The poor complain …

I don’t know about other countries, but in the US, where the very poor can have television, air conditioning, housing, cars, DVDs, and cell phones, I think the system really does bring rewards to all. They just don’t get all the rewards you think they should get. But the system really does make everyone better off than many other systems.

They say the best things in life are free,
but they’ll kill you on the accessories.

where the very poor can have television, air conditioning, housing, cars, DVDs, and cell phones, I think the system really does bring rewards to all.

…and where the very poor also have access to levels of debt that are unconceivable in the developing world. Or, if you’re very very poor, access to those wonderful ‘check-cashing’ facilities, pawnbrokers, payday loan sharks et al. As well as the wonders of ‘at-will’ employment, the crap game that is healthcare, a regressive tax system, a government that advises bosses on how to stop paying overtime, and so on.

(And one should note that there are plenty of areas of the US where the very poor actually don’t have access to such consumer durables. But most people don’t really like driving through those parts of town, because that’s where the scary black and brown folks live.)

It’s Heritage Foundation thinking. It’s WSJ op-ed thinking. It’s ‘lucky duckies’ thinking. And that’s because it actually intimates at some vindictive sense that the poor, with their TVs and rusty old cars, are getting more than they deserve. And while you may claim that that isn’t your intention, that’s what it sounds like. And it’s the shallowest, most facile indicator of poverty possible.

If you get to travel, Sebastian, you’ll probably be intrigued by how, in some countries, people who are very very poor seem to be relatively happy, compared to those who are poor in the land of the ‘pursuit of happiness’.

It’s a question of a poverty of opportunity: something that’s insidious, and can’t be measured by battery-operated trinkets. But can be measured by people who juggle a day job and a night job, with little hope of advancing through the system. By jobs that require people to piss in jars.

I read Nickel and Dimed a couple of months ago, and what struck me most wasn’t Barbara Ehrenreich’s account of her working conditions (we’ve all had shitty jobs) but the way she described the fatigue that came from the combination of long working hours and only having the time/money to eat crappy food. And that was from living alone, so you can imagine what it’s like for parents.

But, all shall have shiny prizes, apparently.

The natural state of a human being in the world is poverty.

I don’t see that anything much follows from this. The natural state of a human being the world is in a small hunter-gather band somewhere on the African Savannah.

It continues to surprise me how people who would likely have no time for arguments from nature when it comes to things like tolerating homosexuals, using GMO crops, and performing organ transplants, nevertheless reach for the state of nature when it comes to social relations. Usually nature is brought up in connection with gender roles. Here it’s used in service of the old argument that “the poor are always with us.” I’m not convinced.

Kieran you missed my point, so I’ll assume I wasn’t clear. The natural state of being is poverty. That isn’t good. A capitalist society is designed to lift the whole society out of hunger, want of shelter, want of clothing. It actually does that for almost every single person in the society–including those who you label ‘poor’. In the US the poor have easy access to many things that the middle class of other countries would have to work very hard to get. It is possible for our poor to have such access because of the system that we have. It is possible for our poor to be non-impoverished because of the system that we have. If relative poverty bothers you, I am thrilled that you want to do things about it. If you want to help people learn to work at better jobs, I’m with you. If you want to help people learn to avoid habits (like having abusive boyfriends or refusing to wear your dentures at work) that make working at better jobs difficult, I’m with you. If you want to teach people to read and write effectively, I’m with you. But if you believe that the mere existance of the poor proves that the rich exploit them, you are wrong. When I say that poverty is the natural state, I merely do so to show that you can be poor without needing rich people to exploit you.

The whole tenor of the last two discussions on this topic has been to act as if Caroline Payne was exploited by America. That is ridiculous. If you read her account it is obvious that the US government has tried quite hard to help her out. She admits that she doesn’t get along with people at work. She admits that she won’t wear her dentures. She admits that she has spent money on a lot of things rather than get her dentures repaired so they fit right. Perhaps the failure cannot all be laid at her feet, but the notion that it is all the fault of the US society is at least equally ridiculous.

To use her story to support the concept that the system is inherently bad is poor logic.

BTW, is there any system that does not produce problems on the margins? I would rather have Ms. Payne, than the multi-generational segregated Muslim ghettos of Paris.

Nobody thinks the poor have “more than they deserve.”

I’ll make it clearer: I didn’t think Sebastian meant that. But I do think that he places himself among more vindictive bedfellows by his choice of argument, since the implication of saying ‘Americans are the world’s richest poor people — look, they have televisions!’ is that the American poor ought to give up their televisions and their cars in order to be ‘truly’ worthy of being poor.

As for your absolutism: oh, you’re wrong. There are plenty of people who think the poor have more than they deserve, and some of them write for the Wall Street Journal.

You have no justification for making a sly accusation of racism.

You have no justification for accusing me of making a sly accusation of racism. It’s a factual statement: the racial divisions in the United States mean that many people’s daily lives don’t take them through the ‘black’ or ‘Hispanic’ districts of cities, or areas of rural states, where one can easily find an unfamiliar degree of poverty. Do many residents of the Upper East Side spend time in the Bronx? Do many living in inner DC take regular trips to the outlying districts? Residential self-segregation is, sadly, a good basis for ignorance.

You’re just being rude for no reason to one of the more civil pro-market posters around here.

No, I’m pointing out a fallacious argument: that an inventory of consumer durables is of severely limited value when identifying structural issues of poverty.

It is flat-out stupid for poor people to go into debt to buy luxury goods. Yet lots of people do it.

That’s your own interpretation of my words, and has nothing to do with my point: pawnbrokers, check-cashing and payday loan facilities exist equally because that’s how many people are able to buy food. And pay rent. Because there remains a section of society that is restricted from access to the privileges of the middle-class banking and credit system.

And you can’t have a civil debate if you insist that anyone who disagrees with you is evil.

Nor if you contend that someone who disagrees with you is blind. And if you consider it to be ‘rudeness’ that I’m annoyed when people continue to imply that owning a television means you’re no longer in The Poor Club, then… well, tough shit. Deal with it.

As has been mentioned in the previous thread, wealth allows all sorts of stupidity; whereas poverty not only discriminates against bad choices, but also limits the choices available — and most crucially, works against the ability to make good choices. Because being part of the working poor requires, at least to some degree, to sacrifice the benefits of forward-planning, given that anything that compromises a precarious existence — a delayed paycheck that means you rack up late fees on utility bills or rent, an illness, an uninsured driver slamming into the back of your car — is all too likely to be catastrophic rather than inconvenient. And saying ‘well, people should plan for these things’ is simply condescending nonsense.

As Samuel Johnson put it: ‘Slow rises Worth, by Poverty depress’d.’ Which makes it about much more than people eating at Wendy’s on their lunch hour.

Finally, on preview:

I would rather have Ms. Payne, than the multi-generational segregated Muslim ghettos of Paris.

Well, you have Ms Payne, and you have South Atlanta, or West Philly, or the perimiter of DC, or the Bronx, or Compton. As I suggested, if you don’t think that the US has ‘multi-generational segregated ghettos’, then you’re wrong, and as I intimated, that’s probably because you don’t spend much time around them. Most cities have their own equivalent of the banlieue, but in the US, thanks to urban sprawl, that’s usually downtown, well away from the commuter routes. Nice false dichotomy, though.

Hmm I wonder if Watts in Los Angeles counts at all as experience in American ghettos?

Anyway,

“since the implication of saying ‘Americans are the world’s richest poor people — look, they have televisions!’ is that the American poor ought to give up their televisions and their cars in order to be ‘truly’ worthy of being poor.”

Uh, no that isn’t the implication. First I’m not sure that poverty or riches has much to do with ‘worthy’. Second I’m not asking anyone to give up their TVs. I’m asking you to realize that TVs are a luxury. I’m asking you to realize that those whom you choose to dismiss with the label ‘poor’ actually have many luxuries in the US that aren’t available to the poor in other countries.

And I’d prefer you not go too overboard with assumptions about me personally. I was without a home for a couple of months–too foolishly proud to ask for help and the like. Anyway I am not asking you to give up concern for the poor. I am asking you to realize that putting such a heavy emphasis on the society isn’t likely to help much. After all it is far easier to actually go out and help the poor than it is to make massive changes in society.

But my experience has been that the left is typically at least as interested in justifying and enforcing societal change with a justification of helping the oppressed as they are in actually going out and helping the oppressed. I don’t buy into much of the social change argument because I think leftists don’t understand most societies enough to profitably change them. But if you want to do concrete work on actually making people’s lives better, I’m willing to help.

I am curious as to how many people who do not believe in a living wage or other government-required compensation for employment (health benefits) have read Nickle & Dimed, and whether they have ignored it or refuted Ehrenreich’s experience.
I think it is books like that that make people think we need more change than they believe they can provide as individuals. There were soup kitchens and so on for Ehrenreich, and yet she still found it difficult to survive.

There is a strong implication in the discussion here that people who are poor (I am defining this roughly as the federal government does) are not contributive, that it is the rich capitalists who are lifting the less fortunate out of their natural state of poverty.
But to what extent is the cheap labor of the poor — in this country and, increasingly, in other countries — creating a better life for all Americans? Relatively cheap goods are created when the people who make them are cheap labor. How much consumer surplus do we derive from this labor?
(I made Cs in all my mathy econ classes, so I don’t know exactly how much, but I remember how to color in that part of the graph.)

“But my experience has been that the left is typically at least as interested in justifying and enforcing societal change with a justification of helping the oppressed as they are in actually going out and helping the oppressed.”

Troll is as troll says, I’m afraid.

On my way home this evening, I sat in traffic behind an SUV with two TV/video screens. In fact, most of the vehicles around me were “light trucks.” It made me wonder why TVs for the poor are a luxury we can be judgmental about, but when the less marginal rack up their credit to buy such extravagent and wasteful toys, we say “it’s their money!” Sometimes it is. But sometimes they are making bad decisions, too — after all, aren’t people with great cash flow but no retirement going to be burdensome on the rest of us at some point? We live in a society where even the president encourages rampant consumerism rather than fiscal responsibility. A television may seem to many like a luxury — and to some extent, it is, but it’s also for many the only connection to the news, to cheap entertainment for the family (certainly in many ways a television gives a better return on investment than scraping up for movie tix, etc.). I think I could swallow the anti-poor arguments better if there were not such gratuitous waste going on by people whose excesses cost the rest of us in non-renewable fuel, overuse of landfills, etc., is only exceeded by their resentment of taxes. When such wealth exists, when states and federal governments can give huge amounts of corporate welfare without asking for corporate accountability (it’s our money — I for one want to know how those tax breaks are being used to directly benefit the economy — somehow, I don’t think that poor dividends, little real shareholder control and ginormous salaries for CEOs are a benefit), I cannot see how anyone can refuse to accept that there is something morally, ethically, and humanly wrong.

It’s one thing when everybody is poor — that’s true in many societies, and many times, that just means poor in terms of material wealth. It’s a very different thing when a society has an excess of available material wealth, can provide basic food shelter and health care to anyone who wants it, and chooses instead to indulge its whims at the expense of a very large number of its members. For shame.

Mmm… I think the problem with these sorts of discussions is that the people who get involved on a certain side are the people who genuinely believe that “the very poor can have […] DVD [players]”, when actually the very poor can in fact barely afford both clothes and food for themselves and their children.

“I know of no conservative poster who is as capable as Mr. Holsclaw of combining thoughtful analysis with some gratingly insulting comments.”

Not to be too personal, but it is well that you modified it with ‘conservative’ because I must humbly bow in awe to Daniel’s ability to combine the two. And he is one of the leftist hosts. ;)

Suppose Mrs. Payne were making $13.60/hour instead of $6.80 an hour, but that everything else were equal.

How much better off would she be?

Then, suppose Mrs. Payne were to reprioritize her spending (dentures, other things) & make moves to get off the consumer-debt treadmill.

How much better off would she be?

Personally, I think that she would be better off at twice the salary. I also think that she would be better off if she made better choices.

Neither of these notions are enemies of the other. In fact, each is a little unrealistic by itself – without making better choices a lot of the extra income would go to debt service; without extra income it’s a steep slope against consumer temptation, and ridiculous to think of digging out of a hole.

Again, personally, I prefer to think about these sorts of problems in terms of putting the tools in people’s hands to make the right choices for themselves. I don’t believe that taking that point of view is inherently blaming the victim. Sure, there will always exist people who make the wrong choices – but also that’s no excuse for kidding ourselves about asking someone to dig a trench with a teaspoon.

“Troll is as troll says, I’m afraid.”

Oh, come now. If Sebastian is a troll, you’ve completely debased the definition to ‘someone who doesn’t agree with me’.

Robert–
This may not apply to your co-workers, but Barbara Ehrenreich couldn’t afford a room with a stove when she was working at Wal-Mart in Minnesota. (As far as the oven goes, I can’t remember the last time I used mine.)
As for being willing to concede that some people are poor because they’re unwilling to do what it takes–not sure. I’m willing to concede that there are probably people who would be poor even if we ensured that people who worked hard to find and keep work couldn’t be poor. But we haven’t done so, so it’s hard to say that those people wouldn’t be poor if they were willing to do what it takes.
Oh, I was going to write more, but I’ll just quote Ben about digging a trench with a teaspoon, and remark that the people who are making policy are in no position to complain that the working poor are living insufficiently monkish existences in order to insure that they get jam today. (Not you, Rob, you’ve been there and obviously did better than I would under significant circumstances.)

Ahem, the fact that you don’t list any possible negative repurcussions suggests that you think things are a lot simpler than I do.

Not so: I think they’re massively more complex.

You say that ‘general anti-poverty programs suffer from lack of focus and lack of attention to different individual needs’, and I agree, to a point. But highly individuated anti-poverty programmes can also suffer from excessive focus, meaning that people are overlooked or excluded. One of the comments on the site of ‘godlesscapitalist’ talked of a group of Libertarians rallying around to help another Libertarian activist; that example epitomises both the benefits and problems of tailored assistance. I support localised programmes, because they identify local needs; but I also recognise that when people group together on their own, there’s always going to be some who are excluded.

To put it in terms of set theory: the Universal Set is always greater than the union of the sets of those identified by self-selected, ‘focused’ organisations. Think of the hundreds of thousands of charitable organisations in the USA, and add up the groups they support: there’s still a modulo.

Or, in more human terms: it’s comparatively simple to create organisations that allow people to sponsor kids in Africa or cute kittens at the local animal shelter, but comparatively difficult to do what you’re suggesting, and pick out ‘a poor person’ to support. Focused, localised assistance is vital; but because that sort of focused assistance requires a degree of self-selection and self-identification, there’s always going to be the additional need for some element of universal support.

(That’s why, in Britain, child benefit remains universal, even though it means that, for instance, Prince Edward is now entitled to it for his kid.)

On the contrary, that is a perfectly consistent position. If you and your friends do believe that “throwing money” really is a solution, then it behooves you to put your own money where your mouths are. That’s not really so difficult to understand, is it?

Um, no. That’s based on an entirely false premise. Or rather, upon a strawman: that if you don’t agree politically with those who loudly argue against ‘throwing money’ at particular problems, you are in favour of throwing an infinite amount of money willy-nilly at those problems. Let’s make it simple enough for you to understand: if you don’t personally believe that throwing money at a problem will solve it (as is the case with most conservatives… and most liberals) then you can’t retain moral consistency by recommending that other people throw money at a problem to solve it.

Or, to put it in other terms: if you loudly advocate in favour of sexual abstinence, you should neither assume that those who do not speak with such volume are in favour of fucking everything that moves, nor should you recommend that they fuck everything that moves. That’s not really so difficult, is it?

But Sebastian’s point was, I think, that no one who can (and does) buy a DVD player ought to be properly considered “poor.”

You can buy a brand new DVD player for $35 these days, Robert. If you had said “no-one who can buy a 41″ plasma TV ought to be properly considered ‘poor'”, then you might have a greater margin of error.

That said, when hearing arguments that the poor cannot be considered truly poor if they have access to small luxuries — the classic examples being alcohol and tobacco — I can’t help remembering Orwell’s comments in The Road To Wigan Pier:

Families are impoverished, but the family-system has not broken up. The people are in effect living a reduced version of their former lives. Instead of raging against their destiny they have made things tolerable by lowering their standards. But they don’t necessarily lower their standards by cutting out luxuries and concentrating on necessities; more often it is the other way about — the more natural way, if you come to think of it. Hence the fact that in a decade of unparalleled depression, the consumption of all cheap luxuries has increased. The two things that have probably made the greatest difference of all are the movies and the mass-production of cheap smart clothes since the war. The youth who leaves school at fourteen and gets a blind-alley job is out of work at twenty, probably for life; but for two pounds ten on the hire-purchase he can buy himself a suit which, for a little while and at a little distance, looks as though it had been tailored in Savile Row. The girl can look like a fashion plate at an even lower price. You may have three halfpence in your pocket and not a prospect in the world, and only the corner of a leaky bedroom to go home to; but in your new clothes you can stand on the street corner, indulging in a private daydream of yourself as Clark Gable or Greta Garbo, which compensates you for a great deal. And even at home there is generally a cup of tea going — a ‘nice cup of tea’ — and Father, who has been out of work since 1929, is temporarily happy because he has a sure tip for the Cesarewich.

If anything, those whose lives are lived from week to week have the greater need of temporary distractions. Orwell talks of how such reprieves during the 1930s might be found in the cinema or a hire-purchase suit; today’s equivalents are a cheap DVD player and a weekly movie from Blockbuster. And once the closing credits appear, you can go back to thinking about how to pay the rent.

That’s why I suggested that those who seek to redefine ‘poverty’ in terms of access to small luxuries are quite mistaken in the force of their argument. Had they been writing in Orwell’s 1930s, I’d imagine they would be claiming that because the poor were able to buy tickets to the Saturday matinee and put down sixpence on a HP suit, they couldn’t be ‘properly considered “poor”‘, especially by comparison with their Victorian forebears.

It’s a diversion from the notion that poverty is better measured in terms of access to a wider range of choices with which to advance one’s life than one’s ability to look at the shelves of Best Buy with anything other than wistful longing.

In any case, I agree with Ben Keen here.

Oh, heavens, where in this article did he talk about rich taxpayers?!

He is talking about the capitalist system itself, not about government-directed redistribution.
In America, the government and every other part of society is held accountable, but the faceless market that doesn’t allow someone to take off a day for medical reasons, or doesn’t accommodate a low-wage worker’s need to have only day shifts, has no accountability whatsoever.

Don’t worry, sgl, it’s not a call to dip into your pocket, unless you see the reduction of your stock profits in order to pay the working poor decently as a dip in your pocket.

“You can buy a brand new DVD player for $35 these days, Robert. If you had said “no-one who can buy a 41” plasma TV ought to be properly considered ‘poor’”, then you might have a greater margin of error.”

Sheesh how can you come so close to the truth and still walk right by it. Why are things that would be luxuries in other countries so cheap here? DVD players and other luxuries are cheap in our capitalist system because our system is really good at making things available to everyone. The whole reason you have to focus on relative poverty is because the capitalist system makes absolute poverty amazingly rare (note I didn’t say non-existant I said amazingly rare). But the way people on this board talk about fixing this marginal problem is by upsetting the whole system which has done more to pull people out of real poverty than anything else. The capitalist system itself is not such a big problem as to require a revolutionary solution.

“But highly individuated anti-poverty programmes can also suffer from excessive focus, meaning that people are overlooked or excluded.”

This makes me nuts. I am very specifically not talking about programs . And your complaint about individuals slipping through the cracks is not at all remedied by ‘universal’ programs. If anything someone is far more likely to fall through the cracks at the national level than they ever would at the neighborhood level. At the neighborhood level someone can ask. “Where is Joe? I haven’t seen him in a while.” At the national level the question is: “Joe who? Is that Joe Smith, Klein, or Beasley? Joe Jingleheimer-Schmidt? Not on my list.” Seriously, if you are worried about the poor, work with one of those small, church-supported but still independent charities nearby. They do great work, and aren’t so religiously oriented as to offend you. Then spend a couple of days at a welfare agency. The difference is dramatic, I’ve been in both arenas.

…but since two of you choose to raise the subject, when’s the last time you heard a liberal politician openly propose to raise taxes on the middle class, let alone the poor? I think you know perfectly well that that syndrome is what I was referring to.

“The whole reason you have to focus on relative poverty is because the capitalist system makes absolute poverty amazingly rare (note I didn’t say non-existant I said amazingly rare).”

There seems to be some confusion here. Firstly, 35 million Americans according the the US bureau of statistics live in absolute not relative poverty – they cannot meet basic needs.

Secondly, the capitalist system doesn’t make this inevitable. The Nordic countries have capitalist systems yet no absolute poverty – indeed Finland pipped the US this year to be the most competitive country in the world. What you are against is welfare and only by degree since the US has some welfare, just less than the Nordics.

Finally, relative poverty is real. People living in relative poverty and not absolute poverty live shorter lives and are less happy. You may not think it is the job of the state to prevent this but to be honest it’s just as arbitrary as absolute poverty.

No I haven’t been to India but the argument is specious. There is a level of income below which people are unable to meet their basic needs (according to the US Department of Statistics) that has nothing at all to do with how much money other people have. Simply because people in India are even less able to meet their basic needs or are able to meet less of their basic needs, does not mean people in the US do not live in absolute poverty.

DVD players and other luxuries are cheap in our capitalist system because our system is really good at making things available to everyone.

‘Things’. Not healthcare, not job protection, not the opportunity to advance. ‘Things’. Your system is really good at making crack available to everyone, too. Go back to the Orwell quotation I posted. Read it.

At the neighborhood level someone can ask. “Where is Joe? I haven’t seen him in a while.”

Sebastian: you’ve said you were homeless for a period of time. When you’re homeless, or sick, or get into trouble, you often stop existing on the neighbourhood level. You lose ties to community structures, apart perhaps from those that exist among the homeless. You get overlooked. And frankly, the suburbanisation of American society limits the ability of communities to identify its ‘Joe’ and go to his aid. That’s my point. Even ad hoc efforts can’t help but be restricted by the motivations and necessarily limited perspectives of those who embark upon them. That’s not to say they do great things. But to appreciate that neither individuals, nor the state, can do everything.

At the national level the question is: “Joe who? Is that Joe Smith, Klein, or Beasley? Joe Jingleheimer-Schmidt? Not on my list.”

At the national level, names don’t matter; bodies do. In a country with decent universal healthcare, you can walk into a drop-in clinic and get examined, no name required. And like I said, certain small-scale universal benefits work better than means-tested ones because they don’t attempt to identify those in greatest need, but rightly assume that many will not collect those benefits because it’s actually not worth the bother. (See: Prince Edward.)

Ah, more transparent subject-changing behavior when it comes to putting your money where your mouth is.

Not so. I’m glad you appreciate my point about measuring poverty in terms of its ability to choke off good long-term choices for one’s life. (Or, as dsquared has linked elsewhere, that poverty ought to be judged on the terms of modern tragedy: call it the Willy Loman index.) Read on and be shocked by where I’ve ‘put my money’.

Seriously, if you are worried about the poor, work with one of those small, church-supported but still independent charities nearby. They do great work, and aren’t so religiously oriented as to offend you.

Please. I’ve worked with the St Vincent de Paul Society, and other non-denominational homeless shelters, which rely as much on funding from national and local government as they do on donations. (Note that, sgl.)

Then spend a couple of days at a welfare agency. The difference is dramatic, I’ve been in both arenas.

Well, the difference is dramatic both ways: that’s because far too many organisations like their poor people nice and polite, and the state doesn’t have that luxury. Like I said, aspects of self-selection and self-identification necessarily limit the great work of focused local assistance, whether it’s ad hoc or ongoing.

Have you been to India? I have. I don’t think a lot of you have any real understanding of what absolute poverty looks like.

Yeah. Worked for a while on the outskirts of Delhi. Miles and miles of homes with frames made out of sticks and corrugated iron, walls built from cowshit and straw, ditches running with open sewage. You want to empty your wallet for every man, woman and child. And sometimes it breaks your heart so much that you do stuff rupees into their hands. But you also know that you could do that every day for the next 200 years and it wouldn’t necessarily change things. And that’s partly because of the gap between rich and poor. Work in Nepal, which is relatively poorer as a country, and it feels less hopeless, because you don’t have the concentration of wealth seen, for instance, on the avenues of New Delhi.

“Work in Nepal, which is relatively poorer as a country, and it feels less hopeless, because you don’t have the concentration of wealth seen, for instance, on the avenues of New Delhi.”
I have a similar emotional reaction, and indeed rich Indians (my experience is mainly of Bombay, which has the most ostentatious wealth in India) tend to really get under my skin. BUT notice the all-too-easy slide here from talking about absolute poverty to talking about relative poverty. I may have that emotional reaction, but I am also self-aware enough to use my reason to question whether it’s a sound guide to action in the real world.

I may have that emotional reaction, but I am also self-aware enough to use my reason to question whether it’s a sound guide to action in the real world.

With respect, I think you’re cheapening the inklings of a decent argument by talking about ‘sentiment’ and ‘economic illiteracy’. (Call dsquared an sentimental economic illiterate to his face, and my guess is he might beat the crap out of you with a rolled up copy of his CV.)

As I suggested, if you have any hope of surviving as a Westerner working in Delhi (or Bombay), you have to harden your heart against showering people with rupees. But that doesn’t preclude you from advocating top-down structural reforms, particularly if one is sufficiently historically-minded to recognise that those states which have benefitted from market liberalisation only did so on the back of some form of welfare state. (See Joe Stiglitz on the IMF; see also Hernando da Soto, no liberal he, on the steps necessary to make capitalism succeed.)

Leftist thinking to the contrary, the existance of a problem does not prove that a government failure has occurred.

Rightist thinking to the contrary, the existence of an individual who may have squandered her opportunities does not prove that no government failures ever occur. (See: right-wing references to ‘Queen, welfare’ ad nauseam.)

“(Call dsquared an sentimental economic illiterate to his face, and my guess is he might beat the crap out of you with a rolled up copy of his CV.)” Gee, that’s a persuasive argument. I’m _so_ convinced.

Adding to my above comment, after reading a response to Jim Putnam’s continuation of this: I wonder why so much of this conversation is so firmly bipolar?

Where is it written responsibility for ourselves and responsibility for others are mutually exclusive?

We should be both.

If I try to skate on a frozen puddle, and break my leg, nobody is responsible by me. If I am left lying there in the cold, and freze to death, then each passer by who didn’t stop to help is responsible for that.