This news story actually ran four days ago, and we’ve been waiting for somebody to get the right interpretation of it. Nobody has, so we will. Remember the foofaraw over Gov. Jeff Landry’s decision not to have Louisiana participate in the COVID-era Summer EBT program? That’s a federal swag program giving free food to underprivileged kids, and it duplicates a number of other welfare programs purporting to feed the poor.
Landry said no, because getting Louisiana off the federal dole starts with not accepting federal money for things the state doesn’t need. And in turn, making public policy with an eye toward weaning perfectly able Louisianans off the government teat.
It’s parents’ responsibility to feed those kids, after all, and not just over the summertime.
Well, the Democrats and their media cheerleaders sure don’t like that idea. Landry was called every name in the book for canceling that program.
He didn’t care. He did it anyway. Which proves that he doesn’t care about the poor kids, you know. Or something.
Lo and behold, this happened…
Toups’ Meatery will be preparing Easter dinner for free for about 1,000 people, including some 600 children. Amanda Toups, co-owner of the Mid-City restaurant along with her husband, Isaac Toups, is grateful for the support that’s helping their restaurant do this. She’s also fighting mad about the reason they’re compelled to do it.
The Easter dinner is the first step in reviving a community feeding program that the restaurant created in the darkest days of the pandemic. It’s coming back now after Gov. Jeff Landry refused federal funds that would have provided poor families across the state with more money for groceries this summer.
Toups’ Meatery (824 N. Carrollton Ave., 504-252-4999) plans to resume its Family Meal feeding program for food-insecure families as soon as mid-May and provide free meals every day through the summer.
To gauge demand, the restaurant is providing a free Easter dinner ahead of the holiday for families in need. Restaurant staff will assemble boxed meals portioned for four people, with food that can be prepared at home.
The restaurant started asking people to sign up for these boxes last week and swiftly generated a list of 1,000. About 600 of those are children, said Amanda Toups.
“The people we’re talking to, it’s the working poor, and those kids are going to go hungry this summer because of this,” she said. “We have the infrastructure, we know how to do this. We have to do it.”
Well, how about that?
The stupid federal program Landry declined participation in gives families $40 per month per kid. Those kids in New Orleans who get in on the Toups’ Meatery plan are likely to eat a whole lot better than what $40 worth of processed junk food at some inner-city convenience store or bodega will offer to them.
And it’ll cost a whole lot less for everybody.
Obviously, Toups’ Meatery isn’t going to feed all the same people that federal welfare program would. But that’s the point – civic groups, businesses, churches and other examples of the civil society have always been the better solution to providing the social goods we need.
The media and the Democrats are busily fulfilling an old cultural Marxist objective by casting the provision of help to the poor as a government item. For the vast majority of human existence that wasn’t the case at all.
We’ll take this back to our old favorite communist intellectual, the Italian wrecker Antonio Gramsci (stuffing Gramsci in prison where he wasted away and died might have been the single most salutary thing Mussolini ever did). Gramsci’s central thesis was that you can’t build the communist utopia in a society unless it is stripped of its Christianity, its nationalism, or sense of national honor and solidarity, and its charity.
Advertisement
It was Gramsci, though he wasn’t necessarily the first, who called for the state to take over the provision of charitable benefits to the public. Communists built on that idea very quickly, and before you know it everybody across the West thought that providing for the poor was primarily a public-sector responsibility.
But the amount of waste inherent in that is staggering. Two thirds of the money supposedly spent to help the poor in the public sector is spent on building and maintaining a bureaucracy to administer that aid. Before long, you aren’t helping the poor, you’re running a jobs program for radical leftists who majored in social work at some woke college, and the poor get crumbs from the table.
But what they get is then calibrated to keep them coming, which is the opposite of what you’re supposed to be doing.
When Toups’ Meatery is feeding people this summer, there’s going to be at least a thought toward helping those customers get on their feet so they can be paying patrons. Maybe they’ll do a job fair. Maybe there will be volunteers helping with substance addiction or whatever. The point is, these guys are trying to help people, and when a society is made up of folks like the Toupses you really don’t need a huge government. And they’re hardly alone. This is but one example of a whole state which can come together to help each other if given a chance.
We’re ecstatic that NOLA.com publicized this, even if the piece was clearly intended as a shot at Landry. They actually helped to prove that the civil society works better than welfare.
Advertisement
Advertisement
