Charles Trevelyan, the British official who oversaw famine relief, was so intent on rooting out the “cankerworm of government dependency” from the character of hungry peasants that he ordered relief food be sold rather than given away. That decision was the single-most devastating one, increasing famine deaths multifold—and unnecessarily.

The words Paul Ryan used, last March, to introduce the Republican budget that eviscerates Medicare and other “entitlements,” had, to my famine-trained ears, an eerie echo to Trevelyan’s. Ryan declared that America was at an “insidious moral tipping point,” adding that “the president is accelerating this.” He went on to say that a capacious safety net “lulls able-bodied people”—I paused at the slightly archaic turn of phrase—“into lives of complacency and dependency, which drains them of their very will and incentive to make the most of their lives. It’s demeaning.” Far better for the American character for the poor to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” Ah, yes, those bootstraps again…

Back in mid-19th century Parliament, Trevelyan wasn’t alone, just as Ryan and Romney aren’t now. Sir Randoph Routh, the head of the Irish Relief Commission, was such a fervent crusader for the free market that not even mass starvation and mass death failed to shake his belief.