By Thomas Sowell
Wednesday, July 03, 2013
The political left has long claimed the role of protector
of "the poor." It is one of their central moral claims to political
power. But how valid is this claim?
Leaders of the left in many countries have promoted
policies that enable the poor to be more comfortable in their poverty. But that
raises a fundamental question: Just who are "the poor"?
If you use a bureaucratic definition of poverty as
including all individuals or families below some arbitrary income level set by
the government, then it is easy to get the kinds of statistics about "the
poor" that are thrown around in the media and in politics. But do those
statistics have much relationship to reality?
"Poverty" once had some concrete meaning -- not
enough food to eat or not enough clothing or shelter to protect you from the
elements, for example. Today it means whatever the government bureaucrats, who
set up the statistical criteria, choose to make it mean. And they have every
incentive to define poverty in a way that includes enough people to justify
welfare state spending.
Most Americans with incomes below the official poverty
level have air-conditioning, television, own a motor vehicle and, far from
being hungry, are more likely than other Americans to be overweight. But an
arbitrary definition of words and numbers gives them access to the taxpayers'
money.
This kind of "poverty" can easily become a way
of life, not only for today's "poor," but for their children and
grandchildren.
Even when they have the potential to become productive
members of society, the loss of welfare state benefits if they try to do so is
an implicit "tax" on what they would earn that often exceeds the
explicit tax on a millionaire.
If increasing your income by $10,000 would cause you to
lose $15,000 in government benefits, would you do it?
In short, the political left's welfare state makes
poverty more comfortable, while penalizing attempts to rise out of poverty.
Unless we believe that some people are predestined to be poor, the left's
agenda is a disservice to them, as well as to society. The vast amounts of
money wasted are by no means the worst of it.
If our goal is for people to get out of poverty, there
are plenty of heartening examples of individuals and groups who have done that,
in countries around the world.
Millions of "overseas Chinese" emigrated from
China destitute and often illiterate in centuries past. Whether they settled in
Southeast Asian countries or in the United States, they began at the bottom,
taking hard, dirty and sometimes dangerous jobs.
Even though the overseas Chinese were usually paid
little, they saved out of that little, and many eventually opened tiny
businesses. By working long hours and living frugally, they were able to turn
tiny businesses into larger and more prosperous businesses. Then they saw to it
that their children got the education that they themselves often lacked.
By 1994, the 57 million overseas Chinese created as much
wealth as the one billion people living in China.
Variations on this social pattern can be found in the
histories of Jewish, Armenian, Lebanese and other emigrants who settled in many
countries around the world -- initially poor, but rising over the generations
to prosperity. Seldom did they rely on government, and they usually avoided
politics on their way up.
Such groups concentrated on developing what economists
call "human capital" -- their skills, talents, knowledge and self
discipline. Their success has usually been based on that one four-letter word
that the left seldom uses in polite society: "work."
There are individuals in virtually every group who follow
similar patterns to rise from poverty to prosperity. But how many such
individuals there are in different groups makes a big difference for the
prosperity or poverty of the groups as a whole.
The agenda of the left -- promoting envy and a sense of
grievance, while making loud demands for "rights" to what other
people have produced -- is a pattern that has been widespread in countries
around the world.
This agenda has seldom lifted the poor out of poverty.
But it has lifted the left to positions of power and self-aggrandizement, while
they promote policies with socially counterproductive results.
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