Reminds me of a famous video[0] of the CEO of Nestle explaining that there exists an "extreme position" that water is human right that everyone should have access to.
That sounds outrageous at first, but it makes sense if you think about it. Are there any mainstream political parties in the west that thinks food (arguably as essential as water) should be a human right (ie. the government provides it to anyone who wants it unconditionally)?
I cannot find any recent reports of anyone starving to death in New Zealand, for example. It would be national news if it happened and (rightfully) generate a lot of hand-wringing and introspection.
Just that the implementation gets complicated and politicised for various reasons.
Distributing food nationally is hard (consider cold chain, warehousing, distribution, managing expiry, dietary requirements, demand), so most welfare states distribute money instead and rely on the private sector to provide the infrastructure.
Giving people "free money" has it's own problems. It gets political. People moralise. Beneficiaries never have enough, they might not spend on food, and they often have worse food choices available to them.
Since the government distribute money and not food directly, they have to add strings to stop people "rorting the system". Those conditions can be a problem.
Food banks and free kitchens have to fill in the gaps where people inevitably fall through the beauracratic cracks in the welfare system.
People do go hungry when the system fails.
But the public view (multi-partisan) in well-off welfare states is that of course people have a right to live, and access to food is a part of that. It would be political suicide to suggest that anyone should be left to starve.
Is it guaranteed? ie. do you have to be disabled/retired to qualify, or is it open to everyone?
>Distributing food nationally is hard (consider cold chain, warehousing, distribution, managing expiry, dietary requirements, demand), so most welfare states distribute money instead and rely on the private sector to provide the infrastructure.
But then the food isn't guaranteed, is it? You're only really guaranteed money, which could be converted to food. Consider a hypothetical: let's say a country has a poll tax of $100 per person, then offsets it by giving everyone $100, is it fair to say that you have the right to vote in that country? Feel free to replace "right to vote" with other rights, such as freedom of speech, right to not self-incriminate, protection against unreasonable search and seizure.
You are correct but I feel perhaps missing the woods for the trees.
Every person's right tends to be someone else's obligation.
When obligations are met by state resources, there is then a responsibility to distribute fairly (because the resources come from everyone), this introduces hoops or conditions.
That doesn't mean that the right, or the obligation doesn't exist.
The need to ensure everyone gets food is absolutely part of the public understanding and discourse.
You can of course pick holes all day because yes, administering public welfare programs is hard.
Conditions where the state is obliged to do or provide something tend to be more complicated in practice than when the state is obliged NOT to do something (search and seizure, freedom of speech etc).
This just seems like the classic confusion between positive and negative rights. Many people view "rights" as only being negative rights - IE someone else/the government can't do X to you. Any talk of positive rights devolves into slavery, because at some point someone needs to do work to provide you with your positive rights, and what if they just don't want to?
That is - if water is a human right, is providing water to people required for that right? Who is on the hook for that? Who pays for the pipes, the drilling, all of the infrastructure and operations to extract and transport it? If the answer is the government, then that is fair enough since it is just really a collective of every member of society mutually providing each other their rights. But is Nestle denying someone their human rights if they don't give them a free glass of water?
How much water is a human right? We know what happens if you don't set a per-person limit to, at least, how much is free. But that's rationing (?) and evil, apparently.
I'm not entirely sure of the terminology, and I suspect there's a deliberate effort to ensure the idea of both government and free market supplies in tandem stays out of popular consciousness. See "death panels" for healthcare... if you can't compete with government, perhaps your business just isn't very good.
Alternatively, Universal Basic Income. Then, assuming your goal is to ensure people aren't dying due to lacking basics, you've only got one parameter to tune and one to monitor.