Poverty is one of the oldest problems in the world. For much of history, it was intractable and grimly inevitable. Today, there is good news and bad news about poverty in the United States.
The good news: Most Americans, even those experiencing financial stress, enjoy a level of affluence scarcely imagined in the year 1900. Indeed, due to the myriad scientific and technological breakthroughs of the past 120 years, the typical American can afford amenities and luxuries that weren’t even available to Queen Victoria and other 19th-century monarchs. The average poor American today has an economic standard of living comparable to that of the average middle-class American in 1950.
The bad news: There are persistent pockets of poverty in our country. Statistics about “average” standards of living mask that some poor Americans are very poor. The key question is: Why? For what reasons does acute poverty stubbornly persist amidst our unprecedented affluence?
What nasty people would do something as cold-hearted as “blaming” poor people for being poor? It isn’t American to kick people when they’re down, is it?
Well, Smith’s article identifies those culprits: “Many conservatives in the U.S. believe that poverty is mainly a result of bad personal decisions.” There are serious problems with the wording of this statement. It meanly, and, more importantly, dishonestly mischaracterizes the mindset of conservative social scientists. Conservative experts on poverty aren’t going around “blaming” poor people or trying to lay guilt trips on them.
I have read and listened to some of the leading conservative experts on poverty, and they are compassionate people who, far from turning their noses up and their backs toward the poor, sincerely want to help them.
Nor is it accurate to assert that conservatives “believe” that some people are poor because of certain choices they make along the way, as if such a conclusion is an unfounded superstition. It isn’t. On the contrary, it’s a simple, incontrovertible fact that some Americans languish in poverty as a consequence of dropping out of high school, having children out of wedlock, getting caught up in substance abuse, or simply being unwilling to work. To deny that is unscientific. The obvious goal of the author is to disparage conservative analyses of the poverty problem—to intimidate conservatives into remaining silent about individual choices and behaviors as factors that contribute to poverty.
Read the book of Proverbs some time, and you will read variations on the message “Lazy hands make a person poor.” (Prov. 10:4). The job of social scientists is neither to condemn nor ignore these factors, but to acknowledge that they exist. Inconvenient truths don’t fade away and disappear if we ignore them. We must be willing to confront reality as it is, for in no other way do we have a chance to understand the phenomenon of poverty accurately and address it intelligently.
The article goes on to say, “According to [the conservative] perspective, if people were just to work hard, avoid drugs, alcohol, and violence, and stop having children out of wedlock, poverty would be rare.” The only quibble I have with this statement is the word “rare.” Conservatives maintain that under those conditions, the incidence of poverty in the United States would be lower, and probably significantly lower, than it is.
What Can Be Done?
The question of what can be done to reduce poverty can be broken down into two parts: What can poor people themselves do to climb out of poverty, and what can the non-poor members of society do to help the poor escape poverty?Having chosen to minimize the role of the first category, the author focuses on the second. He asserts, “... the main causes of poverty are more related to the economy’s structure.” Here, he finds fault with “the capitalist system” and concludes that the federal social safety net needs to be enlarged. I respectfully disagree.
The question of what the non-poor can do to eradicate poverty has no easy answers. At the very least, though, let’s not consume scarce resources doing what doesn’t work. The problem I have with the recommendation to enlarge the government’s social safety net is that no matter how much money the federal government spends on poverty, the poverty rate remains stuck in the same narrow range.
Before the federal government decided to launch the War on Poverty, the poverty rate was locked into a long-term downtrend. Since the War on Poverty began, the poverty rate has hovered stubbornly between 11 and 15 percent for the last 50 years, despite Uncle Sam spending approximately $25 trillion on anti-poverty programs.
Look at that red line again: Year after year, we have continued to spend more and more, but poverty not only hasn’t diminished, it hasn’t even improved. Here’s the lesson we need to learn: Government is incompetent to cure poverty. American taxpayers haven’t been cheap and under-taxed; far from it. But we do deserve a better return on our massive expenditures than what we’ve been getting for the past half-century.
Smith’s article cites a lot of information about Japan in an attempt to buttress his case for a large government-funded safety net. One way of looking at his data is to notice that even though the Japanese people show amazingly low incidences of the problematical behaviors that contribute to poverty in the United States, they still have nearly as high a poverty rate as we do, despite spending a larger share of their GDP on the social safety net than we do. Conclusion: even in Japan, poverty persists despite higher social-welfare spending.
Again: Government is incompetent to eliminate poverty. It can reduce statistical poverty, but only inefficiently and at enormous cost. (In passing, it should be noted that cross-cultural comparisons are problematical. Japan, for example, has long been a relatively closed economy, which has inhibited integration into the global division of labor. The Japanese economy operates on the basis of old-boy networks, resulting in economic opportunities for unconnected Japanese being hard to come by.)
So, if the federal government can’t solve the poverty problem, who can? That leaves the private sector—which was doing a pretty good job of reducing the poverty rate in the United States in the years before the War on Poverty began. One can only imagine how many tens or hundreds of thousands of businesses and millions of jobs could have been created if that $25 trillion had been left in the private sector.
Not Utopian
We need to remember that capitalism isn’t a planned program of economic production. What we call “capitalism” is simply a framework wherein people are free to engage in whatever law-abiding activity they choose (as long as they don’t trespass on the rights of others, of course). It was never expected that it would guarantee universal prosperity; capitalism simply guarantees the freedom to strive for prosperity to the best of one’s ability, initiative, resourcefulness, and so on.Voluntary Charity
How, then, can opportunities for the poor be increased in a capitalist system? To be honest, I don’t have a plan, but there are people in our society who can help. These are the would-be entrepreneurs whom excessive government interference (barriers such as taxes, regulations, needless licensing, and taxpayer-supported competitors) too often stifles. Get government out of the way, and new jobs and wealth will roll back the incidence of poverty. Further, some of that new wealth can fund private initiatives to reach out and help the most disadvantaged poor, such as the homeless.So, how can the poor be helped? Smith would say, “Voluntarily.” While justice—the preservation of man’s unalienable, God-given rights—was, to him and to our founders, the indispensable social virtue, so beneficence—the voluntary reaching out individually or as part of a voluntary civic or church group of citizens—is the crowning jewel of a good society. In fact, Smith endorsed and practiced voluntary Christian charity. A lifelong bachelor who lived modestly, the executor of his estate discovered that he had given half of his annual income to the poor for many years. We should remember that, in addition to its repeated disapproval of laziness, the Book of Proverbs also commends charity: “The generous will themselves be blessed, for they share their food with the poor.” (Prov. 22:9)
I don’t pretend to know how we can re-instill a spirit of Christian charity in our country, but I hope, for the sake of the poor, that we can. A revival of Christian values and a healthy, free, unencumbered private-property order would do more to reduce poverty than any program or series of government programs could accomplish. This won’t happen overnight, and we will never achieve heaven on Earth, but relying on free people and voluntary action will lead to progress against poverty and help us avoid the pitfalls of economic, ethical, and political bankruptcy that other approaches expose us to.
