[xamuel]

Unpopular alternative interpretation: the market is distorted by food stamps.

Imagine if the government announced it will pay for lightbulbs for workers whose workplaces don't provide lightbulbs. Inevitably, certain workplaces would stop providing lightbulbs. Would you really blame them?

This will sound unintuitive, but what if one of the requirements for welfare was that the recipient NOT work? Suddenly, companies would be forced to make jobs more desirable than welfare. In this age of automation, where it's less and less true that everyone ought to work, maybe this would be a better way to do welfare.

[adjkant]

> Suddenly, companies would be forced to make jobs more desirable than food stamps.

Revised:

Suddenly, companies would be forced to make jobs more desirable than food stamps without housing.

In order for the not working stipulation to work, the social safety net would actually have to be expanded to cover housing as well, since I would much rather have a job where I can have housing and ramen every single meal than slightly better food but homeless.

[xamuel]

Thanks, I edited my last paragraph to say "welfare" instead of "food stamps"

[ElBarto]

I don't really know how food stamps work as I'm not in the US.

But, having lived in a few different countries, I can tell you that if a loaf of bread costs 50c then left on its own the market will tend to pay only slightly more per day for unskilled work. People can live in a cardboard box but they have to eat.

[JoshuaDavid]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_trap

> The welfare trap (or unemployment trap or poverty trap in British English) theory asserts that taxation and welfare systems can jointly contribute to keep people on social insurance because the withdrawal of means-tested benefits that comes with entering low-paid work causes there to be no significant increase in total income. An individual sees that the opportunity cost of returning to work is too great for too little a financial return, and this can create a perverse incentive to not work.