You Won't Believe Conservatives' Absurd Theories They Think Will Cure Poverty [View all]

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http://www.alternet.org/economy/conservatives-and-povety



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Yet in the face of these findings, Goldfarb’s paper recently ran a noxious editorial blasting the idea of expanding the social safety net, despite America's extreme current levels of income inequality and misguided economic policies that obviously redistribute wealth toward the rich. Could this be because the editorial board of the Post is caught in the grips of a bizarre belief based on the magic-making capacities of a flightless bird and a supernatural appendage? Let’s explore.

Back before the 19th century, American conservatives advocated what’s known as the “turkey basket” approach to poverty. You help the poor through charitable gestures, like bringing poor families in your community a turkey for Christmas. Poverty was a natural state and part of God's plan, after all, not a social problem. The poor were orphans and widows and such, and giving them alms was a religious duty.

But gradually, conservatives began to consider the ideas of Enlightenment thinkers who tried to approach poverty in a more systematic way. Conservatives preferred the ideas of Adam Smith, the father of free-market fundamentalism, who suggested that a mysterious power called the invisible hand of the market would take care of the poor, providing them with a free, expanding economy that would bring a “universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people.”

So now conservatives had both a bird and a supernatural agent to solve the problem of poverty (though truthfully, some were relieved to dispense with the Turkey altogether and just abandon the poor to the Hand). Unsurprisingly, this approach didn’t work. In the aftermath of the Great Depression, which woke up most thinking people to the mythology of a free-market paradise in which everyone would enjoy opulence, massive government programs were needed to counter the tsunami of poverty and prevent complete social chaos. Thanks to these programs, which included protections like unemployment insurance, America prospered, poverty was dealt a body blow, and income inequality shrank for the next several decades.