The Little Red Blog

Let Them Eat Moral Fiber

“I will show you a better way…” 1 Corinthians (translations vary)

If Paul Ryan spent half as much time as he does hectoring the poor and devising ways to hold them accountable for their measly government benefits; if he spent, as I say, half that much time preventing billionaires like donald trump from gaming the system ("I'd be stupid not to") in order to escape paying taxes, we’d be a much fairer nation.  But Representative Ryan (R-Hooverville) has his sights set not on the uber rich but on the hapless poor.

Talia Lavin (at The Baffler) rightly notes that one of the more pernicious effects of the trumpy victory is that it puts Ryan, as Speaker of the House, in charge of shredding dismantling overhauling the social safety net, the one he has characterized as a “hammock” for moochers and idlers who (for their own good, of course) must be disabused of the notion that they’re “entitled” to anything—including food.

Ms. Lavin ably demolishes Speaker Ryan’s agenda, which he has heralded as “A Better Way” for America:

His “Better Way” plan is as ambitious as its blue-eyed messenger. In the name of a more “confident” and “bold” America, it constitutes a comprehensive restructuring—and dismantling—of benefits on a scale that dwarfs Clintonian welfare reform. A throughline in Ryan’s plan is a principle that Mather might have approved of: pervasive and draconian work requirements. These extend beyond those who receive direct cash assistance to other programs, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which aids twenty-eight million Americans yearly to purchase nutritious food. In this fashion, the Speaker claims, he will aid Americans in poverty to “make the most of their lives.” A “Better Way” factsheet implores supporters to “Reward Work,” informing us that “an increasing number of SNAP recipients are work-capable adults,” and lamenting, falsely, that “most welfare programs do not actually require or even encourage work.” ¹

After taking Ryan to task on the many falsehoods and misconceptions that underlie his proposals, Ms. Lavin turns to history (and to an historian) for a comparison:

To the food historian Andrew Coe, co-author with Jane Ziegelman of A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression, the brittle, peppy ethos of the “Better Way” recalls another period in American history wherein Republicans controlled the House, the Senate, and the Presidency: the administration of Herbert Hoover. “A Square Meal” depicts with chilling precision Hoover’s decision to decline to give direct food aid to those starving in the early years of the Depression, under the principle, first articulated by President Grover Cleveland, that “though the people support the Government, the Government should not support the people.”

“The moral condemnation of idleness, which goes through the history of the U.S., you can still see it in today’s Republican Congress,” Coe said in a recent interview. “It’s a very hard-hearted, self-centered viewpoint, but it’s definitely part of the dark side of American culture.”

During the Hoover era, the president dined from gold-plated dishes while sharecroppers in the South starved in their shacks, and breadlines threaded through American streets. Coe and Ziegelman portray Hoover as a president caught in the grips of ideology, unwilling to change his policies in response to the dire needs of his citizens.² While farmers in Arkansas rioted for food in 1931, Hoover recoiled at the prospect of a direct food aid bill, while a supporter of his in Congress, James Tilson, predicted that “the idle and shiftless will accept it as a gift, dismiss any attempt at repayment, and live off the Federal Government as long as the opportunity exists.”

Talia Lavin recognizes latter-day Hooverism when she sees it:

The narrative that Ryan depicts is distinguishable from Tilson’s vociferous disgust for the “shiftless” only in its blander rhetoric. The “Better Way” offers a paper-thin veneer of narrative—the notion that work requirements are a form of necessary encouragement to the loafing indigent—to cover its essential harshness, what Coe describes as “the streak of cruelty” that stretches from Mather to Hoover to the current Republican party. What the welfare debate requires is a counter-narrative: one that posits, with more forceful, open, and accurate moral rhetoric, but the same urgency, that no one should starve in the wealthiest country in the world.

But this plainly obvious moral truth is not enough, since condemnation of poverty, and the attendant conflation of poverty with poor character, has deep roots in the American character, and therefore demands a deracination of great vigor. We must decouple poverty from moral failure, lack of work from shiftlessness, need from parasitism. The mealy-mouthed, Randian platitudes of the “Better Way” mask an extraordinary failure of compassion, and a willingness to ignore the reality of those who want to work yet suffer from starvation in homes from coast to coast.³

Our problem right now is that we, the American electorate, have handed the reins of power to a demagogue  charlatan man who has shown no inclination whatsoever to use them to restrain Paul Ryan and his Republican colleagues.  Ms. Lavin urges us “to contend” with our present circumstances “with ingenuity,” but I’m not sure there’s enough ingenuity in the world to stop Speaker Ryan from imposing his “Better Way” upon us—for our own good, of course.

_________________________________________________________________

http://thebaffler.com/blog/hoover-ryan-lavin

¹ I can’t prove that Paul Ryan chose the slogan “A Better Way” to deliberately evoke the apostle Paul; but since it was also Paul (of Tarsus, not Wisconsin) who supposedly penned the admonition “If a man will not work, he shall not eat,” I’m willing to bet that Speaker Ryan had him in mind.

² We have met the enemy and it is ideology (although president-elect trumpy, whatever his faults, is no ideologue), which I define as “a preference for ideas over facts.” Ideology is a bipartisan scourge; whether from the Right or from the Left, it imperils both critical thought and open-minded discourse. For ideologues, the conclusion on any issue has been reached and there’s no point in considering evidence or engaging in further discussion. Ideology is where thinking goes to die; as some wit has (probably) said, a mind, unlike a bed, is not better off for having been made up in advance.   

³ “Randian platitudes”: the reference, of course, is to Ayn Rand, Paul Ryan’s ideological pin-up girl whose Atlas Shrugged changed the course of Ryan’s thinking, his life, and—if we don’t prevent it—the lives of millions of Americans, and not for the better.

Sunday Sermon

Peter Leithart:

It’s a truism of Old Testament studies that “poverty” in the Bible isn’t merely an economic condition. To be poor is not only to lack property and tangible wealth. It connotes deprivation in a wider sense.

Psalm 10 illustrates the point. The wicked who does not believe in God (vv. 3-4) seem to be prosperous, unmovable, unaffected by adversity (vv. 5-6). The wicked man attacks the innocent with impunity (v. 8), and his “eyes lie in wait for the poor” (v. 8b). That last phrase might mean simply that the wicked looks for an opportunity to take advantage of the poor, but given the connotations of “eyes” in Scripture it might have a more specific, judicial connotation. The wicked has power to twist the law to his advantage, against the poor. The Psalm compares the wicked to a lion waiting for prey, crouching, bowing, finally pouncing on the afflicted (vv. 9-10), all the while saying that God won’t see and judge what he’s done (v. 11).

The Psalmist’s prayer is not that the Lord would make the poor wealthy, but that He would remember and defend the afflicted, proving Himself to be the “helper of the orphan” who commits himself to the Lord (vv. 12-14). What the poor needs isn’t a handout but rescue. He looks to the Lord to “break the arm of the wicked and the evildoer” (v. 15).

Throughout the Psalm, the disparity between the wicked and the “poor” is a disparity of power. It’s probably also a disparity of wealth. The wicked has “mighty ones” who will carry out his plots against the vulnerable (v. 10); he has an entourage, and is able to keep them around because he can pay them. But the disparity of wealth is relevant here because wealth is a form of power. (Dostoevsky called money “coined freedom”; it is also “coined power.”) The wicked can afford to hire thugs and to pay off the cops and judges; the poor man doesn’t have the resources to purchase the most basic defense.

Poverty also seems to be social deprivation. The orphan doesn’t have parents to protect him, and the poor in the Psalm is isolated and alone. If he had advocates and defenders, troops and networks of friends, he wouldn’t be so vulnerable. He could fight back against the thugs; he could find someone with more power to defend him. He has only one defense, the King who vindicates the orphan and oppressed (vv. 16-18), who gives the safety that the poor long for (Psalm 12:5).

The Psalm exhorts us to faith, but also hints at a paradigm for relief work. What the poor need isn’t money per se, certainly not wealth so they can become good consumers in the global economy. They need power, the power that comes through social networks, the power that comes through advocates, the power of legal protection. Insofar as they need money, they need it to secure the power that wealth affords.

https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/leithart/2016/10/the-powerless-poor

Sunday Sermon

David Mills:

Those who refer so happily to [capitalism's] creative destruction are never themselves among the creatively destroyed. It’s the ideological free-marketer’s version of "Let’s you and him fight." It speaks of the end in a way that makes invisible those who suffer from the means.

[The poor] are not collateral, forgettable damage in the process of creating wealth, as the language of "creative destruction" makes them. Even if over time [certain] kinds of economic activities...produce the greatest good for the greatest number, we should not forget the losses and the "losers" in the way we speak about economics. Their ends and interests should form the way we speak.

We need what [we] might call a preferential rhetorical option for the poor as part of the normal and normative way we speak about economics.

The "preferential option for the poor" refers to the [idea] that the poor go first in the distribution of goods, defined broadly to include not only the physical necessities of life but rights like religious freedom and economic opportunity...Who is the poor is a difficult question, but I’d suggest that these days and in these discussions it includes much of the middle class, whose jobs can be taken away by people who restructure companies for efficiency.

The poor should go first in the distribution of the good of attention. Any sustained statement about economic theory should relate that theory to the poor. If an idea is praised for creating wealth, it should be interrogated for its effect on the vulnerable. One should not speak as if real people were not involved and if general improvement were not bought at a great cost to some.

Even the most ardent free-marketer, driven by the most generous vision of human flourishing, should, when he speaks of the great future ends of economic freedom, speak also of those affected for the worse now. If he must talk about creative destruction, he should speak of those for whom that produces only suffering. it’s the charitable way of speaking. It’s also analytically useful: Having to think about the effect on the poor will force the free-marketer and his readers to think more carefully and understand more deeply about the process they’re praising.

Not everyone feels bound by Christian morality, of course, but that doesn’t let them off the hook. Even someone who feels no obligation to follow the heroic demands of Christian charity should know that basic human kindness and solidarity, and what Orwell called "decency," require him to remember the "losers" when he speaks about success.

https://ethikapolitika.org/2016/01/25/speaking-poor-especially-youre-not-preferential-rhetorical-option-poor/

 

Welfare, Conservative-Style?

It’s nice to read an argument (and from a writer at National Review, no less) on behalf of “a conservative welfare state,” especially when coupled with an acknowledgment that a politics of “indiscriminate resistance” to entitlement programs is, in the long run, untenable. 

Pete Spiliakos, whose work I’ve occasionally read at First Things, seems eminently reasonable on this topic, at least compared to most others on the political Right.  Spiliakos begins by waxing nostalgic:

Welfare reform was the last great conservative policy victory. It is worth thinking about how it happened. Charles Murray and George Gilder were the most acute critics of welfare policy, but their proposals for sharply reducing benefits were never going to happen. Politically, if the choice had been between simply reducing benefits or not reforming welfare at all, welfare would have stayed unreformed.

Welfare reform was built around the work requirement and eligibility time-limit proposals of Lawrence Mead. Mead specifically argued that welfare should not be understood as a question of big government versus small government. It was a deal between able-bodied recipients and society. Society had a right to expect the able-bodied to seek to become self-supporting in return for aid. Cutting government wasn’t the point. Mead made the point that work requirements involved making the government more demanding and less libertarian.

One can argue whether the welfare reforms of the 1990s were wise and whether they have proven either effective or equitable; but “reform” is at least a form of compromise, something today’s conservatives equate with abject surrender.  It was not always thus. Spiliakos provides some historical context:

This kind of thinking was not new to conservatives. Almost 50 years ago, James Burnham wrote, in National Review that a welfare state was an inevitable part of modern society and that, “by indiscriminate resistance to welfarism, conservatives have indirectly nurtured the welfare state.” In the 1970s, Irving Kristol wrote in the Wall Street Journal that, since we were going to have a welfare state regardless, what we needed was a pro-responsibility, conservative welfare state.

That is the kind of thinking we need now — only not about AFDC, but about health-care markets and the withdrawal from work and marriage among prime-age, low-skill males. Someone is going to do something about those issues — even if only just to make things worse. Simply playing defense means that we are going to inadvertently nurture left-wing answers to these social problems

By "simply playing defense," Spiliakos must mean "a strategy of total obstruction"; reading further between the lines, I think Mr. Spiliakos is saying “For God’s sake, stop demanding the repeal of Obamacare!  Instead, try fixing its flaws and making it better.”

What’s needed, Spiliakos thinks, is some sort of conservative “hook” set into our social benefit programs.  Just as work was the hook in the 1990s, the restoration of traditional families should be the hook for contemporary reforms:

Lawrence Mead built his welfare reform around work. We could do the same around today’s problems, while also doing what, sadly little, government can do to aid family formation. The ideas are out there. They could include wage subsidies for low-earners, ending marriage penalties in the tax code and the welfare state, tax credits for catastrophic health insurance so that people who work have access to reliable health care, stricter eligibility rules for disability, relocation vouchers, and blowing up the state job-licensing regimes so that it becomes easier to get training to get a job. 

Spiliakos displays both a disarming modesty and a pragmatic temperament when he writes “Some of these ideas might prove to be better than others, but the purpose should be to make it a little easier for people in the lower half of the income distribution to earn a living and raise their families.”  Rather than claiming (or even seeking) ideological purity, Spiliakos wants his ideas to rise or fall based on their actual effectiveness--a pretty outside-the-box approach these days for a conservative. 

He closes on a note of optimism tinged with resignation and a hint of trepidation:

We can offer the voters a more pro-work, pro-family, and pro-opportunity welfare state that would (incidentally) be much smaller and less socially destructive than the one that would be offered by the Left. A conservative welfare state might even be a precondition for a politics of solvency. If we force people to choose between conservative indifference and the Left’s expensive answers, we shouldn’t be surprised if they eventually choose a course that will bankrupt our country. One final word. If conservatives can’t come up with an American nationalism that can simultaneously speak to the interests and the social legitimacy of both white wage earners and recent immigrants (and their children), then nothing else matters.

One is tempted to say, well, good luck with that; but in this case, one would mean that sincerely. The conservative welfare state would not be my ideal or the ideal of many progressives, but it’s a whole lot better than anything conservatives have been offering of late, and a whole lot better than anything the likes of Paul Ryan are likely to offer in the future.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/440340/rush-limbaugh-and-conservative-welfare-state

Quick Takes

 

In "A Conservative Case for the Welfare State," former Reagan aide Bruce Bartlett spells out what shouldn't need to be spelled out: the "welfare state" is an indispensable aspect of the modern world, and America's reluctance--that is, American conservatives' reluctance--to accept it as such is both foolish and counterproductive.  Citing such bleeding-heart liberals as Otto Von Bismarck, Richard Nixon, and Irving Kristol, Bartlett shows (a) that the social safety net is a welcome buffer against the vagaries of competitive capitalism and against the social unrest to which such vagaries can lead, and (b) that stubborn resistance to that fact results in inefficiencies, inequities, and a diminishment of both social capital and human happiness.  The one thing Bruce Bartlett doesn't explain, however, is: why are we still having this argument?  If the Swiss, the Swedes, the Canadians, and the Australians have all figured it out, why haven't we?

http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/bruce-bartlett-conservative-case-for-welfare-state 

 

 

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

At Crisis, Nicholas Senz gets it right in arguing (in "Reason Is Not the Sole Property of Skeptics") that "science" and "reason" are not synonymous and that confusing the two is unhelpful--until the very last sentence of his essay, when he invokes the specter of totalitarianism for no good reason at all: "[Michael] Shermer may think he is avoiding Christendom, but he is pushing toward North Korea."  It's good to remember that science--a kind of instrumental rationality--can't set goals for us or instruct us as to values; and it's important to be aware that technology, the stepchild of science, is notoriously value-free as to its usage; but suggesting that "professional skeptics" like Michael Shermer are leading us toward totalitarianism is, quite frankly, an infantile reductio ad absurdum.  Christendom wasn't an unreasoning reign of terror, but neither is scientism a dystopian nightmare; Mr. Senz does his cause no favor by replacing one hyperbolic stereotype with another. 

  

http://www.crisismagazine.com/2015/reason-is-not-the-sole-property-of-skeptics

 

 

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 

 

 

SCARCITY: Why Having Too Little Means So Much Sendhil Mullainathan & Eldar Shafir

 

Thank goodness for behavioral economists, who devote their careers to illuminating the blindingly obvious.  In SCARCITY, for instance, we learn that (and why) it sucks to be poor.  Yes, say the authors, poor people make bad decisions, spend money foolishly, undermine their own futures, don't have much of a work ethic, and frequently fail as parents--but hey, you try being poor and see if you do any better!  SCARCITY is all about the "bandwidth tax" imposed on the poor, and if you don't know what that is, that's because you're not up on the latest jargon in behavioral economics, a field devoted to studying and explaining just why ordinary people don't think and act more like behavioral economists.  

Let Them Eat Dignity

According to Greg Forster¹ (blogging at “Work Cited” at Patheos), poverty in America has nothing to do with lack of money:

Let’s be clear: our problem today is not a lack of money. Recent big-think pieces in the New York Times and on National Public Radio have begun with the astonishing observation that in modern America, even the poor have all the money they really need. They have lots of problems, some of them shocking and urgently in need of help. But they also have food, clothing, shelter, cars, phones, televisions, and computers. If money could have solved their most pressing problems, it would have by now."

Mr. Forster cites a New York Times article.²  I followed the link he provided, and discovered that the article said this:

Despite improved living standards, the poor have fallen further behind the middle class and the affluent in both income and consumption. The same global economic trends that have helped drive down the price of most goods also have limited the well-paying industrial jobs once available to a huge swath of working Americans. And the cost of many services crucial to escaping poverty — including education, health care and child care — has soared.

“Without a doubt, the poor are far better off than they were at the dawn of the War on Poverty,” said James Ziliak, director of the University of Kentucky’s Center for Poverty Research. “But they have also drifted further away.”

It also said this:

Since the 1980s, for instance, the real price of a midrange color television has plummeted about tenfold, and televisions today are crisper, bigger, lighter and often Internet-connected. Similarly, the effective price of clothing, bicycles, small appliances, processed foods — virtually anything produced in a factory — has followed a downward trajectory. The result is that Americans can buy much more stuff at bargain prices.

Many crucial services, though, remain out of reach for poor families. The costs of a college education and health care have soared. Ms. Hagen-Noey, for instance, does not treat her hepatitis and other medical problems, as she does not qualify for Medicaid and cannot pay for her own insurance or care.

Child care also remains only a small sliver of the consumption of poor families because it is simply too expensive. In many cases, it depresses the earnings of women who have no choice but to give up hours working to stay at home.

“The average annual cost for infant care in the U.S. is $6,000 or $7,000 a year,” said Professor Ziliak of the University of Kentucky. “When you look at the average income of many single mothers, that is going to end up being a quarter of it. That’s huge. That is just out of reach for many folks.”

And this:

And many poor families barely make it from paycheck to paycheck. For evidence, economists point to the fact that children living in families with food stamps eat more calories at the beginning of the month than the end of it.

Economists pointed out that many low-income families struggled to use even the assets they had: keeping gas in the car, paying for cable and keeping the electricity on. Many families rely on expensive credit. And even if those families sold their assets, often it would only provide them with a small buffer, too. 

And it concluded with this:

In the end, many mainstream economists argue, the lives of the poor must be looked at in light of the nation’s overall wealth and economic advancement.

“If you handpick services and goods where there has been dramatic technological progress, then the fact that poor people can consume these items in 2014 and even rich people couldn’t consume them in 1954 is hardly a meaningful distinction,” said Gary Burtless, an economist at the Brookings Institution. “That’s not telling you who is rich and who is poor, not in the way that Adam Smith and most everyone else since him thinks about poverty.”

I have not checked the report that Mr. Forster cites from National Public Radio.  But it’s clear from the New York Times article in question that Greg Forster either is being disingenuous or has a problem with reading comprehension; the NYT article does not say that “the poor have all the money they really need.” That is Mr. Forster's opinion, and it's wrong.³

It’s true that poverty entails more than simply financial or material deprivation; dignity and respect are essential to human flourishing. But poverty also includes, even today, financial and material deprivation, televisions and cars notwithstanding. Mr. Forster ought to read his sources more carefully, or perhaps he needs some first-hand experience of what contemporary poverty is actually like.

In any case, when Forster writes that “Massive redistribution of wealth in the name of creating “equality” actually creates inequality in the one dimension that ultimately matters most: human dignity,” he is referring to a phenomenon (“massive redistribution of wealth”) that is wholly imaginary and, at the same time, he is being condescending to the poor—who, despite Forster’s scrupulous concern for their dignity, could actually use, and would undoubtedly welcome, more money.

_____________________________________________________________   

¹ http://www.patheos.com/blogs/workcited/2015/02/the-new-inequality-more-musings-on-thomas-piketty/

² http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/01/business/economy/changed-life-of-the-poor-squeak-by-and-buy-a-lot.html?_r=1

³ Mr. Forster, wittingly or not, is reprising the argument that has been made for years by Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation—Rector is notorious for insisting that “poor” Americans are awash in luxuries. He is also notorious for lying: see, for instance, his recent article “Married to the Welfare State” in which he says “Take the earned income tax credit. This program provides more than $56 billion per year in cash grants to low-income persons. But, according to the IRS, a quarter to a third of all EITC claims are fraudulent.”

http://www.heritage.org/research/commentary/2015/2/married-to-the-welfare-state

Mr. Rector’s claim, which has been repeated by Senator Rand Paul, is rebutted at http://www.factcheck.org/2015/01/rand-paul-exaggerates-tax-credit-fraud/ 

Rector has a history of this sort of thing, which is why I say he’s not mistaken but lying.  Ultimately, Robert Rector’s case against America’s poor amounts to: “poor people today have cell phones and computers, and the most fabulously rich people in the past didn’t; therefore poor people today are better off than the most fabulously rich people in the past, and therefore they should stop complaining.” If you can’t spot the flaws in that logic, you’re either Robert Rector or a Romneybot.  

The Role Of The Poor

I recently read Paula Fredriksen’s AUGUSTINE AND THE JEWS, which traced the development of Augustine’s notion of “Jewish witness”.  The Jews, according to the Bishop of Hippo, held a special (and protected) status in Christendom; their continuing obduracy and stiff-necked practice of their traditional (and God-given) laws contrasted with the Christian life of faith and grace.  In addition, the Jews were seen as “keepers of the books”—“the books” being the Old Testament which prophesied of Jesus the Messiah whom the Jews had failed to recognize and in fact had killed.  The prophecies in Jewish scriptures were valuable to Christians; they proved that Christianity was not some innovation that had sprung from the fevered mind of St. Paul, but that it had been God’s plan all along.

I mention this because I’ve just read a column by Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig in which she discusses Christian attitudes towards the poor.  In the Middle Ages, Ms. Bruenig writes, the idea was that “we must care for the poor so that they will use their superior standing with God to pray for us who have an inferior standing with God.” (cf. John Bossy, Christianity in the West 1400-1700.) In that formulation, care for the poor was an exchange that helped to ensure the spiritual destinies of the rich.” Luckily for well-off Christians back then, there was no lack of poor people available to pray for them.

Today, however, we have a different notion of what the poor are for; they are there for us to minister and to evangelize to, as Jesus himself commanded. Therefore, as some conservative Christians argue, government entitlement programs must be opposed: “by replacing aid that could be given by community members who are Christian, welfare programs prevent us from evangelizing to the poor. Thus they [the poor] suffer spiritually even if they do not suffer physically.”

Our attitude toward the poor has pivoted; whereas formerly we needed their prayers, now “we presume them to be in immediate need of evangelizing by the well-off.”  Not only are the non-poor better off in material terms than the poor, but we are also in a position of spiritual superiority. 

Ms. Stoker Bruenig has her own axe to grind in this matter, but what strikes me about all this is that, just as for Augustine the Jews had no value in and of themselves but only as unwitting “witnesses” to Christianity, so too (in the minds of many well-off Christians) poor people are essentially functionaries for the rich.  The poor are either Jesus’ favorites who can pray for those of us so unfortunate as to be prosperous, or they are objects of our tender mercies and ministries.  They also, across the centuries, serve as a convenient reminder to us of our virtues; the poor, as we know, are poor because they lack our work ethic, our persistence, our self-control, our sobriety, our probity, etc.  Like Augustine’s Jews, the poor testify to that which they are not and which we (by the grace of God, of course) are: upstanding members of Christian society bound for our heavenly reward.

If it’s true, as Paula Fredriksen insists, that Augustine’s “witness” doctrine helped obviate (to some extent) Christian anti-Semitism, it did so at the price of making Jews valuable only insofar as they served Christian purposes.  Our attitude towards the poor is strikingly similar; we view them either as awful exemplars and reminders of the pitfalls of bad habits and poor choices, or we see them as opportunities for us to display our own benevolence, both material and spiritual. In no case are they simply our neighbors whom we love for their own sake.

And that’s the pity of it: even in our charity, we keep others at a distance rather than embracing them.  The poor are the Jews of modernity, seen (in Ms. Stoker Bruenig’s phrase) “as a kind of social contaminant” but tolerated because they too play a role in God’s plan—God’s plan for us, that is.

Ni fallor…

____________________________________ 

 http://elizabethstokerbruenig.com/2014/12/02/charity-ministry

Koch-Fluffers at the Washington Post

The Washington Post, for reasons known only to its editors and (possibly) to God, has chosen to publish a paean to, and a free advertisement for, David and Charles Koch.¹ Disguised as an op-ed, this out-of-season valentine is titled “Pope Francis, the Kochs, and how the wealthy can help the poor”.  The authors, John and Carol Saeman, have this to say about their personal friends the Kochs:

In 25 years of knowing Charles and his wife, Liz, and in more recent interactions with David and his wife, Julia, we have seen them demonstrate a deep concern for the least fortunate. The nonprofits associated with the Kochs, which bear the common mission of advancing free enterprise and free societies, reflect our shared conviction that limited government is most conducive to lifting people out of poverty. The two of us, along with hundreds of other philanthropists and businesspeople, support their efforts.

Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig, on her own blog, makes short work of the Saemans' efforts; you can (and should) read her piece at http://elizabethstokerbruenig.com/2014/12/02/kiss-the-kochs/ For my part, I’d like to address only one of the risible claims made by the Saemans.  Relying on the work of Robert Rector (Heritage Foundation), who has for years made a good living “proving” that government programs don’t help the poor, the Saemans write this:

Welfare policy provides a clear example of how federal policies can undermine human dignity. To our society’s credit, the United States has devoted much of its national treasure to combating poverty — January marked the 50th anniversary of the “War on Poverty,” on which we have spent some $22 trillion. Unfortunately, some of our country’s anti-poverty programs are so poorly designed that they harm the poor, encouraging dependency where they should encourage upward mobility.

Sorry, Mr. and Mrs. Saeman: we have not “spent some $22 trillion” on the War on Poverty, because Lyndon Johnson’s ambitious War on Poverty was dismantled beginning in 1969, a victim of the Nixon administration and of the spending needs of the Vietnam War.² If, however, we take Robert Rector’s figure of $22 trillion as being the total amount the country has spent over the past fifty years on anti-poverty programs of various kinds—I haven’t checked to see if the figure is accurate, but let that go—we should at least put it in context.  Over the same fifty-year period, our Gross Domestic Product (or Gross National Product) has amounted to $460 trillion; a quick calculation shows that $22 trillion is just less than 5% of our nation’s total economic output.

Now, does “just less than 5% of GDP” constitute an acceptable effort at fighting poverty?  Is it too much, is it too little, or is just right?  Does it actually constitute, as the Saemans say, “much of our national treasure”? I don’t know, and I presume that opinions will vary.  What I do know is that “$22 trillion” sounds very impressive—until you put it next to “$460 trillion,” which neither Robert Rector nor the Saemans bother to do.

Nor do they bother to tell you that, at least according to official government figures, our anti-poverty efforts have in fact helped: the measured poverty rate has dropped from 25% 50 years ago to 16% today.  Not all of that is attributable to anti-poverty programs, of course, but at least they haven’t stood in the way of progress.  Further, as anyone who watches Fox News can tell you, even people who are officially “poor” in America have it pretty cushy, what with flat-screen TVs, cell phones, indoor plumbing and all—so apparently anti-poverty programs have helped improve the lives of the poor, which is precisely what they were, and are, intended to do.

The Saemans end their Koch-fluffing piece with this bit of self-aggrandizement:

The two of us will continue to devote the vast majority of our money and time to the church and its charitable activities. Yet helping the poor also requires a fundamental change in how our society — and our government — understands and seeks to address poverty. For us, promoting limited government alongside the Kochs is an important part of heeding Pope Francis’s call to love and serve the poor.

If it’s true that John and Carol Saeman devote the vast majority of their money and time to charitable activities, then bless them both; they are admirable people (though they probably ought not to brag about it).  As for their promotion, however, of the Koch brothers’ vision of limited government and low, lower, and lowest tax rates: I’ll take a pass.  

Ni fallor…

_____________________________________

¹ http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/pope-francis-the-kochs-and-how-the-wealthy-can-help-the-poor/2014/11/28/958fbac2-770a-11e4-a755-e32227229e7b_sto

² The War on Poverty suffered some self-inflicted wounds as well, with a myriad of community activists fighting over the anti-poverty turf.  Moreover, the whole enterprise was entangled from the beginning in racial politics, which in practice meant that federal monies sometimes ended up in the hands of angry black people, a situation that was bound to, and did, provoke a backlash.  I vividly remember the conservative publications I was still reading in those days--National Review and Human Events--pouncing on every misdeed, large and small, real and imagined, of every Community Action Organization around the country in an effort to discredit the entire War on Poverty; the effort, sadly, succeeded.

Work Makes You Free

Lawrence Mead, writing at National Affairs, thinks that the highly touted federal Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) has been oversold, as the title of his article “Overselling the Earned Income Tax Credit” makes clear.¹  Mead claims that , while the EITC provides some incentive for some people to do some work (i.e. paid employment), it fails to take into account the realities of poverty and the non-economic incentives with which poor people must deal. 

According to Mead, one of the architects of “welfare reform” back in the 1990s, policies based on work incentives like the EITC:

 “assume that non-working adults want to work and will do so when the payoffs improve. First-hand accounts of low-income life, however, suggest that regular employment is usually not an immediate priority. Poor non-workers typically want to work, yet their lives are not organized around employment, as is true for the better-off. Single mothers are absorbed with family problems, while many men make money off the books without holding steady, legal jobs. Everyone struggles with immediate difficulties, mostly in private life, rather than working regularly to earn income.”  [Emphasis added.]

Let’s take a moment to appreciate what Mr. Mead has just said.  The problem with the poor—and he clearly thinks it’s a problem—is not that they don’t want to work; it’s that they are “absorbed” and preoccupied with things other than employment, things like “family problems” and “immediate difficulties”.  As Mr. Mead says in the sentence bolded above, the poor are willing to work, but they aren’t devoted to work like their “better-off” brethren; they haven’t made paid employment the organizing principle of their lives.

Having asserted this, Mead elaborates:

The economic language that surrounds work incentives assumes that non-workers reason about jobs the way trade unionists do. If they do not work, the reason must be that jobs are lacking or are unacceptable due to low pay or other conditions. But in ethnographic accounts of life in poverty, hardly anyone talks like this. Poor adults typically treat employment as a moral issue, not an economic one. They assume jobs exist on acceptable terms, and they reproach themselves and others for not taking and holding them. If economics does not govern work behavior, there is little chance that "making work pay" will move non-workers into the labor market, as recent claims for the EITC suggest.

What’s interesting here is that Mead is turning on its head the oft-heard claim that what holds the poor back is their lack of a work ethic; Mead says that the poor actually do put a moral value on employment and hold themselves and others morally accountable for not being employed—even when there are good reasons for their unemployment.  Whether Mead is correct about all this or not—I’m willing to bet that at least some of the poor blame their poverty on a lack of employment opportunities—it suggests that “values” aren’t what’s holding low-income people back.

No, what’s holding them back is, as noted above, their failure to sufficiently prioritize employment above other pressing concerns.  Mead wants to “reform” the system so that, family problems and immediate difficulties be damned, the poor will darn well get out there and get jobs.  He thinks this can be done by linking the EITC to some minimum threshold of hours worked (30 hours per week, perhaps) and to having more bureaucratic outreach to, and monitoring of, the poor.  He would also like a targeted “welfare reform for men” which would increase work-enforcement efforts aimed at parolees and at men in arrears on child-support payments.

As it happens, Lawrence Mead has made a lucrative career out of telling the poor what to do and how to behave.  He is considered by some a “big-government conservative” who doesn’t want to shrink government so much as use it to browbeat the poor.  A graduate of Amherst College and of Harvard, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a former speechwriter for Henry Kissinger, Mead sports quite the impressive resume.  His first book (back in 1986) was titled BEYOND ENTITLEMENT: The Social Obligations of Citizenship and, as you might guess, it chastised the unemployed poor for failing to meet their "social obligations"; Mr. Mead has been chastising them ever since.

The most charitable interpretation of Mead’s EITC proposal is this: the poor want to work, they really do, but they’re regrettably yet understandably “absorbed with” taking care of their families and dealing with other problems in “private life”.  Given such distractions, the admitted economic incentives of the current EITC aren’t enough to make work the priority that it should be.  Therefore, the poor must be forced into the workplace by withholding the EITC from anyone who devotes fewer than thirty hours a week to paid employment; this is both for their own good and in line with their own desires and moral values regarding employment. 

As I say, that’s the most charitable spin one can put on Mead’s proposal; less charitable interpretations are equally possible.  His approach to poverty (and to the poor) is not, let us say, uncontroversial. There’s an old saying about the difference between “working to live” and “living to work”.  Lawrence Mead apparently believes that the latter is the appropriate attitude for us all: our lives should be organized around our work.  He may have in mind the words of Jesus, who was recorded as saying to a certain woman insufficiently devoted to paid employment, “Martha, Martha, you are busy and distracted with many things.  Only one thing is needful…” What Jesus obviously meant was that, rather than clattering around the kitchen and fussing about a houseful of unexpected guests, Martha should have been down at the Bethany employment office seeking at least thirty hours a week of paid employment.  To which Lawrence Mead would add, Go, you unemployed poor, and do thou likewise.

____________________________________________________________________________

¹ http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/overselling-the-earned-income-tax-credit

I learned of Mr. Mead’s article through Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig, “Moms & the EITC”: http://elizabethstokerbruenig.com/2014/11/05/moms-the-eitc/  My views on the subject, of course, are my own.

 

Blessed Are The Wealthy?

In one of the more puzzling columns I've read of late, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry explained how, according to the Bible, poverty is the real scandal and so it’s okay to be rich.¹

“Jacques Attali is one of, perhaps the most fascinating French intellectual alive, one of our few polymaths left, with enormously wide-ranging interests. Attali is an economist and a futurist with a keen interest in the history of ideas.

“While tooling around on YouTube, I found out that Attali gave a speech (in French) outlining his thesis on the origins of capitalism. As Attali tells it, as soon as you had organization, the state created the market to get its wealth (shades of Polanyi) but controlled it, and in particular controlled it through the religious.

“And Attali lays out the following dichotomy, which I find fascinating. In the early societies, the big scandal in social life was wealth. The big scandal was that some people were wealthy. According to Attali, who is Jewish, the first peoples to flip that around were the Jews: according to the Hebrew Bible, the true social scandal is not wealth, it’s poverty. If the true scandal is poverty, and not wealth, then it is fine for people to get rich, as long as they make a virtuous use of their wealth.”

It’s true that the Hebrew Bible does not condemn wealth per se. On the other hand, it does not enjoin anything so vague as its “virtuous use” either. The Bible is quite explicit as to what people with wealth should do with it—they should give it to, or share it with, the less fortunate, because wealth, like everything else, comes from God and God demands that it be shared.  The “true scandal” lies in believing that one deserves one’s wealth and can therefore do whatever one wants with it.  M. Gobry may also want to consider how it is that people come to be rich in the first place—does the acquisition of wealth ever involve injustice or exploitation, both of which constitute scandals in their own right? 

In any case, M. Gobry continued:

“According to Attali, historic Christianity shifted back to the scandal of wealth, and only the Protestant Reformation recovered the scandal of poverty, paving the way to a Judeo-Christian understanding that led to the birth of modern capitalism.

“I’m not sure (genuinely) what the picture about historic Christianity is, but I do find the dichotomy between the scandal of wealth and the scandal of poverty fascinating. (There are also obvious implications in regard to René Girard’s mimetic theory.) ²

Christianity’s "historic" relationship to wealth (and to capitalism) is complicated, to be sure, but its preaching and official teachings on the subject never prevented popes and prelates from amassing riches, nor did it prevent the Church itself from acquiring it.  The wealth (and avarice) of the Roman Church was one of the scandals that led to the Protestant Reformation. 

M. Gobry then made this assertion, which I can only characterize as astonishing:

“What does the Jesus of the Gospels say? It seems obvious to me that he is a lot more concerned with the scandal of poverty than the scandal of wealth. I can think of only two Gospel passages concerning wealth: the story of the rich young man, and the story of the poor Lazarus (and the can arguably seem to fall under “unvirtuous use of money” rather than “scandal of wealth” itself).  Meanwhile, Jesus condemns poverty over and over and over again.

You don’t have to be a biblical scholar to know that Jesus had significantly more to say about wealth than the “only two” passages M. Gobry is able to recall: you only have to have stayed awake in church during the gospel readings.  Here are several relevant passages just from Matthew, Chapter Six:

“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. ²⁰ But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. ²¹ For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” [Matthew 6: 19-21]

"No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.” [Matthew 6:24]

“And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. ²⁹ Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. ³⁰ If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? ³¹ So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ ³² For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. ³³ But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” [Matthew 6:29-33]

Oh, and this:

“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God." [Matthew 19:24] ³

M. Gobry would no doubt argue—I say this because I have heard the argument before—that those passages do not condemn wealth as such, they only condemn states of mind regarding wealth: i.e. inordinate attachment to wealth, worry about wealth, jealous hoarding of wealth, etc.  M. Gobry would no doubt further claim that it is entirely possible to be rich, or to acquire wealth, without exhibiting or developing such undesirable psychological traits or anti-social behaviors.  In which case, M. Goby has a somewhat more optimistic view of people’s ability to resist the lure of mammon than I do or, for that matter, than Jesus did. 

In addition, M. Gobry has a surprisingly selective attachment to the doctrine of Original Sin, a doctrine he has championed in the past. In this fallen, Adam-tainted world, where everything around us and everything within us is in bondage to sin, apparently only our ability to handle wealth virtuously remains uncontaminated—how very convenient for all of us, but how especially convenient for the rich.

M. Gobry also apparently believes that the scandal of wealth and the scandal of poverty are not at all interrelated; he believes that when Jesus “condemn[ed] poverty over and over and over again” (which, by the way, I am not sure is entirely accurate) Jesus was not simultaneously condemning the wealth that existed side by side with poverty—wealth that was, in many cases, acquired at the expense of the poor, whether by extortion or by exploitation of labor.    

Apologists for capitalism have long argued that the pursuit of wealth benefits everyone, including the poor: the rising tide of wealth lifts all boats, we have been told ad nauseam.  One can accept that argument or not. What one can’t do--at least not persuasively--is claim that Jesus endorsed it, or that the Bible invented it. 

______________________________________________________________

¹ http://www.patheos.com/blogs/inebriateme/2014/09/the-scandal-of-wealth-vs-the-scandal-of-poverty/

² I’m surprised M. Gobry doesn’t seem more aware of “historic Christianity” in this regard, but if he wants to go beyond the Acts of the Apostles (“All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone in need…There were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales, and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need.”), he might try reading Peter Brown’s THROUGH THE EYE OF A NEEDLE: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West.

³ I concede that this statement by Jesus was made more in sadness than in anger, and constituted less a condemnation of wealth than a lament over its consequences; but still…