This weekend, NPR interviewed Rep. Adrian Smith (R-NE) and asked him a gotcha question: “is every American entitled to eat?” The segment was about cutting food stamps, and NPR’s agenda was clear: show that Republicans don’t care if Americans starve, which is why they want to cut food stamps. Smith answered, “Well, they – nutrition, obviously, we know is very important. And I would hope that we can look to…It is essential. It is essential.”
This was not enough for the media, who declared Smith a dunderhead: after all, doesn’t everybody have the right to food?
Imagine a land where there was a right to food, housing, and healthcare. Imagine that such rights were enshrined in the Constitution of that land. That would mean that everyone in that land could live free without the burden of worry over such basic resources, right?
Wrong.
The South African Constitution guarantees a “right” to all of these commodities. In fact, the Constitution even creates a legal duty for the government to help secure such commodities. Yet there are some 11 million “food insecure” people in the country, including 1.5 million children with chronic malnutrition and growth stunting. Life expectancy in South Africa is 57 years. There are currently 12 million people in the country without adequate housing. The population of South Africa is approximately 55 million.
Declaring a commodity a right, it is obvious, does not make that commodity materialize – and certainly doesn’t make it materialize in the most efficient fashion. Markets make commodities materialize in the most efficient fashion. In the United States, nine out of ten Americans live above the global poverty standard; 96 percent of poor parents say their children were never hungry in the past year, according to scholars at the Heritage Foundation, and a “poor child is more likely to have cable TV, a computer, a wide-screen plasma TV, an Xbox, or a TiVo in the home than to be hungry.” Even the Department of Agriculture, the government agency responsible for administration of food stamps – upon which approximately 15 percent of Americans rely – admit that well under 6 percent of American households have to worry about decreased calorie consumption. Want to know what fills the gap for Americans? Feeding America, a private charity that receives $900 million per year in food donations, the vast bulk from private companies. In fact, there’s a strong link between food stamps and obesity.
So, is America worse off than South Africa despite our Constitution not mandating food as a right? Of course not. We’re significantly better off, because it turns out that using government to confiscate wealth from the very people who produce cheaper and more plentiful products ends up exacerbating scarcity. Declaring things “rights” feels good, but when those “rights” come with forced redistributionism, the things become less available.
So no, you don’t have a “right” from the government to food. You have the freedom from government to live a country where food is available in plenty, and where your fellow Americans help pick you up when you are down.