Comments on: Supersize Me

By: slacktivist

slacktivist — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 00:06:58 +0000

Peter says: “Nearly all poverty is caused by social liberalism.” Which explains the complete lack of poverty in the Middle Ages. Ah, the Golden Years before social liberalism arose to create the hardship of poverty.

By: Hannah

Hannah — Mon, 10 Jan 2005 20:11:26 +0000

I’m from Singapore (living in Toronto now). Hawker centers are great!

By: Hannah

Hannah — Mon, 10 Jan 2005 20:10:51 +0000

I’m from Singapore (living in Toronto now). Hawker centers are great!

By: HP

HP — Mon, 10 Jan 2005 19:40:32 +0000

So, Brett, just out of curiousity: Have you grappled intellectually with an issue and come to a conclusion that didn’t automatically justify and reinforce your own base instincts?

By: mw

mw — Mon, 10 Jan 2005 14:55:31 +0000

I posted a comment on the Asymmetric Info site, so I might as well speak up here as well. The point is not that poverty is not a problem in the US, it is that hunger is not a problem. It is true that food has gotten incredibly cheap in recent decades, and that the poor do tend to have higher levels of obesity than the well off. That is not to say that the lives of the poor are easy—they are not—but hunger isn’t the problem any longer. Housing, transportation, and medical care are now of much greater concern than food (or clothing). Most of the poor have enough to eat, have warm clothing, and even have cell-phones, cable TV, DVD players, etc. but STILL have difficult lives. It is intellectually dishonest and ultimately self-defeating to try to use cooked statistics to portray hunger as a main area of concern for the poor simply because hunger is a more effective marketing tool for generating sympathy. The risk is that people increasingly know that the ‘hunger in America’ statistics that get trotted out routinely are bogus (just as John Edwards fictional little girl who was shivering because her family couldn’t afford a coat was bogus). Advocates for the poor in America need to learn to focus on the other issues that are the real problems or they’re going to lose their credibility.

By: abb1

abb1 — Mon, 10 Jan 2005 12:03:41 +0000

Brett, if you want to be a person who believes in freedom all the way, then you have to reject the whole justice system totally. If I am physically stronger than you, why shouldn’t I be able to take your stuff or, say, to rape your wife? You are limiting my freedom, forcing me to refrain from doing something I want; you’re enslaving me. Well, you’re no anarchist and I am sure you’ll agree that some degree of coercion is necessary for a society to exist; I am sure you’ll agree that actual physical theft has to be banned, not to mention rape and murder. Right? But then you choose to draw an arbitrary line and say: you should be able to steal from me if you’re not using your physical power but only the power of your wealth, the property you managed to accumulate. See, it’s not really like you’re for freedom and the liberals are against it, it’s just a matter of degree, it’s just a question of where we choose to draw that line, that’s all.

By: Brett Bellmore

Brett Bellmore — Mon, 10 Jan 2005 11:00:06 +0000

“Don’t ever let me catch you calling yourself a “Christian”, Brett.” In as much as I’m an atheist, you need have no worries on that score. ;) Firebug, YOU just don’t get it: A point of commonality between both liberals and conservatives, is that you both think it ought to be illegal to “sin”; (You just disagree about what constitutes “sinning”.) Theoretically, though not in practice, you both think that there’s some optimal behavior for each and every person, which, to the extent it can be identified, it’s proper to FORCE them to engage in. Fundamentally, neither of you believes in freedom. You just disagree about what orders ought to be issued to the slaves.

By: Firebug

Firebug — Mon, 10 Jan 2005 09:29:32 +0000

You libertarian morons don’t get it. You really don’t. I believed it once, some time ago, but I grew out of it when I saw the real world. What’s your excuse? Social welfare exists, ultimately, because the poor generally don’t consider ‘Let them eat cake’ to be an acceptable argument. As much as I would like to see Brett and Peter put under the guillotine, I would prefer to avoid the possibility that in such an event I might wind up there too. In the final analysis, social safety nets don’t exist because of kindness toward the poor, although to many of us this is an important motivation. Social safety nets exist because it is dangerous to have a significant group of individuals who feel that they have no stake in society and the existing order. If there is a significant underclass with no real hope (and history shows that this is an inevitable consequence of laissez-faire capitalism, and most crony ‘capitalist’ systems) this creates a situation that is conducive to violent revolution. Consider the history of Latin America in the 20th century compared to the US and Western Europe.

By: Badtux

Badtux — Mon, 10 Jan 2005 05:49:30 +0000

Re: Housing choice in the United States: Not only does living in a decent apartment in a decent area in the United States require a deposit, but it also requires a good credit record. Poor people don’t have a credit record. Thus they’re not allowed to live in a decent apartment in a decent area. Rather, they’re generally only allowed to live in apartments that let by the week, which typically are either old hotels that let rooms by the week, or in very depressed areas of town. Neither is a very wholesome place for a family with children to live. And they’re often just as expensive as the good apartments in the good parts of town. $500/month for a room in a slum motel in Phoenix can get you a decent 2 bedroom apartment in Phoenix (in an okay, though not great, neighborhood). IF you have a credit record, plus the deposit (typically 2 month’s rent for the lower-priced apartments). Now, I was lucky in that I was offered a credit card in college, accepted it, and managed it wisely, thus had a credit record once I graduated college. I was also lucky in that I entered college before Reagan gutted student aid and replaced it with student loans where you can go to jail if you don’t make enough money to pay the loan back (no, that’s not a joke—look at the 1998 revisions to the student loan act). Thus as someone from a poor family I got a chance at college (albeit a state university, not a “name” university) and ended up with a managable student loan burden (student aid paid tuition, the loans paid for books, I worked sometimes three part-time jobs for my living expenses). That route, alas, is no longer possible for the poor in post-Reagan America… and blaming the poor for this is as ludicrous as blaming the Jews for the problems of Germany in 1932. – Badtux the formerly poor Penguin

By: John Emerson

John Emerson — Mon, 10 Jan 2005 05:29:43 +0000

Brett, part of the argument here is that the poor are poor because they make mistakes and are stupid, and more generally that they deserve it. Supposing that this is true of the adults, how can it be true of their children? That was my point. Your response was, of course, about YOU.

By: Thlayli

Thlayli — Mon, 10 Jan 2005 05:13:54 +0000

It might be nice of me to help them out of their jam, but I’m in no way obligated to do it. Shorter Bellmore: "Am I my brother's keeper?" Don't ever let me catch you calling yourself a "Christian", Brett.

By: sara

sara — Mon, 10 Jan 2005 01:31:03 +0000

The social ignorance of these people is amazing: don’t they know that McDonald’s is the opiate of the masses, hence they as pro-business should be for it,. People who are actually hungry (over the long term and as a class) tend to have socialist revolutions, as twentieth-century history shows. I propose the title for Ms. Galt’s commenters and their like, here and at Asymmetrical Information: Galtonians. This is an allusion to Francis Galton, the inventor of eugenics. The new biography Extreme Measures shows what a quack he was. Of course, they are also Norquistians: the level of irrationality (masquerading as hyper-rationality) on this subject of food and welfare for the poor reminds me of the story (apocryphal?) that Grover Norquist’s father used to take his small son’s ice cream cone away and eat it, telling him that each bite represented a sector of government allocation. Sorry, boy, the worthless welfare queens got all your ice cream. The Galtonians and Norquistians certainly aren’t Christians or any other religion that teaches tolerance and charity. Reading all that at Asymmetrical Information last night made me ashamed of belonging to the same species as they.

By: Matt McGrattan

Matt McGrattan — Mon, 10 Jan 2005 01:11:41 +0000

Kevin, lots of good points. One good thing about the UK is that some of the measures enacted by the Labour government of the past 7 years have gone some way to offering people a way out of the poverty trap you describe. I’m not the biggest fan of New Labour but moves like the Working Family Tax Credit really have made it substantially easier—by essentially ensuring a minimum level of income which means that almost everyone is certain to be better off working than they are claiming benefits—for people to escape from the poverty trap. Things are far from perfect but I can think of a number of people I personally know—mostly single mothers—who have managed to return to work or retrain and who had found that impossible in the past because any option they took that involved going off benefits and into low-paid work inevitably left them worse off. Unfortunately, there is still a long way to go and the lack of good quality affordable housing and childcare in many parts of the country still make life a lot more difficult for those on low-incomes than they really ought to be.

By: Kevin Hayden

Kevin Hayden — Mon, 10 Jan 2005 00:22:11 +0000

At ‘povertypoint’ can feel like at gunpoint, Brett. It can hamper one’s capacity for best choices, especially since survival while poor, to a degree, regularly compels obedience, or else.

By: Brett Bellmore

Brett Bellmore — Sun, 09 Jan 2005 23:38:07 +0000

Kevin, there’s an obvious difference between moral obligation, and the brute fact that I’ll be shot if I don’t obey some people’s orders. And one of those differences is that I don’t have to pretend to accept as right and noble the motives that drive those orders. In other words, you’ve got my obediance, albiet at gunpoint. No NOT expect to lie about liking it.