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Politics : Right Wing Extremist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hope Praytochange who wrote (58004)	9/29/2010 9:32:16 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 59480

Indy 29. September 2010 at 06:31 I think we’ve lost all sense of perspective when we talk about the experience of poverty in American in 2010 – internationally, and historically. For the left, the “distressed condition of the poor” serves as the fundamental motivation and justification for their program of societal reform that will remedy this suffering and achieve “social justice”. If one were to admit, say, that the condition of the “American poor” today is so distant from the poor of yesterday, or the poor abroad, that it is hardly comparable, then one loses that fundamental pressing argument for urgent and dramatic political change. This is why the modern progressives can not let this go and be satisfied with the amazing success that has been achieved (largely by technological and productivity progress, I would argue, though partially by government intervention), in the last century. They will still be harping about the inexcusably awful condition of “the poor” in 2050 too, when the poor will have things that would make Bill Gates envious today. “A rising tide lifts all boats” is true, but ineffective as a politically satisfying doctrine that justifies aggressive action, and so the “relative position” of different classes in an inexhaustible fountain of malice, even if the absolute position of the poor is incredibly improved. An objective measure of the physical manifestations of true destitution – as judged from the perspective of an early progressive of, say, 90 years ago, would yield a conclusion that their view of the problem is largely solved, and, in fact, they would simply be stunned and in awe at the many ubiquitous and cheap technological luxuries that our “poor” routinely enjoy and that would have made any Emperor or ultra-rich capitalist of even 75 years ago completely envious. I’m positive that air conditioning would be an an incredibly happy bonus for anyone with my thermal preferences. This is experience of new immigrants who come from genuinely poor countries and it was certainly that of my immigrant grandparents who thought the poor of even 1948 America were actually just “less rich”, at least compared to the poverty they had experienced in their own youth. Though, today, even the poor in poor countries carry cheap cell phones around (which I saw in Afghanistan, for example), which would have been a complete miracle-technology of usefulness in the developed world only a generation ago. When a 1920’s progressive spoke about the poor, they were talking about people who were not just uneducated but largely illiterate, malnourished or starving, ill-clothed, cramped in awful unsanitary shelters with dirt floors, no plumbing, no electricity or appliances, no ventilation, outhouses, no refuse or sanitation services, and sparse, make-do furniture, (we would barely agree to call their sleeping arrangements “beds”) and no ability to afford almost any convenient mode of transportation. Think “How the other half lives” which was about New York slums of the 1880’s. The question, I suppose, is that if you were to put the average material circumstances of today’s bottom quintile in front of someone from the middle quintile of 50 years years ago, would they want to switch? Would they see themselves as being better off and having more utility? I think the answer is clearly yes. And if you’ve raised the material condition of your “poor” such that they exceed those of the “middle class” of a generation or two prior – you’ve won, and you are now allowed to stop exaggerating the scope of their utter depravity, even though your personal vision of Utopia wasn’t quite fully achieved. themoneyillusion.com