Poor in India Starve as Politicians Steal $14.5 Billion of Food

Besides India is such a big country that monitoring these things is nearly impossible. With corruption rampant and lack of accountability, these schemes are designed to fail from their very inception.

What these people need is not food, may be they need it at the moment. But what these people need is a way to make a decent living, which nobody shows them how to- And often we come back and talk about hunger.

1) There is an X amount of food and Y number of people in India. 2) Someone is eating that food (let's assume nothing gets thrown out/rots because of corruption: someone who steals food eventually sells it and it gets eaten, not trashed)

Meaning: corruption does not change the supply and demand, so it doesn't impact the prices (total money that is charged for the food in the country). It only changes the hands which get the money. Nobody starves because of the food getting stolen unless, again, the stolen food is either trashed or ends up exported.

Probably not.

(1) Many of them aren't starving. (The system covers other people, who tend to crowd-out the actual starving.)

(2) The relevant question is "why are they starving". Feeding them typically solves the wrong problem and guarantees that you continue to have starving people.

(3) Such programs tend to reduce local food production, leading to more starving.

The law of unintended consequences doesn't care how good your intentions are. .

Certainly not, if/when it's true that giving the free food causes more people to starve in the long run. Less misery is better than more misery, as sad as any misery is.

Corruption is happening inside this free food distribution program.

But why do those people even need free food? Unfortunately this question is never asked. Those people don't have productive jobs to afford it. That is why we always keep hearing of these stories.

Our focus must be to provide them jobs so that they can buy it, instead of making it a free stuff.

But the point is this hunger stories reappear after the aid exhausts out. Which means people are not put to work to afford it.

I actually come from a pretty poor financial background.

What helped me rise is self esteem to never accept help and learn to be strong instead. In fact right from the beginning I've refused scholarships.

I purposefully turned down the option of reservation for my engineering course though I was perfectly eligible for it.

My dad always says if you let people be strong they will be strong. Let them be weak and they will be weak.

What these people need is not free stuff and reservations. They just need to be shown how to be strong and work their way out of the problem.

It's hard to imagine a way to survive on two quarters ($0.50) per day. The minimum price for pretty much any quantity of food or drink around here is about $0.79. That doesn't get you very far, and certainly not a whole day.

Suddenly I have a wonderful appreciation for how lucky we are to be born in a context that allowed us to learn to become programmers (and also to make money from it).

But the point in discussion is why do people need to be provided food for free? Clearly if they are not able to buy for a real long time- This indicates they are not earning enough. So fixing that makes more sense than fixing problems in the free food program. Because if we fix the affordability issue we will not need the free food program at the first place.

Yes the distribution system is broken. I think a step to fix that was tried- FDI in retail was good. Companies could buy directly from the farmers, eliminating middle men and the entire inefficient distribution cycle. But I and you know well the political opposition to those reforms.

1. Price floors are net harms to economies. Overall growth and employment is reduced at the expense of artificially bolstering the farming industry, which otherwise would be seeing necessary cuts in jobs and profit margins. Re: American New Deal farm subsidies and Japanese rice subsidies.

2. Oversupplies are offset when the market is fully private, because the price mechanism is a consideration for all participants, not just those who are too rich to qualify for the public distribution system. As a result, Purchasing increases as prices decrease, which India doesn't like allowing.

4. Subsidies and freebies exist on the same continuum; when they mean that the government is paying for some portion of the price of a good, they create price floor pressures. Price floors create surpluses [1]. As a result, you have supply exceeding demand, and the country suffers as too much labor is put into producing the oversupply.

[1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/e/e9/Surplus_...

It can be debated all day whether social welfare systems are good or bad, but they are undoubtedly more effective when they support people in very broad ways (such as welfare providing money) rather than narrow ways (such as subsidized food) since the market distortion is more acute when individual industries are subsidized: prices, supply and employment are both distorted. It is natural for countries to reduce the proportion of their population that farms as they grow, and so it's an immediate consequence of that that many farmers need to be allowed to be unprofitable in their farming, so only the most efficient are left.

It is incredibly important that the market be allowed to do its work. Prices need to be allowed to go below the point of profitability for many producers such as farmers, because the industries otherwise become overstaffed and create surpluses, which is a far greater harm in the long run. The same for other employment systems, such as the NREGA you mentioned.

There exists a tradeoff between economic growth and how much the government forces employment over its natural level. If you look at [2], and replace the y axis with "Economic Growth level" and replace the x axis with "forced employment above natural equilibrium", you'll find that policies like NREGA are working to push India closer to point C than B. The same tradeoff curve exists for farming profit margins versus food distribution efficiency, and many other things.

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Production_Possibilities_F...

But this is an excellent economic case, and it goes to show why well-meaning policies that seek to guarantee the welfare of the few that are most disadvantaged end up creating an overall worse effect--they cannot solve problems, they can only redistribute them across the rest of the economy. A population segment that is producing €1 billion under their GDP potential can be uplifted, and produce at that maximum potential, but at the expense of €2 billion of economic harm done to the rest of the economy. The net result is that overall, the country goes nowhere with its efforts to reduce poverty and create growth. So India's public distribution system may feed a million people, but only at the expense of a massive economic inefficiency, perhaps of the size that could have fed 2 million, or more. The net result is that everyone ends up a little hungrier and a little poorer than they would have otherwise been; and to now return to Kamaal's point, we can now see why these freebies and subsidies cause problems in the first place. They create the very poverty they were designed to solve.

The ultimate hallmark of market economics is the recognition that the few can only be saved at the expense of the many. It is only economic and technological growth that ultimately moved entire nation's populations completely above poverty lines, and so all efforts that take away from economic growth to instead give to subsidies and forced overemployment or price floors are also efforts that stop countries from ever moving past those poverty issues in the first place. So saving the few at the expense of the many, over time, undermines your ability to save anyone at all; and countries slide into despair, as those nations that tried the hardest to support the few in theory (such as communist economies) severely underpreform in comparison to free market economies, and eventually disintegrate. India is fortunate to be free enough to avoid that backslide, but it could solve its problems much faster if it were to look to market economics, and allow its problems to solve themselves.

This reasoning is separate from the effects of welfare dependence. While they are also important considerations, they are hardly the only ones. The core consideration is as above: there exists a fundamental problem in the market, and throwing money at those most affected by it doesn't solve it, but instead just prolongs it and distributes the issue to those whose money is being thrown. In the long run, things get worse. India's growth is not helped by its programs, but hindered by them; its growth and its poverty levels would be better, not worse, without the programs.

So basically, there's no part of any of the calculus that involves ethics or anything. It's purely that we find, scientifically, that if you want the most people to be the most well-fed, market policies and low/no subsidies are the way to go. See: the Washington Consensus point 2 [2].

[1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4449397

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Consensus#Original_s...

I can see the benefit of free education. When you educate people, it has a multiplicative effect on the mobility of the individuals. Education has the ability to unlock a great deal of potential in each person which has a seemingly obvious benefit for the rest of the society.

I would argue that giving completely free food and healthcare do weaken most societies. The problem is that there's an all-too-large portion of most societies that will avoid working if they can get basic necessities like food, healthcare, and housing met for free.

Working is good for people. It gets them out of bed, gets them thinking, gives some people their only exercise, forces people to deal with others socially, and quite literally keeps some folks out of trouble that they'd otherwise get into if they were completely idle.

I'm all for a safety net to keep people suffering from catastrophic health problems or temporary situations from dying/starving... but the notion that we should make "free food" a policy is just broken.

How often do "not free" markets have famines?

In the US, poor people are fat. They don't lack food. (They don't lack TVs, cars, or houses either.)

Also, your whole idea that only the affected should protest in a society is grossly simplistic and if I might say then naive. A society exists to protect all its members including the weaker sections. This has nothing to do with communism.

Social evils are fought by the society as a whole. Should men not fight for women rights, should straight people not stand up for LGBT rights, what about priveliged races against racism?

I think you need to think your argument through without getting needlessly worked up.

I'm invoking Godwin here but this quote is thoroughly apt.

When the Nazis came for the communists, I said nothing; I was, of course, no communist. When they locked up the Social Democrats, I said nothing; I was, of course, no Social Democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I said nothing; I was, of course, no trade unionist. When they came for me, there was no one left who could protest.

That is why probably most people on this thread are discussing agricultural methods, distribution and issues related economy.

Besides you always have a right to flag this.