they have used their benefits on discretionary spending like cigarettes, cable TV or iPhones).
Charity and welfare have the same effect, namely giving people stuff they don’t have the ability to accumulate in the market place. Either you are self-sufficient, or you are not. Either poverty is measured BEFORE anyone gives you anything you didn’t earn, or it is measured AFTER. It is completely disingenuous to measure it after people have collected their benefits, but before they go to the food bank. If using a food bank is a sign of poverty, so is the welfare state, and handing people money merely papers over the cracks: the UK is a society where more than 10 million people of working age (between 16 and 64) don’t work and a further 10 million claim some form of benefits even though they are in work. That’s the real problem; welfare and food banks are merely the symptoms of an economy where millions are exluded from the work force and which isn’t vigorous enough to provide opportunities for everyone.
The welfare state is not solving any problems which charitable giving could not. But, apart from being funded at the point of a gun, the welfare state must also be held to account for a catastrophic change in how people view reliance on others: today, people are more likely to be ashamed at having to borrow from friends and family than to have any quarrels with getting handouts from the state – money extracted from complete strangers. But surely relying on voluntary charity is morally preferable to depending on money coerced from strangers? The welfare state has ingrained the idea that responsibility for our lives is collective, not individual, and that collective consists of people who you have never met. Our forefathers relied on family and community; they provided for their own and could turn to their own if they needed assistance. That arrangement requires respect: you must be a valued member of your community to be able to rely on it. The welfare state, on the other hand, doles out other people’s money as a right. And that right is so ingrained in people’s thinking that we now measure poverty not before, but after handouts from the state. That is not only a warped way of thinking which institutionalises and normalises the welfare state, it also absolves those in charge from dealing with the real, underlying causes of poverty which only the economic growth of a free market economy can alleviate.