My sister is a child welfare worker.
I'm just remarking on the economics/politics of creating a layer of functionaries to "help" the poor, and how the money always winds up in the pockets of the wrong people.
J.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Wojtek S" <wsoko52 at gmail.com> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Friday, October 22, 2010 1:09:16 PM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] me against the right
Joanna, I strongly suspect that the guy did not care about the role foundations and their professionals, if any, he just used them to put his foot in the door, change the subject and drop his big fat progressive tax line to a bunch of rich schmucks - which I thought was hilarious.
I also think that your portrayal of "degreed professionals" is a bit too harsh. Many of them do care and are on our side of most issues. If they are guilty of anything, it is idealistic naïveté that education and a few programs here and there can make a difference. Or professional optimism, if you will.
I consider myself an optimistic person of a sort - I tend believe that most people are basically good and things will turn out ok at the end of the day. But the professional gung-ho can-do optimism rubs me the wrong way for some reason (perhaps it stems from my childhood aversion to the Boy Scouts and the Socialist Youth Union that were brimming with professional optimism.) As Milan Kundera wrote, optimism is the opium of the people.
But that is just the matter of aesthetics rather than politics or ethics. If someone if full of professional optimism and wants to take on the world - it is his or her problem, not mine.
Wojtek
On Fri, Oct 22, 2010 at 2:51 PM, <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
> [WS:]
> an old British Labourite took the floor and pointed out that these
> elaborate schemes have a slight problem - philanthropic intermediaries
> that tend to get fat instead of trickling down the "philanthropic"
> donations they receive. He then paused for a while and added, "There
> is of course a solution: a big, fat progressive tax."
>
> Of course, this is not the "problem," this is the point. You spend most of the money getting degreed professionals to "help" the people who cannot help themselves and to write countless papers on why exactly these people cannot help themselves.
>
> Paying the salaried professionals is cheaper than paying the poor and "helpless" and not only that, but then the salaried professionals also produce the justification for why the whole system should work exactly as it already does.
>
> Joanna
>
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