Planned Parenthood and Ukraine: There Is No Such Thing As Non-Lethal Aid
After the recent release of undercover videos featuring a executive of Planned Parenthood talking about harvesting organs from aborted fetuses, conservatives have renewed calls to strip the organization of taxpayer funding. Liberals have countered that taxpayer dollars are not allocated toward funding abortions.
Ukraine is also back in the news, as another round of aid from the US government is being sent there to help Ukrainian forces resist Russian encroachments into their territory. This aid is championed as “non-lethal aid,” partly to avoid increased tensions with Vladimir Putin and partly because lethal aid requires a full presidential finding and a briefing to congressional leaders.
At first glance, these events may appear to be completely unrelated. But there is an economic fallacy being advanced by both sides of mainstream politics which appears in both cases. Any organization has a total operating cost, which we may call C, and a total income, which we may call I. At issue here is the income from a particular source, which we may call S. Regardless of how S itself is allocated, the very presence of S means that the remainder of the total income, equal to I minus S, will be allocated differently than it would be in the absence of S. In other words, taxpayer funding for a non-controversial portion of an organization means that the organization can spend less of its non-taxpayer funding on that portion, thereby freeing up resources that the organization can now use for a more controversial activity.
In the case of Ukrainian defense forces, money that they do not have to spend on transport vehicles, food, training, medicine, etc. is money that they are now able to spend on armaments. In the case of Planned Parenthood, money that they do not have to spend on STD testing, contraception, cancer screening, etc. is money that they are now able to spend on abortion. Note that fungibility does not come into play, as this effect will occur regardless of whether resources are able to be redirected by the organization once the resources are in the organization’s possession. (Planned Parenthood is disallowed by law from doing this and would have a hard time getting away with it, but Ukrainian defense forces could do this rather easily with black market arms dealers.) The practical upshot is that there is no such thing as non-lethal aid to an organization that conducts lethal operations, and that economic and political commentators should take this into account.
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