Give a homeless man $100k and he'll squander it
Poverty is the result of poor choices
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2006/08/the_power_of_pe.html
JoeUser Forums
A long time ago I wrote "the value of working hard". One of the comments I made is that in my experience, having grown up around genuinely poor people that most of them are poor because, frankly, they're losers. Show me a consistently poor American and I'll show you someone who is either disabled, or more commonly a fool.
Joe Knowledge followed this with an article called "poor people are stpuid" as a response to what I had written arguing that most poor people are poor becaues of circumstance and bad luck and that I lacked compassion.
Most bleeding hearts for the poor, like Joe Knowledge, have never done very much research into the causes of poverty in America. We have 40 years of research on the subject and time and time again the same statistics show up -- overwhelmingly, people who live in poverty are idiotic. There are exceptions but they are just that -- exceptions.
Once in awhile, someone wants to prove that if a poor person is just given a break, they can be just as successful as someone else. Remember the moving Trading Places? Well, in real life, everytme they run such an experiment the same result happens.
There have been numerous social examples of philanthropists giving money to the abject poor to help them only to discover it ends up squandered.
I recently came across a show called "Reversal of Fortune". In it, Showtime gave a homeless man $100,000. The qualification was that they picked a man without any overt mental illness or drug addiction. The idea was to show that many homeless people are just victims of circumstance and that if given a break will make something of themselves.
Alas, to their surprise the Homeless man soon sqaundered the money and was back on the streets.
Which underscores what many of us have known -- taking property from people who earn it and giving it to people who don't is not just immoral but it is a waste of time. Overwhelmingly, 1st world citizens who are living in consistent poverty are doing so due to their own faults that can't be remedied by throwing money at the situation.
That doesn't mean every single person living in poverty ended up there due to poor choices. There are disabled people. There are genuinely people who have gotten incredibly bad luck (but they won't stay in poverty). But the reality is, poverty in the United States is not something that can be cured -- not with money anyway.
PolMach Forums