From New Mexico, to Colorado, to Maryland, my google news alert for school lunch flooded my inbox with stories this week about various schools across the country that have enacted policies that disqualify students from receiving school lunch if their accounts are unpaid.  As you would expect, most of these articles are mostly about the public outcry that these schools would even consider to stop giving lunches away that haven’t been paid for.  Of course, the schools are still giving these kids a cheese sandwich and a drink, but this isn’t fair.  These poor students are only getting a sandwich where their peers get a nice hot meal.

Some of the schools in these reports are in the hole $140,000 because of delinquent school lunch accounts.  Yet there is no outcry against the thievery of the parents who are sending their children to school with no lunch and stiffing the school with the bill.  If you ask me, I think that parents who steal school lunches should be thrown in jail for stealing instead of whining about their children being given a free lunch.

Since the national school lunch program is funded by import tariffs, you can expect this program to completely collapse over the next year.  With the economic recession decreasing demand for imported crap from China and the 60% drop in the price of oil, I would imagine that the available funds for the school lunch program will dwindle.  Of course this is coming at a time when record numbers of people are signing up for the free and reduced lunches.

Ultimately this all goes to show that even if your entitlement program has the best intentions, it is doomed to failure because there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.  Even though millions of children receive free lunch every day, the cost of these lunches are built into everything you purchase that wasn’t manufactured or produced in America.  However, when you put economic costs aside, we also find that entitlement programs lead to an even larger moral cost.  The entitlement culture created by the school lunch program has created a moral environment where stealing is tolerated if not encouraged.  

I could solve this problem pretty quickly.  I know from experience that a private school lunch service can offer better food at a lower price than the government and still make a decent profit.  I say increase the child tax credit and completely privatize school lunches and get the federal government out of the picture.  

Read Tanstaafl and The Parable of the Broken Window if you want to learn more about how the unintended consequences of well-intentioned entitlement programs are far more dangerous then the problems that they solve.