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From: cliff@unmvax.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: Re: A statistic on poverty [2]
Message-ID: <548@unmvax.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 17-Dec-84 17:01:27 EST
Article-I.D.: unmvax.548
Posted: Mon Dec 17 17:01:27 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 21-Dec-84 00:43:30 EST
References: <251@gargoyle.UChicago.UUCP>
Organization: Univ. of New Mexico, Albuquerque
Lines: 171

> >However, other people with the same or more money had serious problems, even
> >serious malnutrition.  Why?  Usually the main reason was vice.  Cigarettes,
> >alcohol, junk food.  In general, poor money management. 
> 
> Cigarettes are an addiction, not a vice.  Obviously, the poor should give up
> smoking while the affluent continue to puff away.  Alcoholism is a serious
> and tragic illness, not a vice.  Eating junk food is the result of poor
> education, bombardment with advertising, and various factors which together
> can be called the "culture of poverty" (see below), but it is not a vice.
> You forgot to mention gambling.  Chronic gambling is an addiction, not a
> vice.  Lots of poor people throw away their money on state lotteries.  This
> is not a vice; it is seen by them as perhaps the only way to escape their
> dreary world.  Don't get me started on lotteries.  Well, I suppose they're
> better than playing the numbers rackets.

Vice is a word that I do not like to use.  It implies a morality that I do not
subscribe to.  Addiction and illness are frequently associated with conditions
that are hard to reverse or are not a direct consequence of one's actions.
Both nicotine and alchohol are physically addicting.  Gambling is not.
The concept of a psychological addiction is quite useless.  Picking your
nose, watching t.v. is addicting and compulsively doing good work is addicting.
A better word for the "vices" previously mentioned might be "poison."  Gambling
with money that should be used for shelter or sustenance poisons the household
that depends on that money (assuming sufficient losses, as are the norm in both
state lotteries and numbers games, 'though a good poker player can actually
supplement his income...).  The words that are used to label the maladies that
often strike the poor should not be the point argued.  Quite simply, money is
spent on things from the frivolous (soda on top of a healthy diet shouldn't
lead the average consumer to an early grave) to the deadly (smoking will) when
the money is needed for a proper diet, etc.  If the problem is that the poor
really are in need of a government supplied set of nutrients then it should
be fairly simple to prepare a "people chow" that provides the essential
vitamins, minerals and protein.  I lived for about four months on a diet of
a multi-vitamin, some peanunt butter and cottage cheese each day.  People chow
could be made in large quantities very inexpensively.  Now watch all the people
who have been clamoring for food for the hungry shout and scream and say how
insensitive such a program is, because it is meets the minimum requirement and
provides incentive to get away off it (bland food = incentive).  People will
say that poverty is a vicious cycle, but when a solution to one  of the causes
of this cycle does not provide incentive to stay within that cycle then it is
usually shot down with cries of "inhumane, unsensitive, etc."  Everyone who
would like to see food stamps replaced with "People Chow" raise your hands.
Those of you without your hands up, please explain to me how your objection to
"People Chow" is different from the desire to keep a system that both allows
the original goal of the program to be circumvented (i.e. buying potato chips)
and supplies the poor with a type of "free money" that will be cut back and
eventually revoked as the household income continues to rise.  Which would you
want to hang on to longer:  a guaranteed $xx.xx off each weekly grocery bill
or a guaranteed delivery of x lbs. of unsavory sustenance?

> >I've had some rather enlightening talks with social workers.  One family
> >that spent their entire allowance of Food Stamps on soda and potato chips.
> >That's all they ate.  The rest of their money went to support their father's
> >4 pack a day habit and alcoholism.  
> 
> Yes, the familiar and comforting image of the shiftless, irresponsible poor.
> Most non-poor Americans simply don't have the faintest idea of what life is
> like for most of the poor population.  From Michael Harrington:

So Michael Harrington, by virtue of his ability to write prose, has a better
idea of what life is like for most of the poor population, better than Alien
who claimed to have grown up in a family whose income was below the poverty
line, better than the social workers he has talked to, better than the grade
school teachers thaI have talked to...

> "Here is one of the most familiar forms of the vicious cycle of poverty.
> The poor get sick more than anyone else in the society.  That is because
> they live in slums, jammed together under unhygenic conditions; they have
> inadequate diets, and cannot get decent medical care.  When they become
> sick, they are sick longer than any other group in the society.  Because
> they are sick more often and longer than anyone else, they lose wages and
> work, and find it difficult to hold a steady job.  And because of this, they
> cannot pay for good housing, for a nutritious diet, for doctors.  At any
> given point in the circle, particularly when there is a major illness, their
> prospect is to move to an even lower level and to begin the cycle, round and
> round, toward even more suffering....

So when the circle is finally broken the poor will be able to rise out of
the depths of poverty?  Once we institute Food Stamps, Welfare, Medicare,
Medicaid, Social Security, all the problems of the poor will go away, because
they can get decent medical care, adequate diets and good housing and hence
get a steady job and get better medical care, etc.  What is one flaw in this
thinking?  There are no jobs.  There is a program that systematically
discriminates against people who have not held steady jobs and do not have
a decent education and who may need more sick days than other people.  This
program is the minimum wage.  The minimum wage prevents people who have marginal
job skills from working.  If someone, for some reason, does not appear to be
worth minimum wage to a prospective employer, the employer and employee may not
agree to a lower wage while the new employee developes appropriate skills.
This is in the same country that provides a safety net for those that do not
have enough money to keep themselves adequately fed/housed, etc.  If the
government already has this safety net, why is it necessary to also have a
minimum wage?  Who lobbies the loudest for retaining minimum wage?  That's
right, the unions.  Seems a little strange, when you realize that union members
rarely get minimum wage.  When unemployment for teenage black youths climbs
you will hear politicians, both black and white, suggesting a lowered minimum
wage for some special class, either by age or locale.  Why do they wait until
conditions are almost intolerable before such an idea is proposed?  If it were
really the poor that our entitlements were set out to help then we wouldn't
have a minimum wage.  The plain truth is that the majority of all the
entitlements/subsidizes/protection programs benefit the middle class much
more than they benefit the poor.

> "Poverty in the US is a culture, an institution, a way of life....The family
> structure of the poor, for instance, is different from that of the rest of
> the society.  There are more homes without a father, there is less marriage,
> more early pregnancy and ... markedly different attitudes toward sex.  As a
> result of this, to take but one consequence of the fact, hundreds of
> thousands, and perhaps millions, of children in the other America never know
> stability and `normal' affection.
>
> "Or perhaps the policeman is an even better example.  For the middle class,
> the police protect property, give directions, and help old ladies.  For the
> urban poor, the police are those who arrest you....The outsider is `cop',
> bill collector, investigator (and in the Negro ghetto, most dramatically, he
> is `the Man')."

Thanks for a bit of melodrama to lighten my day, but it doesn't matter whether
a police officer is called `the Man' or `a Pig', I am not sure whether it is
your editing, or Michael Harrington's style, but that last paragraph is
incoherent.  What is the policeman a better example of?  See my other postings
about the police, victimless crimes and the poor.  If you want to get the cops
off the poor people's backs, legalize all victimless crimes, especially the
use, sale and possesion of drugs.  This will allow people currently addicted
to illegal substances to pay for these substances with much less of an
expenditure.  The other benefits are too numerous to explain here, but
I am easily prompted to elaborate.

> >I could go on, but I won't.
> 
> Thanks, I get enough to turn my stomach from such humanitarians as Ed Meese,
> our future Attorney General.  Finally, a conciliatory note to conservatives
> who found this article as offensive as I intended it to be:  I suggest you
> read the essays of George Will, the Thinking Man's Conservative, or listen
> to him holding forth on ABC.  George will explain to you, complete with
> quotations from Chaucer or somebody, why conservatives should be strong
> supporters of the welfare state.  You could also read such books as "The
> Other America" and "The New American Poverty" by Harrington or "Blaming the
> Victim" and "Equality" by William Ryan if you wish to discuss the problem of
> poverty with adults.

Good ol' George Will, if you objected to the use of the word vice labeling
smoking, drinking, etc. you should not turn to George Will.  The man is
quite the moralist.  In addition, he believes that whenever the government
acts, it has moral implications, it can't really be neutral about "values."
I also believe that, but since I do not cherish shoving my morality down
other peoples' throats, I am a libertarian.  George Will on our country's
founding fathers:

    "the Founders thought they had devised a system so clever that
     it would work well even if no one had good motives--even if
     there was no public-spiritedness."

Joseph Sobran, writing in the American Spectator Vol. 16, No. 10 -- Oct. '83
p. 11 interprets that quote as "Our Constitution itself was apparently a
wrong turn."  Again, being a libertarian, I tend to like what our FF created
and only wish that it hadn't been watered down through the years.  I believe
that the FF tried to create a system that was neither paternalistic or
maternalistic; it allowed a separation of morality and the state.  Beware
when conservatives advocate the welfare state.  They will have no qualms
insisting what is morally acceptable and what is deviant.  If you disagree
with them and they hold the strings, you better not be on the other end
(i.e. poor), lest you want to be part of an experiment in more government
mandated morality then you have seen in a long time.

> Richard Carnes, ihnp4!gargoyle!carnes

	--Cliff [Matthews]
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