…They don’t have enough money.
My dear (and long-suffering) spouse was on some kind of a panel the other day, where a number of kind good-hearted liberal folks were trying to figure out how to encourage literacy among the poor.
Of course this wouldn’t be a problem if there weren’t any poor. You’d then just have rampant illiteracy among the ‘middle class’, which doesn’t seem to cost anybody any sleep. As long as you have a BA and a white-collar job, it doesn’t matter how pig-ignorant you are.
So dear spouse suggested that maybe poor people would be better off if they had more money. Shock and dismay all round.
Now really, isn’t this the very heart and soul of liberalism? Leave all the core institutions of the society alone — including that most ancient and hallowed of institutions, poor people — but think, think very hard, about clever ways to improve the lot of those… poor… people. Everything is on the table. Sky’s the limit. Think. Think! Think outside the box!
Except the one unthinkable idea: abolish the poor. Which is to say, give ’em money.
Oh, no doubt they’d all buy big flat-screen TVs, and nice new sneakers, and SUVs. But then, that’s what their ‘middle-class’ fellow-citizens do too. Doesn’t that mythical but indispensable beast, ‘the Economy’, feed itself on just such folly? So the Teevee tells me, anyway. Not to mention NPR.
Now you may say that an unearned income is bad for peoples’ moral character. And maybe it is, in some cases. But I know a bunch of people who have enjoyed unearned incomes for the last four or five generations. Some of them are pricks, of course. But most are very decent people — hardworking, if there’s any virtue in that; conscientious; polite; respectful of books and pictures and 18th-century music; attentive to their spouses and devoted to their children.
From what little I’ve seen of life — if you want to elevate the cultural tone of the poor, you need to give ’em a trust fund.
And you have to stay the course. A presidential term won’t do it. A generation won’t do it. No, if you want to eradicate the lingering traces of the Culture Of Poverty(*), you’ve got to take the long view. Three generations at least.
————-
(*) Do I correctly recall that we owe this loathesome phrase to the unspeakable Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who I hope gets to Heaven some day, but spends several millennia frying in Purgatory first?
…Of course this wouldn’t be a problem if there weren’t any poor. You’d then just have rampant illiteracy among the ‘middle class’, which doesn’t seem to cost anybody any sleep. As long as you have a BA and a white-collar job, it doesn’t matter how pig-ignorant you are…
Shit, man, I’ve seen people with Master’s and Ph.D’s who are rock stupid — like those clowns who are having school kids expelled and arrested for making pantomime guns with their hands or conducting chemistry class experiments which malfunction and go “bang!”
Fuckin’ retards, the lot of ’em.
Why do we want Moynihan in Heaven? Generosity of spirit?
Yes. I really want Hell to be empty, at the end of the day.
Got it. How do we stock the trust funds?
Oh easy. Carbon tax.
The phrase “Culture of Poverty” was actually coined by Oscar Lewis. His original argument was that people afflicted by it needed even more aid to break out of it, not that helping them was hopeless. But it soon got turned on its head by the likes of Moynihan.
Let’s face it, people who identify themselves by whatever label, whether it be liberal, conservative, libertarian, anarchist or even ugly, have merely taken on a particular role. When someone suggests, as your wife did, that there might actually be, no matter how remote that possibility might be, a way to eliminate the ‘poor’ in poor people, she triggered an instinctive response.
Now I know the following equation may seem absolutely ludicrous, but I know I’ve experienced similar feelings. It’s the reason why people absolutely lose it when someone suggests a contrary political opinion: it’s a threat to their very existence!:
Liberal means caring for the poor.
If there are no more poor, that means there will be no more liberals.
I ‘am’ a liberal.
I will be eliminated!
Father forces the chat into a region
I wax ” Johnny one note ” over
We have what you might call a job ethic round here
Soooooooo
We need jobs for all comers
I realize this isn’t paradise
But as over the horizon as it may be
To even consider a job for every soul
As a right
It at least sets this job obsessed society
marching in the direction
Where higher ” solutions ” might follow
Going straight to universal trust funds
Or even the modest goal
to increase the free of charge
socially provided
stuff
My generation of god damn peacenik drugee college kids
as it finds itself today
I submi provide ” living proof ” of where that conjured enterprise leads
Oh, that would work too. Of course you’d have to have free child care, right?
How the jobs-for everybody scheme would work is interesting to contemplate. There are of course people who would find it hard to keep down any job at all — I am increasingly one of these myself. So I imagine them reporting to work, digging a hole, and filling it up again the next day. (In fact this is more or less what my job is at the moment.)
It’s better than leaving us to sleep on a heating grate and beg in the subway, I admit. But for all the use it is, wouldn’t a social wage be better still?
Not that either will happen in our lifetime of course.
One thing about the social wage is precisely the change in thinking it implies. All those dead generations who toiled and suffered so we could have cheap sneakers and flat-screen TVs — to whom does that inheritance belong? If it’s not the common property of all, ant or grasshopper — why not?
Oh I agree
Expectational Trust fund baby that I am
I know or knew or lounged close to
the life of
Undefiled “free labor”
Marx nicely slashes at the Adam
On this
Can’t find where just now
But to the point
The dawn of Free labor and nothing but free labor
is not like the end of Rene Clair’s
greatest movie
Frolics of a shop girl 24/7/365 ?
Just win a lottery and see how
the morning mirror reflects back a challenge and an endless anguish
To have only ourself to blame
To have the option
To make a life’s worthy work
or waste
like tissues
the 30 k days till death
I restrict myself to what the kulack soul will tolerate
An Incrementally built and increased social wage**
**( I prefer to call it
a citizen dividend
Over a social wage
Wage being commonly linked
to the reward for
” honest ” if tedious or Vapi
Or even spirit punishing
time burning toil
Again I apply ” kulack blood sweat apnd tears rules” here
Calling the dividend
An earned payment
I’d base it on a system like the the retirement payment of social security
You’d get a dividend with. E eryone else
It would be
N (some periodic and or occasional amount) X LH (lifetime hours worked)
I always thought the logical source for it would be a walloping carbon tax, whose proceeds would be distributed on a strict per-capita basis to every man, woman, and baby in the country. Taken back from the wealthy in income tax, of course. So don’t call it a wage or a dividend; call it a tax refund. The kulaks *love* those.
Pigou tax
George tax
Any tax you like that essentially enhances orate least leaves untouched
The fruits of socially necessary labor
Of course I agree
Per tax payer
“Tax” rebates are
A jolly mode of pay out
Equal payment to all
But to return to strict
kulack
Desserts
The existing
earned income tax credit is precisely the sort of pay out system I’m suggesting
I simply generalized it and removed the taper down to zero
Of course we can fund a strapping share of this rebate
And life’s “work ” reward system
By monetized borrowing
But now we are about to enter
Paine’s
mad science laboratory
I’ll break off
”Just win a lottery and see how
the morning mirror reflects back a challenge and an endless anguish”
first nat. lottery
my daughter entered [this
wk] and winning ticket
was purchased at
grocery she
shops at
so what numbers were
only soso close
she would have
bought new boat
for padre S
NM State lottery winner
lived close by few
yrs ago
but burned out
in 1 year
did not know how
to do 58% avg
an lt return
did know how to
consume
”the dawn of free labor”
is the demise of
labor and
rise of work which
is btw happening
as rural is spun
to urban
peasant
ry and
supra giant permanent
petty commodity
mode ‘solidifies’
N X LH will not do
when Mad
Science
is
Available
In a word
Versailles
“Wouldn’t it be nice”
As the beach boys sing
…..” if we all lived like a court without a king”
During the Nixon administration, the federal government conducted some experiments in which poor families were given money every month, irrespective of anything else they did. The results were interesting. The men in the families either showed no change in their labor force participation or actually increased it (white men showed no change, while black and Hispanic men showed an increase. The women, on the other hand, showed decreased labor force participation (their initial wage work was very low), but they used the extra time to care for their children and/or to obtain more schooling. Needless to say, the economists were surprised by these results, since they flew in the face of the economists’ wisdom, that if you give people money, they will simply take more “leisure time.” No doubt, money gave these families some hope, and this encouraged them to take steps to put their families on a better economic and social course. Needless to say as well, the government soon stopped these experiments. We should give everyone money enough to have a decent life. If we did, then we would see a “hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend.”
A typical government “experiment”, in other words, a “one-shot” design open to infinite interpretation and proving nothing much in particular. But, let’s see, I guess it proved that the poor families didn’t grow wings and fly south for the winter and any number of other implausible hypotheses. The behavior of formerly poor winners of large lottery prizes probably backs up the conventional economists’ wisdom better than this experiment.
Were the payments contractual and set to stop on a date certain or just provided like gifts from the tooth fairy which could end upon conditions not predictable?
Of course, enough money for a decent life is self justifying under certain economic conditions… perhaps conditions that are not hard to imagine existing in quite a few nations today. But if one removes the huge current third world gifts to the developed world, this “enough” might be rather more difficult to arrange anywhere. A family wage job seems to describe a more plausible goal, with some government or other standing by as employer of last resort.
Sure, lead the way professor. How about you give away YOUR money to layabouts, set an example for the rest of us, and we’ll follow. Sound like a plan?
Given more money than I can count, to all sorts of layabouts. Let me know next time you are laying about, and I will give you some too. Bit in the meantime, fuck off.
And what if someone wishes to “fuck on”? How do you distinguish between “on” and “off” forms of fucking?
Perhaps you could give us a treatise on the subject.
I’ll leave the treatise to you, Ferdinand. I’m too busy counting my money.
Well, before commenting, it might be good to read about the experiments. Etc. Otherwise, you just give us “bar talk.” And anyone who won a large lottery and kept a shit job should probably be committed. Jobs to ensure full employment is fine, but the nature of the jobs might be important too, including how what is done on the job is determined. Etc. But this is well beyond MJS’s post, in which he is remarking on the tendency of good liberals to propose anything that won’t require them to part with their money.
Bar talk is about my level.
Are the experiments you are referring to the New Jersey Income Maintenance Experiment? Something else? A link?
Your own description of the surprising results fall into the bar talk category quite well, doesn’t it? “No doubt, money gave these families some hope, and this encouraged them to take steps to put their families on a better economic and social course.” Plausible, yes, but many explanations could be offered for the observed behavior. The families knew that he largesse could end at any moment and decided to put the unexplained, unexpected gifts away against future possible emergencies. Or one could emphasize racial/ethnic differences in response and spin all kinds of theories. All very “bar”…
Correction:Your own description of the surprising result falls into the bar talk category quite well, doesn’t it?
We’ll have to have a drink, brother! I don’t have the link now, but it was in the Journal of Human Resources, sometime in the 1970s. Yes, all sorts of things can be spun concerning the results. The theory predicted decreases in hours of work and reductions in labor force participation rates, but neither happened. The programs were for two or three years, with monthly amounts of money going to the families, the amounts varying but based upon the official poverty level of income. The only reason I referred to this is because economists have a jaundiced view of poor people. As I think do the liberals MJS was referring to.
Economists are always surprised by experimental results — when they bother to pay attention.
@Michael Yates
Drinks on me. I won a lottery! Of sorts.
Best wishes to all,
Boink
Great, Mr. Smith, Professor Yates, and the free-verse autistic want to take my hard-earned money and give it away. The proles will love your plan, boys, especially the ones on lefty mailing lists.
Oh smiles, welcome back. We’ve missed you.
======= it doesn’t matter how pig-ignorant you are.=======
”Pigs are wise … and clean
Paulo Whitaker / Reuters
Here’s the dirt on pigs: They are perhaps the smartest, cleanest domestic animals known – more so than cats and dogs, according to some experts. But pigs don’t have sweat glands, so they roll around in the mud to stay cool. A sign of their cleverness came from experiments in the 1990s. Pigs were trained to move a cursor on a video screen with their snouts and used the cursor to distinguish between scribbles they knew and those they were seeing for the first time. They learned the task as quickly as chimpanzees.”
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/24628983/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/smartest-animals/
What are industrialized pigs thinking about [or have they been stupified]?