>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."
That US business prefers to employ illegal immigrants who will work cheap tells you only that US business prefers not to pay the local market price for labour. This should come as no surprise.
Your belief that unemployment is a result of lack of skills, culture, etc of the unemployed is laughable. I suppose you also imagine that the famine in Ethiopia was a result of many Ethiopians not knowing how, or being unwilling to eat?
>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.
The necessary what? No meaningless jargon please, I only speak English.
> 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.
Yes, but the only trouble is that what the unemployed lack is not "human capital" (whatever that is) but their lack of actual capital. That is to say they don't have any actual factories with which to produce the cheap goods for export. That ingredient is supplied by capitalists, not the unemployed of Somalia or wherever.
>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
Hang on, you acknowledge the need for outside investment now?
> - of large segments of the population.
So (at least part of) the cause of unemployment is the lack of capital of large sections of the population you say? And this is due to unemployability, right?
So let's get this straight, unemployment is ultimately caused by ....unemployment. OK... Thank you for that insight professor, don't call us, we'll call you.
> Government
>handouts will not solve those structural problems, only perpetuate them.
No, government "handouts" won't solve that problem, however getting back to the original problem we were talking about - poverty - government handouts would certainly have some impact on that problem. Poverty is merely insufficient funds with which to buy food and shelter and such. It doesn't make any difference how you come by the money to solve that problem.
>I understand that this view is very unpopular on the left, but we have to
>agree to disagree on this.
OK, fine. But can we at least agree to talk about the same thing? Poverty and unemployment are different things. A rich man can be unemployed and some unemployable people are not in the least bit poor. Conversely, a poor man can be fully employed. You seem to be conflating the two things and getting all mixed up, trying to solve one problem by addressing another problem entirely.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas