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Comment by troupe | Hacker News Reader

> she suggests that poor mothers lose their privacy altogether if they accept public assistance,

I'm not sure about the altogether part, but if I don't want people to know how much money I have, going to the government and saying "I need money from other people because I'm not capable of providing for myself and my kids" is kind of the start of a process of telling people about your life in exchange for getting money from other people.

The article makes some good points on bail and fines, but the idea that getting other people to pay for your living expenses should somehow be possible without giving up up any information about yourself is pretty silly.

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It's not that they have to give information, like name, age, SSN, address, etc., it's that they have to answer very private questions about their lives, like who they are dating, how often they have sex, do they use condoms, do they have medical conditions, etc. It's not right to make someone answer these questions just to survive and help their kids survive, because they have literally zero other options.

Especially with the rise of austerity welfare, some states want to prevent single mothers from receiving benefits if they are sexually active. It's incredibly intrusive.

I can totally see that.

But the other side is that they money they are asking for has to be taken from people who were responsible and can afford their families. Shouldn't we at a minimum require that if you seek help for family members you can't afford, that you take the same steps others take to not get any more kids you can't afford?

Because unless you have a good counter argument to that, you won't get anywhere politically.

It does sound quite reasonable when you put it that way. On the other hand, you could also describe it as, "we should starve poor families to death if the mother is sexually active and doesn't use approved birth control." Which sounds decidedly less reasonable to me.

But ultimately my counterargument would be that we should focus on helping people who need it, rather than on not helping people who we think don't deserve it. This country has a puritanical mindset about public help, where we're outraged at any person who receives it who we see as being in any way unworthy. For a pervasive recent example, look at drug testing for welfare recipients. It's more expensive than not doing it, but people love it because we see drug addicts as being evil and therefore unworthy of help.

We need to teach compassion, or at the very least rationality, rather than a punishment mentality.

>we should starve poor families to death if the mother is sexually active and doesn't use approved birth control.

We also murder people who have expired tags, as long as they don't pay the fine, don't show up in court, resist the police officers enough to get them to shoot them.

In reality essentially everybody stops before it gets to that point, and in your example the women buys (or ideally gets) a bunch of condoms, use them and no more children nobody can afford is brought into the world, and maybe she also avoids some STDs.

Look I don't want to compel her to do it, but at the very least make sure that she understands that the people who pay for her children have certain justifiable expectations.

>people love it because we see drug addicts as being evil and therefore unworthy of help.

If you work hard at a crap job that pays say 22 usd/hr, you don't want to pay for somebodies meth bill.

If you want a system that can help people then you need it so that it is politically palatable enough -- or you won't be able to focus on it at all.

The solution needs to be long term viable, which means that voting tax payers have to find the people who receive help sympathetic enough they don't vote to change the system. It's a hard balance to strike.

On my application for food stamps, they ask for my bank account number as well as the service provider for my cell phone. So far I've left both blank, though I may have provided the latter the last time.

I don't know if they can find out about my bank account or not, but I'm guessing they can, so I am effectively discouraged from saving any money from side jobs (yard work, that sort of thing). I know for a fact they have access to any employment, so that is a big disincentive to pick up a job unless I really think it's going to work out.

As you have pointed out, there is a feeling that this kind of intrusion is justified since I am apparently getting something I don't deserve anyway ("other people's money").

If food stamps are helping you get out of a tough spot, I'm glad it is helping you.

> there is a feeling that this kind of intrusion is justified since I am apparently getting something I don't deserve anyway

The idea that you deserve food stamps implies that you some how earned it. Keep in mind that what you get in food stamps effectively comes from someone else who would earned that money and might rather use it to pay off their college debt or put their kid through school.

If you are not listing your bank account because you don't want them to know that you DO have enough money to provide for yourself, then you are highlighting why they ask for that information. I'm glad if you are getting temporary help if you need it. If you think you somehow deserve and are trying to hide the fact that you actually do have resources you could use for food, you are making a good case for the fact that the government needs to do a better job of requiring that type of information.

How about land? Who created it? If god or nature, then doesn't that make it a common inheritance? Perhaps I deserve some sort of compensation?

People make things so complicated, they'll do anything to avoid doing the right thing. It's not that complicated.

The law isn't right by virtue of being the law, it's right in virtue of being in accordance with what's truly right. Ignoring this for generations doesn't change it.

You would think a nation that has the sins of taking the land and labor of others would have the respectability to make sure everybody has a place to be with no work requirement. Alas, this nation knows no shame.

UBI would have this feature. (Though any kind of collective redistribution system needs accurate identification of recipients, so that goes somewhat against privacy, and if it is implemented as Negative Income Tax, then of course accurate income and tax assessment is a hard requirement.)

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