On Wednesday, the Republican Study Committee, of which some three-quarters of House Republicans are members, released its 2025 budget entitled “Fiscal Sanity to Save America.” Tucked away in the 180-page austerity manifesto is a block of text concerned with a crucial priority for the party: ensuring children aren’t being fed at school.
Eight states offer all students, regardless of household income, free school meals — and more states are trending in the direction. But while people across the country move to feed school children, congressional Republicans are looking to stop the cause.
Republicans however view the universal version of the policy as fundamentally wasteful. The “school lunch and breakfast programs are subject to widespread fraud and abuse,” reads the RSC’s proposed yearly budget, quoting a report from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. The Cato report blames people who may “improperly” redeem free lunches, even if they are technically above the income cutoff levels. The “fraudulence” the think tank is concerned about is not some shadowy cabals of teachers systematically stealing from the school lunch money pot: It’s students who are being fed, even if their parents technically make too much to benefit from the program. In other words, Republicans’ opposition to the program is based on the assumption that people being “wrongly” fed at school is tantamount to abusive waste.
Not to be confused as completely frugal, the Republicans call to finish construction of border wall projects proposed by former President Donald Trump. And not to be confused as focused, the budget includes the word “woke” 37 times.
As a libertarian, the Cato Institute has a lot of nonsense, and this is one of them.
Here’s my take: if we require students to be in school during certain hours, the school should be obligated to provide everything they need, from supplies to meals. It’s the same idea as with prisons, if we, as a society, decide that certain individuals need to be locked up, they should have their needs provided for. Same thing if we detain someone at custom for hours or whatever.
On the flipside, there should be a way to opt-out for parents who don’t want the school-provided lunches. There are plenty of parents who think school lunches are unhealthy, so perhaps there’s an argument that they should get some kind of cash card to help pay for home-provided meals that’s equivalent to the cost to make the school lunch (like $2-3/lunch). That sounds kind of complicated, so I obviously wouldn’t lead with that, but maybe it’ll resolve some people’s concerns.
If we want to save money (and I think we should), we should shut down a few of our foreign military bases and end federal student loan programs. Those are a lot more expensive than school lunches…
IMO guaranteed child welfare (including universal lunch) is 100% consistent with any major political idealogy that is internally consistent.
Libertarianism? The whole basis is the personal choice, autonomy, and the ethics of consent. Children fundamentally cannot consent. They still, however, individual agents. They simply are in a state where social order defines their outcome. As society, we must then take this to maximize their outcomes and ultimately their personal liberty - when they reach an age where they can operate with it.
Therefore, we have to choose between depriving others of a relatively small resource, or depriving children of a major resource: the nature of their ability to participate with full autonomy and personal liberty.
The choice, in my opinion, is very clear.
Exactly.
I’m a fan of libertarian paternalism, which is all about society choosing good defaults because it’s clear individuals often make poor choices (especially when uninformed). Individuals who can consent or who have the legal responsibility over someone else should be able to choose something different. However, you should also be legally liable for any changes to defaults you make on behalf of someone else (e.g. choosing to forego school lunches for your child and not providing a nutritious meal is theft and abuse).
This is an issue of rights. Until kids can consent, they have a right to proper nutrition and whatnot because they didn’t consent to being brought into the world.
So yeah, the choices are between everyone suffering a minor inconvenience (slightly higher taxes) to guarantee the rights of children, or children suffer. It’s absolutely clear, the minor inconvenience wins.