David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

poverty

Bad personal decisions are at root
of almost all of society’s problems

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I’m going to tell you a disturbing secret: Human beings are very flawed and make terrible life decisions which hurt themselves and others. No form of legislation is ever going to change that.

I am where I am in life because of a series of decisions — some good and some bad. I had a lot of advantages that some people don’t have. I came from a relatively affluent family with educated parents who taught me how to fit in among the American middle class. I had some disadvantages that some didn’t have. I came from a dysfunctional family which had serious and ongoing problems.

Everybody comes from some combination of advantages and disadvantages. Some get luckier than others. In fact, some people come from such dire circumstances that we’ve learned not to expect anything of them. We’ve given up on them — and we’ve essentially told them they ought to give up on themselves.

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If you can’t change your life story, that narrative will become destiny

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The woman seemed tired, but that wasn’t surprising. It was after midnight and she was at work as a cashier at Walmart. There weren’t many people in the store. It was mostly employees stocking shelves and there were a very few late-night shoppers like me.

When I spoke to her, she didn’t look at me at first. She just responded briefly and went about her work of checking me out. It quickly occurred to me that maybe she wasn’t tired — at least not physically. Maybe she just didn’t care anymore.

She was about 45. She seemed to have forgotten how to smile. She did seem tired, but as I watched her, I thought it seemed more as though she was tired of life. Since there was nobody behind me, I tried to find out her story. It was quickly obvious that she didn’t mind talking. She simply didn’t care about much anymore.

She’s from a tiny town in southern Ohio that I’d never heard of. She said it was near Kentucky and she’s never lived anywhere else. She’s in this area briefly. The youngest of her three daughters ran off with a man and he abandoned her in Birmingham after she got pregnant.

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The free market: It’s not just for greedy, rich white capitalists

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Some well-meaning people on the political left listen to arguments for the free market and respond by saying something such as, “Well, that’s fine if you’re one of the privileged middle class or higher. But for those in poverty, they’re never going to have anything unless the state helps them. Your free market is only good for the rich.”

This just isn’t so. The free market is the best known vehicle for raising the living standards of the poor. People today look at the lifestyles of poor people in the 19th century (and even 20th century) and believe those lives indict the free market. Reality is just the opposite.

Life has always been difficult. Thomas Hobbes famously referred to the natural state of man as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” The relative wealth that came to the poor in the 19th century — because of industrialization — was a tremendous improvement over what they had experienced before. It’s a testament to just how far we’ve come since then that their lives seem so bad to us today. The fact that the “working poor” weren’t as well off as the capitalists doesn’t change the fact that the market helped the poor immensely.

Michael Strong makes a powerful case for the market when he talks about the experience of the poor in India:

“At the average rate of economic growth under socialism, India would have reached a U.S. standard of living in 2300. At the average rate of economic growth achieved since economic liberalization, India will reach a U.S. standard of living in the mid-21st century. By what standard of morality can one condemn a billion people to 250 years of unnecessary poverty?”

That’s a powerful argument. If you’re a socialist or egalitarian, you might not like it that some people are going to do better than others in a market. But condemning people to the “equality” of a non-market system ensures that the living conditions of the poor will be far worse. Is your egalitarianism worth condemning billions of people to lives of poverty for? If so, please don’t pretend that you really care about the poor.

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