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>I don't think there is much debate that societies should try to mitigate that. You haven't been reading HN then, and you haven't met the Tea Party. There are

>I don't think there is much debate that societies should try to mitigate that. You haven't been reading HN then, and you haven't met the Tea Party. There are a lot of people here who believe that poor people deserve their lot and should wallow in it. In my opinion society needs to use tax dollars to ensure a basic standard of living for all citizens. This idea (the welfare state) is deeply unpopular in contemporary America.

learc83 15y ago
Just because I might disagree with your methods of equalizing income, doesn't mean I "believe poor people deserve their lot and should wallow in it." You've turned a political disagreement about the methods to accomplish some desirable goal do so into a moral argument. You've decided that if I think there is a better way to elevate the poor than your way, I must want them to stay poor and thus must be evil. Why do you feel you need to frame the argument as such?
- forensic 15y ago
  Politics and morality are intimately related. There are SOME free market ideologues who believe that unrestrained corporations will enrich the poor, however I believe they are in the minority. You may be one of them. The majority of libertarians believe that individual property rights are sacrosanct and that it is wrong to forcibly redistribute wealth to prevent poverty, hunger, suffering. This is the argument of the Tea Party to my knowledge. Am I wrong? Right now the excess wealth is in the hands of the rich, especially the top one-tenth-of-one-percent (0.1%). Society is presented with a choice: (a) we can take it from them and redistribute it to the bottom 80%, or (b) we can let them keep it and allow people to suffer. (a) is a moral statement, that the poverty of the poor trumps the property rights of the rich. (b) is a moral statement, that the property rights of the rich trump the poverty of the poor. Almost all proposed actions in this situation amount to either (a) or (b). The wealth of society can increase over time, but at any single point in time it is a fixed quantity whose distribution is intimately related to whether poor people exist or not.
  - jgesture 15y ago
    It is good to take care not to create a false dilemma. Of course the government is not the only actor that can, or should, address moral problems. As I understand libertarianism, they are not at all against solving issues of poverty or hunger. But they do believe that the government is not necessarily the best solution to every problem. Of course that statement should be obvious, as government tends to be less efficient and more watered down than other organizations. So the question is in the details.
  - sgoranson 15y ago
    Economics is not like religion; there are actual correct and incorrect answers. As a newer field, we not always know how to find the correct answers yet. But that isn't an excuse to start treating it more like religion and less like science. "we can let them keep it and allow people to suffer." Using your feelings to guide your monetary policy decisions is no better than the creationists forcing ID to be taught in schools. If your hunch is that a Keynesian approach is ideal, cool. Many would agree. But choosing it because it's the obvious "moral" choice just dumbs down the whole debate, opens the door to all sorts of emotional reactionary ignorance, and doesn't get us any closer to the right answer.
    - cwp 15y ago
      Economics is exactly like religion. There are correct and incorrect answers, but most people ignore them, and believe something that makes them feel good about their place in the world.
    - arethuza 15y ago
      "As a newer field, we not always know how to find the correct answers yet." If I may say so, that is a rather refreshingly humble statement for an economist to make.
    - notahacker 15y ago
      There are correct answers to questions like "will redistributing income from group X to group Y improve overall productivity?" but they're neither necessary nor sufficient criterion for policy formulation. (Keynesians, like their neoclassical economist critics tend to be favourably disposed towards assessing policy impact based on empirical evidence; Austrians on the fringe Right argue the economy is too complex to act as a testing ground) Questions like "is better aggregate economic growth a justification for disproportionate tax increases for these people?" or "if the bottom percentile are hungry, should feeding them take precedence over growth objectives?" are inherently moral
- wanorris 15y ago
  For one thing, because there is no evidence I'm aware of that any tangible, real-world action originates from the belief that the poor should be "elevated" in some other manner. When the government gives poor single moms peanut butter to make sure that her kids have protein to eat, that gets measured, and we can perform efficacy studies on it. When the government gives housing stipends to poor families so that they have a home to live in, we can measure that too. If the enormous segment of the population that doesn't believe the government should be helping the poor is initiating some kind of private action that has broad, measurable effects on the plight of the poor, I would be delighted to hear about it. If not, then this claim that some other action should be taken kind of seems like a red herring in the discussion, because that means that the only practical options on the table are for the government to do something or for the government to not do something.
  - OstiaAntica 15y ago
    The government has largely crowded out private action. Before the American welfare state was created, mutual aid societies and churches filled the welfare gap. These institutions were generally more effective in their mission than government today, and the fabric of our society was far richer for it. Today, helping the poor largely means lobbying for more spending for some program.
    - prodigal_erik 15y ago
      There was very little to be crowded out. When funding was opt-in, the result was a vanity safety net far too weak for any serious problems. That's why Dickens portrayed such a hellhole. Why communities organized around private charity declared defeat and posted "OKIES MOVE ON" signs during the Great Depression (which is what led to creating a welfare state that actually kind of met the needs). Why even churches need government funds to keep their own food banks open. The problem is bigger than the number of volunteers paying more than their share.
- msutherl 15y ago
  The reason that the government should take care of the poor and the sick is not because it is the most efficient and moral way to do so. Indeed, given appropriate conditions, I concede that "the market" and the goodwill of "the people" would be capable of ensuring that their needs are met in a more efficient and, according to libertarian logic, more ethical manner. The reason that the government should provide this welfare service, however, is that it results in an incredibly desirable situation where any citizen of the United States would know that, no matter what the state of the (semi-)unregulated economy, it is guaranteed that they will be taken care of. Were welfare left to the emergent logic of the market, somebody who, say, depends on medication to fight a chronic condition or somebody who cannot for some reason hold a job reliably (like my pan-handler friend who can't get a job because of his face tattoo and rotting teeth) would not be able to count on being able to survive should there be a severe economic depression or a war. To live in a society where somebody who depends on an external institution to them to keep them alive cannot absolutely depend on that regardless of the economic climate is, in my opinion, uncivilized, and for such a person, downright hellish. If you could convince me that the market is more reliable over time than the US government, then by all means, I might consider the dismantling of the welfare state a viable option.
  - dpatru 15y ago
    > The reason that the government should provide . . . welfare . . . is that it results in an incredibly desirable situation where any citizen of the United States would know that, no matter what . . . it is guaranteed that they will be taken care of. I don't see it desirable to disconnect causes from consequences. Quite the opposite. Society functions best when people are very aware that their choices have consequences and when they choose to act in ways that produce good consequences. In fact, individual responsibility is essential to civilization. Society would just fall apart if more than a few percent of people began acting irresponsibly. For example, America has a problem with education. There are a lot of children not learning despite a lot of money being spent. I think a root cause of the problem is students knowing that nothing bad will happen to them if they don't work hard in school. If all the unmotivated students would be put to work for a few weeks in picking crops, with the promise that this will be their lot in life if they don't learn, I suspect the education problem would solve itself quickly. We live in a world where it is possible to be tremendously productive and wealthy. But it is still necessary to labor and be disciplined to achieve wealth. Retirement, doing nothing productive knowing that you will still be able to eat tomorrow, should be the reward of years of diligent work, not the entitlement of the lazy who want to benefit from the toil of others without contributing.
- jberryman 15y ago
  > Why do you feel you need to frame the argument as such? While it might not be your view, the notion that the poor "deserve their lot" and even that their being poor is the Will of God (evangelical prosperity theology) is literally a mainstream conservative position. If this doesn't ring a bell then you haven't actually been paying attention.
  - learc83 15y ago
    Myself, I'm libertarian, but I grew up in a very conservative household, surrounded by conservatives at church, and I was a conservative until my early twenties. I have never met a conservative who believed that the poor "deserve their lot." And I can't think of one single conservative I know who wouldn't love to see the elimination of poverty. They just disagree with the liberal method. If this were really the case why would conservatives donate money to charity? Why would conservative churches run food kitchens?
    - pyre 15y ago
      How many of those conservative churches accept government money to run their soup kitchens?
    - brycecolquitt 15y ago
      Just as anecdotally, I have met plenty of them.
    - jberryman 15y ago
      I should have clarified that when I said "mainstream conservative position" i meant that it's espoused by mainstream political figures (some current republican pres. Candidate for instance), rather than that it is the dominant conservative opinion.
  - Roboprog 15y ago
    Such people seem more than ready to forget about something called "Jubilee" in the Old Testament, it seems. Jubilee was essentially a 100% property tax (property, not income) collected (and redistributed) twice a century. Of course, that era in that tradition had no aristocracy, despite the supposed "divine right" of such. It's funny how people can skim through a 1200 page book and select just the parts they want to emphasize. I could go on, but I'm getting way off topic.
kevinpet 15y ago
The first half of your comment is idiotic and unworthy of HN. Find me someone who has actually stated that the poor deserve their lot. The Tea Party's primary gripe is that the government is picking winners and losers and the best way to get rich is now to lobby rather than to work hard. Even Reagan, the godlike idol of the small-government right, never thought the poor deserved it, he just thought that the best way to help them was to grow the economy as a whole (through policies that ultimately sucked). The second half I also disagree with, but it's just a failure of logic and a disconnect of values, not flat out idiotic.
- forensic 15y ago
  The Tea Party has millions of people, so there may be a few different views in there. However my impression was that the bulk of the Tea Party harbors a lot of hate for welfare recipients and social services in general. They believe the poor should pull themselves up via bootstraps and should not receive direct help from the government. Am I wrong about this?
  - jgesture 15y ago
    Believing that someone shouldn't receive direct help from the government isn't the same thing as believing that they shouldn't receive help. This is a false dilemma. As, perhaps, a kind of silly example, a couple of weeks ago, my car wasn't working, I was immobile. I didn't and don't believe that the government should've helped me get my car working. But I did believe that I should be helped. I called a couple of my friends and now my car is working again.
  - OstiaAntica 15y ago
    It is quite the opposite of "hate" to believe that independence and self-reliance are the best approach to solving poverty.

learc83 15y ago

Just because I might disagree with your methods of equalizing income, doesn't mean I "believe poor people deserve their lot and should wallow in it." You've turned a political disagreement about the methods to accomplish some desirable goal do so into a moral argument. You've decided that if I think there is a better way to elevate the poor than your way, I must want them to stay poor and thus must be evil. Why do you feel you need to frame the argument as such?

forensic 15y ago
Politics and morality are intimately related. There are SOME free market ideologues who believe that unrestrained corporations will enrich the poor, however I believe they are in the minority. You may be one of them. The majority of libertarians believe that individual property rights are sacrosanct and that it is wrong to forcibly redistribute wealth to prevent poverty, hunger, suffering. This is the argument of the Tea Party to my knowledge. Am I wrong? Right now the excess wealth is in the hands of the rich, especially the top one-tenth-of-one-percent (0.1%). Society is presented with a choice: (a) we can take it from them and redistribute it to the bottom 80%, or (b) we can let them keep it and allow people to suffer. (a) is a moral statement, that the poverty of the poor trumps the property rights of the rich. (b) is a moral statement, that the property rights of the rich trump the poverty of the poor. Almost all proposed actions in this situation amount to either (a) or (b). The wealth of society can increase over time, but at any single point in time it is a fixed quantity whose distribution is intimately related to whether poor people exist or not.
- jgesture 15y ago
  It is good to take care not to create a false dilemma. Of course the government is not the only actor that can, or should, address moral problems. As I understand libertarianism, they are not at all against solving issues of poverty or hunger. But they do believe that the government is not necessarily the best solution to every problem. Of course that statement should be obvious, as government tends to be less efficient and more watered down than other organizations. So the question is in the details.
- sgoranson 15y ago
  Economics is not like religion; there are actual correct and incorrect answers. As a newer field, we not always know how to find the correct answers yet. But that isn't an excuse to start treating it more like religion and less like science. "we can let them keep it and allow people to suffer." Using your feelings to guide your monetary policy decisions is no better than the creationists forcing ID to be taught in schools. If your hunch is that a Keynesian approach is ideal, cool. Many would agree. But choosing it because it's the obvious "moral" choice just dumbs down the whole debate, opens the door to all sorts of emotional reactionary ignorance, and doesn't get us any closer to the right answer.
  - cwp 15y ago
    Economics is exactly like religion. There are correct and incorrect answers, but most people ignore them, and believe something that makes them feel good about their place in the world.
  - arethuza 15y ago
    "As a newer field, we not always know how to find the correct answers yet." If I may say so, that is a rather refreshingly humble statement for an economist to make.
  - notahacker 15y ago
    There are correct answers to questions like "will redistributing income from group X to group Y improve overall productivity?" but they're neither necessary nor sufficient criterion for policy formulation. (Keynesians, like their neoclassical economist critics tend to be favourably disposed towards assessing policy impact based on empirical evidence; Austrians on the fringe Right argue the economy is too complex to act as a testing ground) Questions like "is better aggregate economic growth a justification for disproportionate tax increases for these people?" or "if the bottom percentile are hungry, should feeding them take precedence over growth objectives?" are inherently moral
wanorris 15y ago
For one thing, because there is no evidence I'm aware of that any tangible, real-world action originates from the belief that the poor should be "elevated" in some other manner. When the government gives poor single moms peanut butter to make sure that her kids have protein to eat, that gets measured, and we can perform efficacy studies on it. When the government gives housing stipends to poor families so that they have a home to live in, we can measure that too. If the enormous segment of the population that doesn't believe the government should be helping the poor is initiating some kind of private action that has broad, measurable effects on the plight of the poor, I would be delighted to hear about it. If not, then this claim that some other action should be taken kind of seems like a red herring in the discussion, because that means that the only practical options on the table are for the government to do something or for the government to not do something.
- OstiaAntica 15y ago
  The government has largely crowded out private action. Before the American welfare state was created, mutual aid societies and churches filled the welfare gap. These institutions were generally more effective in their mission than government today, and the fabric of our society was far richer for it. Today, helping the poor largely means lobbying for more spending for some program.
  - prodigal_erik 15y ago
    There was very little to be crowded out. When funding was opt-in, the result was a vanity safety net far too weak for any serious problems. That's why Dickens portrayed such a hellhole. Why communities organized around private charity declared defeat and posted "OKIES MOVE ON" signs during the Great Depression (which is what led to creating a welfare state that actually kind of met the needs). Why even churches need government funds to keep their own food banks open. The problem is bigger than the number of volunteers paying more than their share.
msutherl 15y ago
The reason that the government should take care of the poor and the sick is not because it is the most efficient and moral way to do so. Indeed, given appropriate conditions, I concede that "the market" and the goodwill of "the people" would be capable of ensuring that their needs are met in a more efficient and, according to libertarian logic, more ethical manner. The reason that the government should provide this welfare service, however, is that it results in an incredibly desirable situation where any citizen of the United States would know that, no matter what the state of the (semi-)unregulated economy, it is guaranteed that they will be taken care of. Were welfare left to the emergent logic of the market, somebody who, say, depends on medication to fight a chronic condition or somebody who cannot for some reason hold a job reliably (like my pan-handler friend who can't get a job because of his face tattoo and rotting teeth) would not be able to count on being able to survive should there be a severe economic depression or a war. To live in a society where somebody who depends on an external institution to them to keep them alive cannot absolutely depend on that regardless of the economic climate is, in my opinion, uncivilized, and for such a person, downright hellish. If you could convince me that the market is more reliable over time than the US government, then by all means, I might consider the dismantling of the welfare state a viable option.
- dpatru 15y ago
  > The reason that the government should provide . . . welfare . . . is that it results in an incredibly desirable situation where any citizen of the United States would know that, no matter what . . . it is guaranteed that they will be taken care of. I don't see it desirable to disconnect causes from consequences. Quite the opposite. Society functions best when people are very aware that their choices have consequences and when they choose to act in ways that produce good consequences. In fact, individual responsibility is essential to civilization. Society would just fall apart if more than a few percent of people began acting irresponsibly. For example, America has a problem with education. There are a lot of children not learning despite a lot of money being spent. I think a root cause of the problem is students knowing that nothing bad will happen to them if they don't work hard in school. If all the unmotivated students would be put to work for a few weeks in picking crops, with the promise that this will be their lot in life if they don't learn, I suspect the education problem would solve itself quickly. We live in a world where it is possible to be tremendously productive and wealthy. But it is still necessary to labor and be disciplined to achieve wealth. Retirement, doing nothing productive knowing that you will still be able to eat tomorrow, should be the reward of years of diligent work, not the entitlement of the lazy who want to benefit from the toil of others without contributing.
jberryman 15y ago
> Why do you feel you need to frame the argument as such? While it might not be your view, the notion that the poor "deserve their lot" and even that their being poor is the Will of God (evangelical prosperity theology) is literally a mainstream conservative position. If this doesn't ring a bell then you haven't actually been paying attention.
- learc83 15y ago
  Myself, I'm libertarian, but I grew up in a very conservative household, surrounded by conservatives at church, and I was a conservative until my early twenties. I have never met a conservative who believed that the poor "deserve their lot." And I can't think of one single conservative I know who wouldn't love to see the elimination of poverty. They just disagree with the liberal method. If this were really the case why would conservatives donate money to charity? Why would conservative churches run food kitchens?
  - pyre 15y ago
    How many of those conservative churches accept government money to run their soup kitchens?
  - brycecolquitt 15y ago
    Just as anecdotally, I have met plenty of them.
  - jberryman 15y ago
    I should have clarified that when I said "mainstream conservative position" i meant that it's espoused by mainstream political figures (some current republican pres. Candidate for instance), rather than that it is the dominant conservative opinion.
- Roboprog 15y ago
  Such people seem more than ready to forget about something called "Jubilee" in the Old Testament, it seems. Jubilee was essentially a 100% property tax (property, not income) collected (and redistributed) twice a century. Of course, that era in that tradition had no aristocracy, despite the supposed "divine right" of such. It's funny how people can skim through a 1200 page book and select just the parts they want to emphasize. I could go on, but I'm getting way off topic.

kevinpet 15y ago

The first half of your comment is idiotic and unworthy of HN. Find me someone who has actually stated that the poor deserve their lot. The Tea Party's primary gripe is that the government is picking winners and losers and the best way to get rich is now to lobby rather than to work hard. Even Reagan, the godlike idol of the small-government right, never thought the poor deserved it, he just thought that the best way to help them was to grow the economy as a whole (through policies that ultimately sucked). The second half I also disagree with, but it's just a failure of logic and a disconnect of values, not flat out idiotic.

forensic 15y ago
The Tea Party has millions of people, so there may be a few different views in there. However my impression was that the bulk of the Tea Party harbors a lot of hate for welfare recipients and social services in general. They believe the poor should pull themselves up via bootstraps and should not receive direct help from the government. Am I wrong about this?
- jgesture 15y ago
  Believing that someone shouldn't receive direct help from the government isn't the same thing as believing that they shouldn't receive help. This is a false dilemma. As, perhaps, a kind of silly example, a couple of weeks ago, my car wasn't working, I was immobile. I didn't and don't believe that the government should've helped me get my car working. But I did believe that I should be helped. I called a couple of my friends and now my car is working again.
- OstiaAntica 15y ago
  It is quite the opposite of "hate" to believe that independence and self-reliance are the best approach to solving poverty.