Yes, We Do Need Bloated Bureaucracy

I watched an exchange on Twitter, which I thought was educational.

Tony Arnett, the author of Cathonomics: How Catholic Tradition Can Create a More Just Economy, tweeted that it would be better to tax Jeff Bezos’s vast wealth than to just trust him to donate a hundred billion to charity. The Catholic apologist Trent Horn responded with a tweet that had me scratching my head: “Tony, would you agree money should be spent on the poor in the most efficient way possible? If so, then would you agree that government is never the most efficient way to help and is often the least efficient? Catholic should endorse effective altruism over bloated bureaucracies.”

This is the problem with Catholic apologists in general: they think they can make pronouncements on things they know nothing about.

Trent Horn has obviously never had to use a government safety net in his life, and he’s never had to weigh the efficiency of a government safety net versus a private charity. I have. I can tell you a thing or two about them. I’ve never had much patience for apologetics, but I can tell you all about the government safety net.

When I was too poor to feed my family, I got on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as “food stamps” even though they haven’t used actual food stamps for decades. I had to fill out a lot of irritating paperwork to get enrolled in that program. I had to sit through an interview at eight in the morning. I had to re-interview and fill out more forms every year. It wasn’t easy. It was scary and difficult. But once I’d jumped through the right hoops, I got a debit card in the mail which could be used on food at every major grocery store in the country, and that card was automatically refilled with about $500 on the same day every month. As my income went up and I reported the changes, the SNAP benefits were cut from 500 to 300 and then to 250 a month, and then they were discontinued entirely. But I always knew how much I was going to get and on what day. I knew at what income level the benefits would disappear. The SNAP program was a predictable, reliable, regularly lifesaving bloated bureaucracy.

Catholic Charities at the diocesan office downtown, which is a very good charity you should support, had some cans to give away, and they had some information on how to get to the food pantry to get some more cans. The Friendship Room, which is a Catholic Worker Hospitality House and a wonderful charity you should support, brought us a couple of chickens and a gift card. They eventually installed an outdoor free pantry where you could walk or drive up and get some food, and that’s great. More people should do the lifesaving work that they do. But they didn’t have five hundred dollars a month to load on a debit card for every poor family in town. They couldn’t possibly.

When we were in desperation because the heat and electricity were going to get cut off, the Community Action Council downtown managed to get us signed up for the Home Energy Assistance Program (HEAP). HEAP is a government program which cut down our light and gas bills to ten dollars a month each. We had to fill out forms for that. We had to wait for an hour in an annoying stuffy basement office with a waiting room TV that showed nothing but soap operas. It was irritating and scary. Every year something would go wrong to make us miss our appointment and I’d have a panic attack. As our income went up, we stopped qualifying for the program, and I was actually thankful it was over. But for a few years, HEAP was the only reason we could keep the lights on and keep warm.

Once, when the water to our apartment was about to get shut off, the government employees at the Department of Job and Family Services got us a special one-time payment to the city to bring the shutoff amount to zero, as long as we paid the fifty dollar trash pickup fee we also owed the city. I didn’t have fifty dollars. I didn’t even have one dollar. I sprinted to the Catholic Charities office with tears rolling down my face and got there half an hour before they shut down. I was their last client of the day. They paid the fifty dollars for me with a grant. They could not pay the hundreds we owed to the water department. They certainly couldn’t pay for our gas and electric every month like HEAP did. They didn’t have that kind of money. Only the government did.  And as for The Friendship Room, they did the very important and necessary work of opening up a warming center with cots for the homeless to sleep on during the winter freeze. During the summer, they saved more lives by passing out popsicles, water and Gatorade to the homeless. They saved lives. But they didn’t have the resources to keep the power and gas on in poor homes all over town.

The State of Ohio provided $300 clothing vouchers for kids going back to school, which were agonizing to sign up for and sometimes you had to wait in line for hours. I don’t think we ever managed to get one. Some of my poor friends did. If you could get a voucher, you could take it to Walmart or Old Navy or just about anywhere and get school clothes for the whole year. At Catholic Charities and at the Friendship Room, you could rifle through piles of used clothes and hope someone had donated your size. This was a real gamble if you had a growing child.

Trent is right about one thing: the government has plenty of bloated bureaucracies that are a pain to have to deal with. But what he doesn’t realize is that those bloated bureaucracies are necessary, and they work.

I’m not saying they shouldn’t be reformed to make them easier to access; they ought to be. They are a mess. But we can’t do without them.

Altruism and private charity can’t do what the government can do. They don’t have the resources. They don’t have the money. They don’t have the bureaucracy– the thousands of employees pushing paper all day to make the program run even if it doesn’t run smoothly. In a better world, they would. But we don’t live in a better world. We live in this world, and in this world, government programs are necessary.  In this world, the poor can’t get by without government programs, plus private charities and mutual aid from their community. All of those are necessary.  We should all be helping our neighbors and supporting the charities that help. But we also need taxpayer-funded bureaucracy.

If you want to make a different world, be my guest. But you won’t get there through pulling the plug on the government safety net we already have.

Catholic apologists like Trent live in the world of theory. They like to make pronouncements about an imaginary world where things are black and white, and things that aren’t what they should be can be overturned in favor of a perfect system. We live in the real world, where we’re stuck working with the system we have.

The system we have needs a bloated bureaucracy.

That’s just the way it is right now.