The Poor Are Immoral
“In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor
alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.” (Anatole
France, 1921 Nobel Prize winner for Literature.)
One of my routes home is, in fact, under a bridge underpass
where between one and three desperately poor, filthy, miserable, and often soaked
and freezing homeless men camp out. One
tries to keep his personal belongings in a couple of carts, but the others
scatter garbage (and, occasionally, less attractive items) in “their”
areas. I have no idea what their
experience with the law might be, but it’s safe to assume that if there are interactions,
they might not be entirely gentle.
Walk the streets of my city, an epicenter of some of the
greatest wealth in the world, and you will see similar scenes—in parks, on the
steps leading to churches, on benches, on the promenades that overlook the
Hudson and East Rivers. They are there--and
they are the tip of the iceberg, because more than 50,000 people, over a third
of them children, sleep in shelters every night.
The poor, of course, are not confined to cities. 50 years ago, LBJ launched his war on poverty
with a trip to Appalachia, and the black and white images of shotgun shacks
with no indoor plumbing, one room school houses, rusted trucks, and barefoot
children still have emotional resonance.
Nor is rural and exurban poverty a thing of the past, or just something
that comes with an accent. A doctor
friend who lives and works in upstate New York told me the other day is that
the most visible evidence is her patient’s teeth. They just can’t afford a dentist, and there
is neither the money to attract dentists to come to the area, nor to support a
free dental clinic.
Who is to blame for all of this? Why even talk about blame
when people are in need? Because we live
in a political world as well, where the greatest wealth and power, by far, is
that possessed by the government. Government can regulate, and tax, and
redistribute, and subsidize. And,
however coldly some of our electeds may divide up the spoils in private, in
public they adopt the language of blame and immorality to justify their
choices. Barack Obama talks about the
one percent and income inequality.
Republicans talk about freeloaders and free cellphones.
These words are clearly emotional shorthand—a way to razz up
the base. By focusing on a caricature (the cigar-puffing
plutocrat, the welfare queen) they dehumanize the issue. They
don’t provide an intellectual framework for any solutions—in fact they almost
guarantee the status quo, as both sides hunker down and fight smaller
skirmishes for small prizes that have mostly symbolic value. The argument over extended unemployment
insurance is an excellent example of that.
That process tends to provide an emotional safe-haven for
the vast majority of us. We don’t have
to think about ameliorating the plight of people sleeping under bridges and
rotted teeth and kids who go hungry. We
can walk past them, as I do, when I take that route home.
But most of us also know this emotional model is incomplete.
We would prefer a binary, moral definition of wealth and poverty. Politics attempts to provide that as a means
to an end. On the far Left, wealth
(particularly excessive wealth when others are in need) is wrong and needs to
be rectified by state action. Charity
becomes egalitarianism and egalitarianism becomes a justification for
redistribution on a large scale. On the
far Right, unemployment and poverty is the genetic marker for immorality. People don’t work because they have a
character deficiency: they don’t want to work--they are strictly “takers” and
the way to bring them to the path of righteousness is through tough love (and,
if necessary, starvation.)
Most of us, however, are in neither camp. We know that every person of wealth does not
wake every day wondering which company they can buy up, loot the pension plan, close
the plant, lay off the 1,000 workers, and cause the small company town it is located
in to careen into decrepitude. And we
also know that most of the poor don’t get into their Escalades to drive to the
store to buy junk food with their food stamps. But we don’t really know how fix
it, and we have our own lives to live, so we content ourselves with worm-eaten
chestnuts. Detachment is safe,
comfortable, and I have my children’s tuitions to pay.
A friend sent me an article from Ethics written by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt, “Equality as a
Moral Ideal.” In it Frankfurt rejects
the idea of economic egalitarianism and economic equality as an ideal and
embraces what he terms “the doctrine of sufficiency.” “(W)ith respect to the distribution of
economic assets, what is important from the point of view of morality is not
that everyone should have the same but that each should have enough.”
Intuitively, that makes some sense, at least from a moral
perspective, although in today’s political environment one would think that
places Frankfurt far left. But Frankfurt expressly rejects an egalitarianism
that ends in income equality, and goes to considerable length to debunk the
opinions of others who are more sympathetic to that view. I may be paraphrasing
somewhat here, but Frankfurt wouldn’t
take my kid’s college savings accounts in order to fund Universal Pre-K.
I found Frankfurt a very challenging read, so I asked my
friend, a generous person and high achiever, what he saw as his moral
obligation. “I don't think there's a moral duty to do anything other than deal
with people in distress.”
Then I saw Tom Donlan’s “Poverty and Measurement” in this
week’s Barron’s. To him, LBJ’s War of Poverty has been akin to General Westmoreland’s
infamous “destroying the village in order to save it.” He says, “In 50 years of programs to
reduce the pain of living in poverty, the U.S. paid too little attention to
reconstructing the damage that poverty wreaks on character. The final struggle
in the war on poverty must be to restore the balance between government support
and individual earnings.”
Donlan, for all his astringent Calvinism, is right. Transfer payments without a way out are the
equivalent of opiates for someone with a broken leg. They may dull the edge, but if you don’t
reduce the fracture and put a cast on it, there’s not going to be a lot of
walking going on. And without that way out, every act of personal charity my
friend (and all of us) might make are drops of water in the ocean. As are the “sufficiency” aspirations of
Frankel. We will never get to “enough.”
But Donlan’s pleasant poetry of character building for the
poor through the application of more pain falls short as well. We have a moral duty to stop bellying up to
the bar ourselves and instead demand that our politicians, who run the biggest
business in town by far, do the same. You want people to be self-supporting? Stop
demeaning them--or enabling them--and focus your energies on creating economic
opportunity.
Both the President and several prominent Republicans have
started talking about ways to address this, but they can best begin anew by
discarding every comforting nostrum.
It’s not starving the poor or giving them more, it’s not further
incentivizing the “job creators” or taxing them more, it is having a rational
discussion—and political horse-trading is encouraged if that is what it take to
get it done. Give people the chance to
pull themselves out of poverty, and my bet is that you would find the “immorality”
levels dropping rapidly in this country.
Can our politicians do this?
To return to Anatole France, “It is human nature to think wisely and to
act in an absurd fashion.”
Perhaps that’s a maybe?
Michael Liss (Moderate Moderator)
Questions or comments? Email
And join us on Twitter @SyncPol
