Poverty and the Liberal-Statist Ethos

I remember watching Ruth Conniff interviewed a few years back and the interviewer asked her to explain what causes poverty. She replied, "A lack of money." Wow! That's like responding to the question of what causes obesity with "Being overweight." She defined poverty, but she certainly never answered what caused poverty.

Mark Winne concludes his op-ed in today's Washington Post with this:

We know hunger's cause -- poverty. We know its solution -- end poverty. Let this Thanksgiving remind us of that task.

Until you adequately explain what causes poverty you can never end it. Despite spending $10 to $12 trillion over the span of more than forty years fighting "the war on poverty" (under the leadership of eight Republican and Democratic presidents), poverty is actually worse. Or so we're led to believe, depending on how you define poverty.

Poverty is not caused by a lack of money; plenty of that has been thrown at it. Poverty is caused by one's inability to produce value to others. For whatever reason - those who live isolated from larger populations (hillbillies in the hollows of Kentucky and West Virginia, as well as isolationists the likes of Ted Kasczynski); those with mental and/or physical impairments; and those simply refusing to work - if you don't produce value to others you will have little income. And yes, there are coordination problems (there are too few jobs in a specific geographic area), but these should normally be temporary (entrepreneurs find it advantageous to open a business where the existing labor supply is plentiful and expected to be productive, or residents move to find jobs in areas where their skills are more in demand).

Liberals want to argue that poverty is largely a problem of mental illness (only about 20-25% of just the homeless population) or a coordination problems (markets do a lousy job of creating opportunities for the poor). Never is poverty viewed as self-imposed, and worse still, exacerbated by programs ostensibly seeking to eradicate it. (What incentive does the welfare bureaucracy have to eliminate their jobs?)

Watching The Boys of Baraaka was infuriating for just this reason. These kids have very little chance of leading productive lives, the efforts of the Baraka School notwithstanding. These kids still have to go back to their welfare-dependent dysfunctional families.

As Daniel Patrick Moynihan aptly noted,

"There is one unmistakable lesson in American history: A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future — that community asks for and gets chaos... And it is richly deserved." — "Family and Nation", 1965

Comments

[True_liberal]

There is more than simple fiscal poverty: How about behavioral poverty, educational poverty, cultural poverty? Very often they are interrelated, with fiscal poverty being the result rather than the cause.