Posted on 11/08/2005 4:20:51 PM PST by SJackson
I was watching MSNBC a few nights ago, or maybe it was CNN, and one of the program’s featured shots was a live picture from Bourbon Street in New Orleans. It was packed and the people were sassy and partying – normal, in other words.
Indeed, the commentator used that, very word and stressed the importance of it. He said it again – New Orleans is returning to normal.
How depressing it was to hear that because of all things we want for that city, we should not ever again want it to be its old normal self. Normal – in the context of what New Orleans used to be – meant not just a good time in the French Quarter. It meant severe and cruel poverty for a significant portion of the population.
We only got to meet that latter group in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Through stark and dramatic photos, we saw their misery, and we could also see the wretchedness that had embraced their lives even before the storm hit.
I love Bourbon Street as much as the next person, and I’m glad to see it up and running. Hooray for those who want to rebuild their businesses and bring tourism back.
But let’s not forget the lesson the hurricane taught us: the region needs not only a new levee infrastructure but a new economic infrastructure that can provide the area’s poor with a decent and better life.
As disastrous as it was, Katrina offered up a great opportunity for a social experiment, for a new and creative War on Poverty.
Unfortunately, as the nightly news shifts its focus from the poor-flooded neighborhoods, the opportunities before us are fast being gulped away, like a quick Jack and Coke on Bourbon Street.
Our country will spend more than $200 billion in Katrina recovery efforts, we know that much. But how will it be spent? Unfortunately most of it is going not to needy individuals but to big corporations for large-scale construction projects, many of them based nowhere near the Gulf Coast.
In other words, the Bush administration is applying the trickle-down approach to aid, rather than providing needy people with the direct help they need.
A better way to approach rebuilding would be to guarantee for a period of two or three years the incomes of those who lost their jobs in the disaster. If we took just that small step, the economic and social benefits would be enormous.
Those who lost everything would be able to return home and provide continuity for their children. The money would be pumped into local economies, accelerating economic recovery and re-establishing vital community centers. New businesses would be started, and the wage subsidies would help guarantee the employment of the local population.
The cost for all this bounty? A drop in the bucket.
It is estimated that about 400,000 jobs were lost. Even if those jobs averaged $30,000 a year, the price tag would be $12 billion, or $24 billion if extended to two years. That’s only about 10 percent of the federal dollars expected to be spent, and probably less since new cost estimates are edging closer to $300 billion than to $200 billion.
If the grand experiment worked – and I think it would – then the country should take the next logical step: a guaranteed annual income for every American. The minimum should be enough to guarantee that no American would ever again be called poor.
Ah, in the words of John Lennon, “you may call me a dreamer,” but I hope someday “you’ll join us.” Consider just who some of the “dreamers” have been:
Well, as one might expect, there was the social reformer Michael Harrington.
“Even in a society based on private economic power, the Government can be an agency of social, rather than corporate, purpose,” Harrington wrote in 1968. “This does not require a fundamental transformation of the system. It does, however, mean that the society will democratically plan ‘uneconomic’ allocations of significant resources.”
Sounds radical, doesn’t it? But guess who came to the same theoretical conclusion and specifically endorsed a guaranteed national income?
A lot of conservatives, that’s who.
Actually, there was broad support for the idea beyond the liberal left. The conservative economist Milton Friedman endorsed the concept as early as 1962, and in 1968 1,300 economists signed a petition urging Congress to pass a national system of income guarantees and supplements.
President Richard M. Nixon joined the parade in 1969 with his Family Assistance Plan.
Now, it’s true, Nixon’s plan was skimpy and fell far short of what was needed. But that really is beside the point. What was important was that, had it passed, it would have codified in law the principle of a legal end to poverty, if not of a living wage.
Simply put, by the late 1960s, Democrats and Republicans alike were not really debating whether there should be a guaranteed annual income but the level at which it should be set. Compare that to today, when politicians of both parties avoid debates about the precise role of the federal government in abolishing poverty and engage instead in a debate about whether there should be any federal role at all.
Let’s be frank. Today, unlike in the 1960s, most Democrats and Republicans are quite content to let the poor starve, and that shows just how fundamentally the political paradigm has shifted in the past 40 years.
Back then, New York Times columnist James Reston understood the importance of the GOP’s philosophical acceptance of the idea. In 1969 he wrote:
“The main thing about President Nixon’s proposals for dealing with poverty in America is that he recognizes the government’s responsibility for removing it. He has been denouncing the ‘welfare state’ for 20 years, but he is now saying that poverty in America in the midst of spectacular prosperity is intolerable and must be wiped out ... A Republican president has condemned the word ‘welfare,’ emphasized ‘work’ and ‘training’ as conditions of public assistance, suggested that the states and the cities be given more federal money to deal with their social and economic problems, but still comes out in the end with a policy of spending more money for relief of more poor people than the welfare state Democrats ever dared to propose in the past. This is beginning to be the story of American politics ...”
Unfortunately, Reston was wrong; it was more like the end of the story in American politics. At the moment the columnist was penning those words, a new and potent laissez-faire force was gaining ascendancy within the Republican Party, and these days it has pretty much gained ascendancy within the Democratic Party, too.
The domination by laissez-faire politicians – always extolling the virtues of private mostly nationally controlled monopolies over the value of decentralized and local democratic planning, no matter what – that fundamental shift of the political paradigm is one reason why the Gulf Coast looked like a Third World country after Hurricane Katrina.
It’s because we are already a Third World country in most respects. Katrina didn’t so much create those conditions as expose them.
Sure, there are pockets of the middle class left, mostly in the suburbs, but they are voting themselves out of existence every time they cast a Republican ballot, and most every time they cast a Democratic ballot. They may get away with their living standards intact, but their children almost certainly will not.
We are once again in need of a paradigmatic shift in political thinking. The effects of Hurricane Katrina and the consequences of corporate governing are becoming obvious validations of that need.
In truth, the “disasters” we increasingly face are not random events, chaotic and unpredictable, but the absolutely predictable outcomes of the modern American political mindset.
Put bluntly, we need to fundamentally change the way we organize society. Instead of from the top down, as we do now, let’s for once give the bottom up a chance. A guaranteed income is one way to achieve just such a goal.
WELFARE is what you get when you don't.
Guaranteed income is welfare. How motivated, productive and industrious is one going to be when his 'income' is guaranteed? Duh.
It makes me angry everytime I hear some idiot say something like this. This person has obviously never been to a Third World country, because it goes beyond ignorance to compare the poverty in America to the poverty in a Third World country.
First you have to dig the pony out of the horsesh**
I think you're getting your Lennon's mixed up with your Lenin's.
america is home to the richest poor people in the world.
our "poor" qualify as middle class in most DEVELOPED nations!
Thus it is that what we are attempting to do in this rapid survey of the historical progress of certain ideas, is to trace the genesis of an attitude of mind, a set of terms in which now practically everyone thinks of the State; and then to consider the conclusions towards which this psychical phenomenon unmistakably points.
Instead of recognizing the State as "the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men," the run of mankind, with rare exceptions, regards it not only as a final and indispensable entity, but also as, in the main, beneficent.
The mass-man, ignorant of its history, regards its character and intentions as social rather than anti-social; and in that faith he is willing to put at its disposal an indefinite credit of knavery, mendacity and chicane, upon which its administrators may draw at will. Instead of looking upon the State's progressive absorption of social power with the repugnance and resentment that he would naturally feel towards the activities of a professional-criminal organization, he tends rather to encourage and glorify it, in the belief that he is somehow identified with the State, and that therefore, in consenting to its indefinite aggrandizement, he consents to something in which he has a share - he is, pro tanto, aggrandizing himself. Professor Ortega y Gasset analyzes this state of mind extremely well. The mass-man, he says, confronting the phenomenon of the State,
"sees it, admires it, knows that there it is. . . . Furthermore, the mass-man sees in the State an anonymous power, and feeling himself, like it, anonymous, he believes that the State is something of his own. Suppose that in the public life of a country some difficulty, conflict, or problem, presents itself, the mass-man will tend to demand that the State intervene immediately and undertake a solution directly with its immense and unassailable resources. . . . When the mass suffers any ill-fortune, or simply feels some strong appetite, its great temptation is that permanent sure possibility of obtaining everything, without effort, struggle, doubt, or risk, merely by touching a button and setting the mighty machine in motion."
It is the genesis of this attitude, this state of mind, and the conclusions which inexorably follow from its predominance, that we are attempting to get at through our present survey. These conclusions may perhaps be briefly forecast here, in order that the reader who is for any reason indisposed to entertain them may take warning of them at this point, and close the book.
The unquestioning, determined, even truculent maintenance of the attitude which Professor Ortega y Gasset so admirably describes, is obviously the life and strength of the State; and obviously too, it is now so inveterate and so widespread - one may freely call it universal - that no direct effort could overcome its inveteracy or modify it, and least of all hope to enlighten it. This attitude can only be sapped and mined by uncountable generations of experience, in a course marked by recurrent calamity of a most appalling character.
When once the predominance of this attitude in any given civilization has become inveterate, as so plainly it has become in the civilization of America, all that can be done is to leave it to work its own way out to its appointed end. The philosophic historian may content himself with pointing out and clearly elucidating its consequences, as Professor Ortega y Gasset has done, aware that after this there is no more that one can do.
"The result of this tendency," he says, "will be fatal. Spontaneous social action will be broken up over and over again by State intervention; no new seed will be able to fructify.[2] Society will have to live for the State, man for the governmental machine. And as after all it is only a machine, whose existence and maintenance depend on the vital supports around it,[3] the State, after sucking out the very marrow of society, will be left bloodless, a skeleton, dead with that rusty death of machinery, more gruesome than the death of a living organism. Such was the lamentable fate of ancient civilization."
Our Enemy, The State
by Albert J. Nock - 1935
CHAPTER 5
I find it impossible to believe that Milton Friedman ever endorsed such a concept, as this writer claims. No way.
I think I'm going to hurl at this socialism.
Giving people who made a career out of bad decisions a "guaranteed income" comes with only ONE guarantee - we will create a new class of poor decision makers who don't spend their "guaranteed income" intelligently.
After it's all been blown on crack, weed and booze, they'll still be just as poor, they'll just be too toasted to care.
You mean like Richard Moore, the author of this silly piece?
Personally, I like St. Paul's prescription: ". . . this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat." (2 Thes. 3:10).
I remember the newspaper-size money in 1952 Italy. People were carting wheelbarrow loads to buy a loaf of bread. Imagine a teen working for $30,000 a year at MacDonalds and a 50 year old CEO working for $30,000. There would be no incentive and
the economy would collapse. This is where liberalism always fails.
Tagline material
Someone needs to put this commie back in the crypt with his buddy V.I. Lenin.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Now correct me if I'm wrong, but that says "pursuit of Happiness". It doesn't guarantee anything other than the right to make your own way. Shame the Founders didn't write "among these are Life, Liberty, an Income, A new car, medical care, abortion on demand up to and including the last seconds before birth, marriage no matter what sexes may be involved, and anything else you can get the courts to agree we meant, but didn't write down". That would have almost made the leftists look sane. But, the Founders didn't, the leftists don't, and that pretty much sums it up.
It's semantics and a refusal to accept reality - "poverty" is a lifestyle for some. Unfortunately, some have come to think of the safety net as a way of life. No "war" is going to defeat the cultural attitude that perpetuates this thinking.
Only individuals can decide to change their situation in life. That's not to say that family, church, and other role models cannot be influential, but with all the race-baiting and class warfare the dims push, there is really little hope for many.
They are looking at a symptom. The problem is elsewhere.
I am certain that Russia and China are more tolerant of the above "anti-social" behavior. Espeially in the 'gulags'.
May I suggest Equine Scatology?
I have an alternate proposal.
Unless one is disabled, mentally ill, retarded,,,we should bring back the Poor Farms of the thirties. Or barring that, let non workers starve.
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