Mandating Living With Poor Folk to Make More Libertarians
In giving an explanation for the current financial crisis Darwin writes:
1. from the millions of people who are getting evicted from their homes because their bank assured them they could afford a variable-rate mortgage and
Notice that Darwin frames the issue as a matter of the bank tricking unsuspecting borrowers into taking loans they couldn’t afford. He doesn’t frame it as the borrower making a bad decision. It’s very common to see people on the left model poor people this way. The poor are model as ignorant saps ready to be taken advantage by unscrupulous greed driven capitalists. The model dictates that blame lands on the capitalist because the poor person is to stupid to know what they were doing.
This model of poor people is ridiculously common in academy. This got me thinking about why such a crappy model of poor people permeates throughout a group of people whose supposedly should know better. For the last couple of years I have been toying with the idea that liberals like to be compassionate and this causes them to support policies that protects the poor from their bad choices. Like for example, in the current crisis, they support protecting poor people that took on loans they could clearly not pay, by stopping the foreclosure.
However, thinking about it more today I came up with an alternative explanation. I think the biggest reason why people on the left, particularly the academic left, hold such wrongheaded views on the poor is because they have never had direct exposure to them for an extended period of time. Liberals have never faced watching a poor person make a bad decision after they spoke with them about why deciding that way is a bad idea. By not living with poor people in a day to day fashion, the educated left can maintain the belief that the poor are not responsible for making bad decisions because of the machinations of others.
Perhaps we should mandate the passing of legislation forcing young people to live with poor people. Hopefully that will libertarian them up as they grown into adulthood.
September 29th, 2008 at 7:15 pm
Your argument seems incoherent to me. You say that liberals treat poor people like they’re pitiful saps who are too dumb to know when they’re being taken advantage of. But you then say (and have said many many times in the past) that poor people ARE too stupid to make good decisions, which is why they’re poor.
Your argument seems not to be that liberals don’t have a correct understanding of poor people and their lives, but rather, that it’s OK to take avantage of them, and that they deserve to be poor and don’t deserve help, because it’s all a result of their own stupidity.
Tell me where we disagree on the actual facts (rather than the morality or rhetoric), because I don’t see anywhere that we do. The only disagreement in our positions that I can see is that I feel poor people who make bad decisions deserve compassion and help, and you feel that they deserve contempt and indifference.
September 30th, 2008 at 9:08 am
I want to help poor people too, but not by spending billions of tax dollars to cover them when they make bad decisions. It’s called tough love, and I think everyone would take these lessons to heart if they are allowed to suffer the consequences. The burnt hand teaches best.
By stopping foreclosures with government debt we are bailing out mortgage lenders and investment firms who also made poor decisions, while simply delaying an inevitable market correction.
September 30th, 2008 at 10:09 am
I’ve already come out against the bailout, but this question of how we view poor people is more general.
September 30th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
If poor people want to make a better life for themselves they need to work hard. My father, the son of a high school dropout, came from a poor family in a poor neighborhood outside of Pittsburgh. He worked his ass off, went to Princeton, then to medical school. He is now a wealthy physician.
Millions upon millions of immigrants have come to this country with nothing but a dream to make a better life for themselves and their families. And they did, by working hard and striving for the American dream.
Adults take responsibility for the decisions they make. This is what separates them from children. If you want a nation of children then, by all means, help the poor when they do stupid things. Take care of them when they refuse to take care of themselves. Clean up after their messes. Just be prepared to do it forever.