Well, yes, it would be better to restructure property and power relationships so that societies did not tend to generate poverty, of course I agree. I did call the NIT/GAI a "technocratic fix," and just to remove any doubt, that was not meant as a laudatory characterization. But as a logical point, and within living memory a politically possible one urged by some important figures even on the right, there is/was a "poof" solution domestically that would be a vast improvement on the status quo.
State sponsored charity is one way of putting it. But that is misleading. Charity is voluntary and not obligatory. Transfer payments funded by taxes are neither. Another, better, way of putting it is minimal economic justice, an acknowledgment that we're all in the same boat and share fates in such a way that the better off among us have no entitlement to flourish at the cost of utter destitution of our fellow citizens. The less well off have a right not to be rendered destitute that, as a matter of right, does not depend on mere good will by the better off.
The leads back into the old Marxist critique of merely liberal redistribution of income and radical changes in property relations. As noted, I too favor the latter, but the former is not trivial.
--- Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:
> Andie:
>
> W, maybe I am missing something, but about 40 years
> ago Milton Friedman and Richard Nixon proposed a
> perfectly good instant technocratic fix that would
> make poverty (at least in the US) go away pretty
> much
> "poof"-ishly. This was the negative income tax aka
> the
> guaranteed annual income. If anyone (or any head of
> household, details matter but not here) below the
> poverty line received from the government the money
> to
> make up the difference between his or her income and
> poverty line + one cent, there would be no poverty.
>
>
> [WS:] This solution is nothing more than state
> sponsored charity that does
> nothing to address the social structural causes of
> poverty which boils down
> of the subpopulation that is unemployable due to the
> lack of basic skills,
> culture of poverty etc. It tells you volumes that
> the US business depends
> on illegal immigration to meet their demand for
> labor, nut not on the
> domestic supplies of the "unemployable."
>
> The Third world poverty has similar roots - their
> economies have very little
> to offer for sale to global capitalism, and they do
> so mainly because they
> lack the necessary human capital. This can be
> demonstrated by countries
> like Thailand where those segments of society
> supplying cheap goods for
> global capitalism fare far better than the true poor
> there.
>
> In other words, the main structural cause of extreme
> poverty both in the Us
> and developing countries is the unemployability -
> due to the lack of human
> capital and investments - of large segments of the
> population. Government
> handouts will not solve those structural problems,
> only perpetuate them.
>
> I understand that this view is very unpopular on the
> left, but we have to
> agree to disagree on this.
>
> Wojtek
>
>
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