What Causes Poverty?
It is undeniable that welfare programs create, for their recipients, various disincentives to be financially and socially responsible. A perfect example of this is the fact that public housing requests for single mothers are often expedited as compared to requests from non-parents. This clearly creates an incentive to have children. This incentive is not a sufficient cause, by any means, I am sure, but the knowledge of this fact among young girls residing in public housing is surely considered by young girls in their decision making process.
As a source, I cite Desire, an independent documentary by Julie Gustafson. http://www.state.sc.us/arts/circuit/current.htm#gustafson
(I think that Gustafson is a fine filmmaker, and a wretched economist/sociologist, by the way.)
While Gustafson herself makes the case in her narration/dialogue in the film that her subjects--young, poor girls such as those discussed above--were inevitably going to get
pregnant and remain poor, the girls themselves were adamant that they had many options available to them and could have chosen differently.
In the movie, which follows the lives of several girls over five years, we meet a girl named Cassandra who dreams of going into the military, going to college, and leading a financially comfortable life. She becomes pregnant, and, despite his overtures, refuses to allow her child's father joint custody of their daughter. Because of her sole custody of the baby girl, the military will not allow her to contract (for the obvious reason that she would be unable to care for her child while in basic training, while deployed, etc.).
Gustafson's interpretation of this is that Cassandra was doomed by her poverty, and never really had a choice. When I saw this movie last night, Gustafson was in attendance, and held a short question and answer time afterwards. When questioned as to why the girls ended up as they did, she stated that they were trapped, and that the "illusion" of a choice is what gave them hope and their pride. Gustafson then repeated, "They were very proud... too proud." It was this last part that I find most revealing.
Cassandra was too proud to allow her child's father to share custody, and too proud to depend on him for support, even though, by the end of the movie, he is working as a barber making better than the usual (for the individuals in the movie) minimum wage. Her unwillingness to depend on others who were voluntarily offering support, and to instead rely on the government housing and other welfare made available to her effectively kept her in poverty.
After viewing this, I must conclude that it is this government's welfare programs, which create this sense of entitlement in the first place, which ultimately made this girl too proud to accept a hand up. Had she allowed her former lover joint custody, she could have achived her dreams, insofar as they were portrayed in this documentary.
Likewise, when people feel as though they are entitled to something that they did not earn, there is little incentive to be responsible, to control spending, to save, to plan ahead, and to lift yourself from a life that seems to be close to mere subsistence.
Labels: charity, katrina, new orleans, poverty, welfare
posted by Dick Clark @ Wednesday, September 28, 2005
1 comments
1 Comments:
I must take issue with some of your views, Mr. Clark.
I agree, of course, I must say, with your assessment of statist welfare programs, as destructive even of its recipients. But I must take a stance in favor of the reduction in the scope of choice produced by institutions outside of the state and its licensed monopoly on retributive violence. This analysis if true will not justify state intervention, however, because to do so would be to magnify one of the most important powers in the reduction of the liberty and more broadly choice of the people.
But before I get to that let me say something about whether it is mere pride that has got Cassandra into this situation. First off, if it were mere pride, we would not be able to blame the state; pride is an internally arising phenomena or method of dealing with the world around one. The state would at most be secondarily at fault in the corruption of the values of Cassandra herself. Second, I must ask the quesiton whether it is just pride. It seems to me that it is nearly a law that he who pays the piper picks the tune (is this a psychological law? or a sociological law? or what?) . And if she takes money from her husband she is likely to feel obligated in some ways that she would not find acceptable. I cannot say, of course, what those ways might be, except that perhaps he would exert an influence on the child that would be more than would be best for the child, in her view at least, or perhaps she would feel tempted to go back into a relationship which she knows to be bad for.
So let this be a segue then into the topic originally delineated. It seems to me that Cassandra's choice has been constrained by her socioeconomic situation, inasmuch as her best choice available was one that may have compromised her integrity or best interests.
So I argue that there is a useful class analysis in addition to that practiced by libertarians in general (against the state as versus civil society): socioeconomic. Other factors than the state constrain our choice, and even though they lie outside the realm of what is just in retribution to do (NB), still, justice is clearly far from the only virtue, and issues which in social sciences run parallel to issues of justice (such as economics may tend to be understood as, inasmuch as its conclusions apply to human action, and justice would seem to be the virtue most relevant to human action as such) are not the only issues for the social sciences adn politicla philosophy. There are other ones that, for instance, class analysis may do.
I guess that's all? I hope that wasn't terribly inconclusive (regardless of how wrong you may think it to be).
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