Jon sent me this link with the comment “Don’t know if the article is bloggable, but I liked the opening salvo”:
Natural disasters can cause enormous human misery, and require massive relief operations, to provide food and medical aid. To cause serious, long-term, grinding poverty, however, you need government involvement.
I have to agree with Jon, the opening to the post is quite good. After digging into some of the examples (the Ukraine under Stalin, Ethiopia in the 70s-80’s, and the US experiment with the “Great Society”), the first point at which an apolitical or undecided reader would say “Now, hold on there . . .”
Of course, the meaning of “poverty” has changed a lot over the years. The poor of the United States have a higher standard of living than the middle class in much of the rest of the world. They also have a higher standard of living than the filthy rich of a hundred years ago, or the crowned royalty of the centuries before that. This improved standard of living has very little to do with the government.
Poverty is something any civilized society wants to reduce and then eliminate, but it never seems to happen. The reason for that, aside from the vast amounts of time, effort, money, and resources being wasted through inefficiency, incompetence, and bureaucratic delay, is that the problem cannot be solved in most countries by definition. Most of the time when people use the term “poverty” they mean relative poverty. For most of the western world, absolute poverty affects a vanishingly small number of people (it’s not gone, but it’s lower than it’s ever been for any civilization in history). Relative poverty, however, is usually linked to a formula (like a set percentage of the average family income), which means that even as individuals’ and families’ financial situations improve, they will still be proportionally lower than the average (which will have improved over the same relative period of time). Statistically, no improvement will appear.
Popular belief, shaped by the official statistics, is that many people live in dire circumstances. Some do, but most who are technically below the poverty line are doing better than the average family from a few decades back. Proportionally, they’re still below the line, but from the standpoint of access to food, shelter, health care, and transportation, they’re better off.
If you are motivated by a humanitarian desire to help the poor – the ostensible mission of much of the modern liberal state – you must realize that nothing helps them more than the increased standard of living and economic opportunity brought about by the private sector.
However, the public perception is quite different: that it is the modern liberal state that has made these improvements against the active resistance of the private sector.
Here, in a nutshell, is the crucial difference between reality and the perception of most voters:
The value of every wasted government dollar must be judged by what free enterprise could have accomplished with it.
Most westerners think that General Motors, Chrysler, and AIG are the perfect exemplars of the free enterprise system, replacing the earlier capitalist icons of Enron and Worldcom.
When you say “capitalist”, most people hear a very different word than the one you’re using. “Free enterprise”, to far too many people, means vast corporations with dozens of legislators (or even legislatures) in their back pockets, using their tame politicians to obtain tax credits, advantageous labour codes, or “eminent domain-ing” their way through neighborhoods. The “private sector” decodes to “rich, secretive plutocrats”.
What you say and what they hear bear very little resemblance to one another. You’re not speaking the same language.
Then, the touching statement of hope:
If the six long months of this Administration serve any constructive purpose, it should be permanently dissolving the illusion that a small group of political appointees can predict what the economy will do, and control it to produce an improved outcome.
Most people, in times of stress, look for that man on the white horse. Most Americans still think they found one.
