On Dealing Honestly With Poverty

The other day, in conversation with a relatively affluent professional, I remarked on the immense gap between the rich and the rest of us. He felt that the existing arrangement was acceptable. I noticed that I have been using "the rich and the rest of us" lately rather than the "rich and the poor." I think I have picked this up from the political literature I read and I believe it is used there to enlarge the population opposed to the very rich in this time of diminishing economic activity. In other words "the poor" would not be politically viable.

In any event, this change in locution got me asking why we have abandoned the long-established rich/poor dichotomy. I suspect that this change is ultimately due to the American cultural refusal to deal honestly with poverty as a human condition, not unlike some contagious diseases and that, as with disease, we need to find a remedy.

If we were concerned to deal candidly with poverty we would ask why do we have the cliché "the poor are always with us?" instead of "the rich are always with us." After all, it has been the rich who have dominated the mass of mankind. It is they who have started most of our wars. It is they who have oppressed the working class. It is they, in short, who have treated a class of human beings, the poor, as objects to be discarded when their serviceability has been used up. It is also the rich that create societies of the rich and the poor in which democracy cannot survive. Currently this attack by the wealthy is being carried out by the Republicans who, of all things, accuse Obama, by proposing increased taxes on those earning more than $250,000 a year, of conducting "class warfare."

Of course, when the Bush administration gave the wealthiest an enormous tax break, which the rest of us would have to subsidize, it was not class warfare, because the wealthy would reinvest those funds in enterprises. Nor, when Ronald Reagan created the "welfare queen", was it class warfare.

However this glaring duplicity is not my point. It is that this society will accept the mistreatment that the wealthy subject it to rather than seek a just economy in which the society as a whole benefits from its productivity. As a case in point the wealthy have created a national economy, and hence the welfare of us all, on the skittish response of wealthy investors to every shift in the financial wind. Is this any way to run a country's economy? Our economy is too important to be put in the hands of wealthy privateers seeking their own ends. The mere fact that Henry Paulson, one of the architects of the house of cards that collapsed in 2007 could be kept on as Secretary of the Treasury under Bush to throw hundreds of billions of dollars to Wall Street financiers with little accountability and that Obama has continued much of this practice, illustrates the utter self-absorption of the monetary elite. This shows how "regulation" can be and has been manipulated for the benefit of the few. It also shows the extent of the gullibility of the American citizenry who apparently believe such an approach is necessary to save capitalism and the freedom that is supposedly contingent upon it. It is doubtful that either Kafka or Becket could have dreamed up such an absurd misplacement of faith on such a large scale.

What can be done? I am not sure that we yet know how to organize a human economy so that the full human potential of its citizens can be optimized. However, given what our experience with capitalism has revealed, I believe a few precepts are indicated.

• All investment should be kept as close to production as possible. Money invested only to generate more money is counter-productive and should be carefully scrutinized if not banned. Using money to simply generate more money is a primary bane of capitalism.

• Human welfare, including care for the planet we inhabit and the other species with which we share some portion of our DNA, should be the focus of our economy. If an enterprise cannot be justified on this basis it should not be permitted.

• Society should be viewed as the fundamental requirement for civilization. Without it we are but beasts in the jungle.

• The objective of society should be the optimum realization of each citizen's potential.

Bob Newhard