I found a link to this post over at Balloon Juice and felt the need to rant. Be warned, I swear a lot.
We begin with this quote:
The free-enterprise system has lifted more people out of poverty than any government program, and yes, our “social problems create our poverty.” But there’s a tension inherent in these two points. It’s not precisely true that the free-enterprise system itself has lifted people out of poverty; it’s more true that the free-enterprise system has created opportunities that allow hard-working (or even moderately hard-working) individuals to succeed. But if you destroy the people’s industry and virtue, then all the economic liberty in the world won’t save them.
First of all, if the free enterprise system and some religion was all it took to get people out of poverty, the great depression never would've happened. Free enterprise was about as free is it got in the years leading up to the great depression - regulations were few and far between, unions were getting busted left and right, and religion was pretty prominent throughout the country both among the rich and the poor. Still, the depression happened. Why? Because there was nothing to protect the have nots from the tyranny of the haves. There was no safety net, nothing to keep senior citizens from starving, nothing to help the disabled, nothing for those who lost their jobs to fall back on.
It should also be noted that people didn't become senior citizens, disabled, or unemployed because they didn't have enough God in them. That's just utter bullshit. People get old, people are born or become disabled, and people lose their jobs all the time often through no fault of their own. Roosevelt, father of every conservative's worst nightmares, DID NOT institute Social Security and the rest of the new deal entirely out of some sense of kindness or humanity, not to say that he wasn't a good man, that's not the point of this debate. The fact was that he was very much entrenched with the rich corporatists and elites that drove the country into the ditch in the first place, and was one of them. No, he did it to save their asses as the meek were about to rise up and inherit themselves some earth with pitchforks and torches. By creating a stable middle class to buffer the poor from the rich, he kept the great depression from becoming the great revolution.
As for the argument that anyone can lift themselves out of poverty if they just work hard enough, it's my opinion and personal experience that most of the people who believe this argument have never actually worked hard a day in their lives and wouldn't know hard work if it bit them in the ass. Then there's the argument about religion, about 'virtue', which is usually code for straight, white Christians. Modern day Christianity, especially as practiced by conservatives, has absolutely nothing to do with Jesus and the ideals that he preached. A rich man will never get into heaven? Leave all your things behind and come with me? Help those that have the least among you? Yeah, didn't think so.
It continues:
It is simply a fact that our social problems are increasingly connected to the depravity of the poor. If an American works hard, completes their education, gets married, and stays married, then they will rarely — very rarely — be poor. At the same time, poverty is the handmaiden of illegitimacy, divorce, ignorance, and addiction. As we have poured money into welfare, we’ve done nothing to address the behaviors that lead to poverty while doing all we can to make that poverty more comfortable and sustainable.
Simply a fact? I know facts usually have a liberal bias, but do you even know what the word fact means? It is simply your opinion that poor people are somehow depraved because they're either gay, brown, divorced, never married in the first place, or any other number of things that have nothing to do with depravity as the word is intended to be used.
Depravity is hoarding all of your wealth while watching your fellow man suffer. Depravity is hoarding all of your wealth and not being satisfied with what you have, but needing even more of it. Depravity is spending millions of dollars scapegoating your fellow man to get yourself a bigger piece of the pie. Depravity is claiming to be Christian while simultaneously shitting on every single thing that Jesus ever taught.
This idea that if a person just works hard - again, working hard is not something most of these people are familiar with - completes their education - if they can afford it in the first place - gets married - if they can marry the person they actually love - and stays married, they'll magically never become poor! This conveniently ignores that a lot of people can't afford an education, can't marry the person they love, and can't help the circumstances into which they were born. But never mind all that, because free market Jesus will set them free!
I'd like to also knock down this idea that poverty is tied to a legitimacy, divorce and other such things. The divorce rate is over 50% across the country, and is worse in the supposedly Jesus loving red states than it is in the heathen socialist blue states the. Divorce has very little to do with class (see: Gingrich, Newt) or religion. Illegitimacy has little to do with class (see: Schwarzenegger, Arnold) or religion. Ignorance is only related to poverty in as much as good educations are often the sole property of the rich, and again I would point out that the red states have much higher illiteracy rates and teen pregnancy rates and dropout rates than the blue states do.
He's right on one thing, though, we haven't addressed the core issues with poverty. We haven't done what we need to do to bring education to the places it's most needed, we haven't done anything to bring better food to the places it's most needed, we haven't done anything to address social justice, protect the rights of workers and their safety on the job, or help the vast majority of people without Health Care. Maybe that's because cutting taxes for the rich doesn't solve any of those problems.
He concludes:
Earlier this week, Walter Russell Mead highlighted disturbing research showing that the poor — far more than the rich — are disconnected from church and religion. While church attendance is dropping among all social classes, it’s falling off a cliff for the poorest and least-educated Americans. In other words, the deeper a person slides into poverty, the more they’re disconnected from the very values that can save them and their families.
The bottom line is that we need more free enterprise, and we need more virtue. Sadly, the Great Society and the sexual revolution have deprived us of both.
If the poor are being removed from the church, it might be because the church doesn't have their interests at heart. While people starve and go without healthcare, the church is more interested in going after gays and Muslims. If the poor are leaving the church behind, it's because they've realized that the church has left them long ago. More and more, what Jesus said and what the church does are at increasingly greater odds. The fact that the people are seeing through this hypocrisy is a feature, not a bug.
So no, the bottom line isn't that we need more free enterprise or more 'virtue', something that is again and again proven to be hypocrisy, what we need is more compassion and understanding. What we need is to learn how to share, how to help each other and care for each other. What we need is to stop worrying about whether we have ours and fuck everybody else, and to make sure that our neighbor has what they need as well. That would certainly be the Christian thing to do, and I'm not even Christian, but it sure isn't the conservative thing to do. Funny how that works.