Murray N. Rothbard, “The Homeless and the Hungry” (1987)

This file is a short single-author polemical chapter from Making Economic Sense. Its scope is the late-1980s public discovery of homelessness and hunger, but Rothbard treats these campaigns as symptoms of a broader welfare-state logic: deprivation is split into emotionally charged categories so that taxation, bureaucratic programs, and favored interests can expand under the language of compassion.

A vast propaganda effort has discovered the homeless and adjured us to do something about it—inevitably to pour millions of tax-dollars into the problem.

The essay’s opening move is satirical deflation. Rothbard presents “the homeless” and “the hungry” not primarily as empirical populations to be studied, but as political labels manufactured in sequence. His repeated questions mock what he sees as the endless production of pity-objects: once hunger has served its mobilizing purpose, homelessness appears; next may come other needs rebranded as discrete public emergencies.

And what of next year? Are we to be confronted with a new category, the “unclothed,” or perhaps the “ill-shod”?

The central conceptual move is reduction: food, housing, clothing, and transportation are not independent policy problems but manifestations of one condition—poverty, or “lack of money.” Rothbard’s point is not merely semantic. By collapsing the categories, he seeks to redirect attention from provision-in-kind to income, incentives, and causation.

If this were recognized, the problem would be simplified, the causal connections would be far clearer, and the number of afflicted millions greatly reduced: to poverty, period.

The essay then asks why this simplification is avoided. Rothbard’s answer is political economy: separate needs create separate constituencies. Housing programs benefit construction firms and building unions; food programs benefit agricultural and distribution interests; each category also enlarges the role of social workers and administrators. The rhetoric of compassion thus becomes, in his account, a mechanism for subsidy.

By stressing particular, specific problems, the inference comes that the taxpayer must quickly provide each of a number of goodies: food, housing, clothing, counseling, et al. in turn.

Rothbard also argues that specificity sentimentalizes policy. “Home,” “food,” and “Christmas dinner” are easier to dramatize than cash income, and therefore easier to use in campaigns for public spending. This is why, for him, the welfare debate prefers concrete images of need over the more abstract language of money.

Money does not have nearly the sentimental value of home and hearth and Christmas dinner.

The later paragraphs turn from rhetoric to incentives. If the problem is named as lack of money, Rothbard says, uncomfortable questions follow: why do people lack it, what happens when taxpayers are compelled to transfer it, and how do permanent benefits alter work effort, rehabilitation, and dependency? His language is deliberately stark, framing welfare as a moral and economic relation between producers and recipients.

Doesn't parasitism gravely weaken the incentives to work among both the producer and the parasite class?

The conclusion restates the libertarian thrust of the chapter: Rothbard favors private, limited charity over open-ended taxpayer obligation, and he sees categorical welfare policy as both intellectually obscuring and politically self-serving. The essay’s relevance lies in its compact display of his broader critique of the welfare state: public compassion becomes category-making; category-making becomes program-making; program-making becomes redistribution to bureaucracies and organized interests. Its final claim is that clarity begins by refusing the proliferation of sentimental labels.

Focusing on money, instead of searching for an ever-greater variety of people to be pitied and cosseted, would itself tend to clear the air and the mind and go a long way toward a solution of the problem.