> Since you are such a critical thinker, care to back that assertion up with any evidence or statistical data? Clearly you've done your research since you are a HN member but for some reason I don't see any links in your post.

Okay, I'll jump in and play. First, you could be a little more civil if you want to stimulate discussion - something like, "Since you are such a critical thinker... but for some reason I don't see any links in your post" is just unnecessary, makes him less likely to respond civilly. You can just ask him why he thanks that way and he'll be more likely to respond. But I'll jump in and give my take if the OP doesn't mind. Here's what he originally said:

> "Making food a right in the US would be a disaster."

Now, after that, you asked for "evidence or statistical data" - the problem is, you can't run controlled experiments on government programs because every nation has different conditions and you can't run and re-run experiments. So, judging whether a new policy would be good governance or bad governance is largely based on looking at historically similar examples and extrapolating that you're likely to get a similar result.

Now, "disaster" is subjective. What's a disaster? You need a criteria for disaster. One criteria could be someone's views of how a government should run, which is somewhat opinion. If he believes larger government would be a disaster, full stop, then there's no discussion - he can say, "This will make the government larger, and that's bad full stop in my eyes." But that's a boring argument, there's really nothing to discuss there, it's just his opinion.

There's much, much more interesting standards to measure disasters by. One would be - "Does the policy fulfill its own stated objectives?"

I think we can agree that if a policy costs money, uses people's time, takes energy away from other areas of concern, and then doesn't even fulfill its own stated objectives, then you can call it a disaster. Actually, you could go further - you could call it an unmitigated disaster - completely and entirely bad.

Now, for evidence and statistical data, I would refer you to the United States' recent track record over the last... well, over the last whatever timeframe you think is relevant. USG's domestic programs are just ridiculously incompetent as of late. Now, if you diagree with this and are seriously open to changing your mind, I might go put in 30 minutes to find statistics and make a case for you. I say if you're open to changing your mind because many people aren't, and I've only been sleeping five hours/night lately while doing crazy amounts of work - and Hacker News is entertaining, but digging through USG reports is less so at my current energy levels.

But if we wanted to go through stats, the first one I'd look for is what percent of funding in government programs goes to admin and what goes to benefits. I forget the number at the federal level, but I remember it's fucking brutal. In California, 80% of benefits and entitlements go to paying administrators and civil servants, not to the people receiving the benefits. On the federal level it's slightly better, but still more than half. IIRC, the complete amounts spent on welfare, benefits, etc, etc came up to something like $20,000 PER PERSON in the USA, and obviously that money ain't getting to the poor people.

Next I'd look at stated objectives on programs and see if there's any measurable gains. Now, if you're really inclined, you can find a ton of killer stats easy to find on USG actively breaking things they were trying to solve. War on Drugs is the easiest with increasing drug and violence rates. Then there's the Clinton-era reduce-executive-compensation law that prompted the shift to stock options and increased executive compensation. Then there's FDA holding off beta blockers from the market 10,000 people per year were dying that they could've saved.

But maybe the two most similar examples I can think of are the food subsidies and the Nixon era nutrition campaigns. The food subsidies in corn wanted to make it affordable for everyone - instead, it led to huge rises of corn syrup in everything and Americans got increasingly more sick, diabetic, and obese as a result.

Second, I'd point at the Nixon recommended daily guidelines that pushed towards simple carbs and away from healthy fats. Which is totally backwards, and also led to declining USA nutrition. Actually, you can look up the talk "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" for all sorts of stats and analysis on how and why that happened and there's lots of stats in there. All sorts of discussion and stats here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006980

Man, USG quite sucks. What they touch tends to break far more often than not. There's many, many examples of this, and very few examples of significant successes. Especially in terms of making Americans healthier and eating well.