Clayton Cramer says that he used to qualify as a liberal, but that the liberalism left him. His post is about how liberals refuse to acknowledge that some poor people are poor by choice becuase of laziness or drug use. He then goes on to allude that our welfare system should be more like England's in the mid-1800s.
As I discuss in this paper about the English Poor Law of 1834, it was not just stinginess that caused English welfare laws to be so cramped in how they treated the poor; it was recognition that welfare must provide "less-eligible conditions" than working. In short, welfare had to be more miserable than working, to encourage those in need to work if at all possible.Agreed that some people could getoff of welfare if they'd get off drugs, and agreed that some folks are just plain L-A-Z-Y. But returning to Dickensian England is a bad idea. "PLease, sir, may I have some more gruel." Some liberal.
I'd comment directly to Cramer, except 1) his blog doesn't have a comment function. You can email him, but then of course any dissenting opinion cannot be seen. And 2) I refuse to jump through his little hoop of putting "spamIamnot" in the subject line.
2 comments:
Liberals are easy to argue with when you put dumb arguments in their mouths.
No one's refusing to acknowledge that poverty can be self-inflicted. Unfortunately, the way things are set-up, poverty is also self-perpetuating. The point is that it doesn't really matter who is inflicting it when people are living in conditions where they aren't able make better lives for themselves. Making poverty harder does only that; making financial solvency easier is a much more sensible way of making progress.
I would say that Clayton, if he were and intelligent person, is about to make the great leap of compassion that identifies the catch-22 pattern that maintains the status-quo of the poor, that there is very little possibility of climbing the social ladder that does everything it can to keep them poor. Welfare, clean up, job, lose welfare, don't make enough money to actually live and maintain a decent life, get depressed, do drugs, lose job and start all over again. Of course, there are other circles, other patterns that can be acknowledged, but when people like Cramer ignore the realities that society is made up of classes that requires a poor class, there can be very little done to actually fix the conditions at the bottom.
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