Government efforts in "War on Poverty" often aid the enemy

[karl]

In Miami, in October 2006, a group of community organizers and about 35 homeless people built Umoja Village, a shanty town, on an inner-city lot that the local government had kept vacant for years. They publicly stated to the local government that “We have only one demand . . . leave us alone.”

That would be the end of the story in a free market: there would be no eminent domain, no government ownership, and thus also no political process of seizure and redevelopment; once-homeless people could establish property rights to abandoned land through their own sweat equity—without fear of the government’s demolishing their work and selling their land out from under them. But back in Miami, the city attorney and city council took about a month to begin legal efforts to destroy the residents’ homes and force them off the lot. In April 2007 the city police took advantage of an accidental fire to enforce its politically fabricated title to the land, clearing the lot, arresting 11 people, and erecting a fence to safeguard the once-again vacant lot for professional “affordable housing” developers.

Had the city government not made use of its supposed title to the abandoned land, it no doubt could have made use of state and federal building codes to ensure that residents would be forced back into homelessness—for their own safety, of course. That is in fact what a county health commission in Indiana did to a 93-year-old man named Thelmon Green, who lived in his ‘86 Chevrolet van, which the local towing company allowed him to keep on its lot. Many people thrown into poverty by a sudden financial catastrophe live out of a car for weeks or months until they get back on their feet. Living in a car is cramped, but it beats living on the streets: a car means a place you can have to yourself, which holds your possessions, with doors you can lock, and sometimes even air conditioning and heating. But staying in a car over the long term is much harder to manage without running afoul of the law. Thelmon Green got by well enough in his van for ten years, but when the Indianapolis Star printed a human-interest story on him last December, the county health commission took notice and promptly ordered Green evicted from his own van, in the name of the local housing code.

Since government housing codes impose detailed requirements on the size, architecture, and building materials for new permanent housing, as well as on specialized and extremely expensive contract work for electricity, plumbing, and other luxuries, they effectively obstruct or destroy most efforts to create transitional, intermediate, or informal sorts of shelter that cost less than rented space in government-approved housing projects, but provide more safety and comfort than living on the street.

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According to Star Parker, syndicated columnist who escaped "Uncle Sam's Plantation," our war on poverty actually insures that most poor people will simply stay "on the plantation."

[Dr. Shane]

Sounds like we have some good local governments doing good things. When I was a kid my mom was living out of her car with us kids for about a week or so until one of her friends took us in.

[karl]

Sounds like we have some good local governments doing good things. When I was a kid my mom was living out of her car with us kids for about a week or so until one of her friends took us in.

The point is government's interfering with free market solutions to this world's problems are deleterious.

Living out of a car is better than living under a tree.

Jesus said "The poor you have with you always."

Boldly declaring "an unconditional war on poverty," President Johnson rolled out a laundry list of programs that he claimed would end poverty in America. Meanwhile, the government's own statistical police and bureaucracy were saying that poverty was already in decline from the highs of the (Hoover-FDR prolonged) Great Depression, as the New Deal and war-time price controls and rationing expired and industrial production and competition were permitted by Washington, D.C.

Undaunted by this fact, Johnson declared: "The Act does not merely expand old programs or improve what is already being done. It charts a new course. It strikes at the causes, not just the consequences of poverty. It can be a milestone in our one-hundred eighty year search for a better life for our people."

Implied throughout Johnson's proposal for the massive expansion of the welfare state is the conventional, but wrong wisdom, that it is now possible to eradicate poverty, not through the division of labor and private property-based production, but rather that the level of general wealth has reached such an alleged level that it is now possible to achieve an equal and high standard of living by forcible confiscation and redistribution.

That the state can abolish poverty through theft and handouts was the mainstream view back then, and unfortunately is still the mainstream view today, although it exists in two schools of thought; the old price and wage central planning and redistribution, and the more recent concentration on destroying the value of the money standard through inflation as the method to "lift all boats."

Poverty continues to exist today, in Africa, Latin America, India, the Arab/Muslim world, Russia, South and Eastern Europe, China, and tragically in the state-created and perpetuated ghettos of North American "inner-cities" because of statism and the destruction and loss of property rights and liberty. Whether it is in Calcutta, Cairo or the inner cities of America, the State has time after time replaced individuals' rights to their labor and property with bureaucratic directives, agencies, licenses, police, welfare, taxes, subsidies, political favors, vote-rigging, bribery and all other manner of controls that make the inhabitants wards of the state from the cradle to the grave.

The War on Poverty, like many other State programs around the world, can be interpreted as yet another attempt to repeal the Industrial Revolution, which alone made it possible to feed and cloth the hundreds of millions of human beings that otherwise would have starved to death, all the while increasing the standard of living for all who participated in production and exchange.

Instead of mass production, State welfare involves attempts to redistribute existing property rather than allowing markets to increase wealth and capital that can be reapplied in the production of new goods and services to increase the standard of living for all. At the same time, all state spending is a drain upon the productive members of our culture.

As Murray Rothbard pointed out in an essay in Making Economic Sense, the amounts spent by federal, state, and local governments since the Great Society of the 1960s totals the staggering sum of $7 trillion. "And what is the result?" Rothbard asked.

"The plight of the inner cities is clearly worse than ever: more welfare, more crime, more dysfunction, more fatherless families, fewer kids being 'educated' in any sense, more despair and degradation.... It should be clear, in the starkest terms, that throwing taxpayer money and privileges at the inner cities is starkly counterproductive. And yet: this is the only 'solution' that liberals can ever come up with, and without any argument—as if this 'solution' were self-evident. How long is this nonsense supposed to go on?"

[Dr. Shane]

The Great Society programs have effectively ended poverty in America. What we call poverty is those living beneath a certain level of income which is established so there is a cut-off point for those that can and those that cannot receive government assistance. About the only people that are truly poor in America are the homeless street people - most of which are alcoholics, drug addicts or mentally ill.

Jesus was right when He said we would always have the poor with us. What He didn't say was that they would be in America. There are still poor people but they are not in the US. They are in Latin America, Africa and Asia. The "poor" in America sleep in beds with mattresses. They have shoes and socks on their feet. They have flushable toilets. They have refrigerators and cooking ranges in their kitchens. They have hot water heaters and bath tubs. They have heaters and many even have air conditioners in their homes or apartments. Many even have cars, microwaves, televisions and computers. Compare this to the standard of living in our southern neighbor and it is no wonder that so many Mexicans come here hoping to become among America's "poor".

[karl]

The Great Society programs have effectively ended poverty in America.

They have shoes and socks on their feet. They have flushable toilets. They have refrigerators and cooking ranges in their kitchens. They have hot water heaters and bath tubs. They have heaters and many even have air conditioners in their homes or apartments. Many even have cars, microwaves, televisions and computers.

[Dr. Shane]

They have stuff and food...

The ghettos are worse than ever, except people have more stuff.

Sounds like the government is being quite successful but the churches are failing to do their part. The government's war on poverty was to help the poor have more stuff (likes socks, mattresses, refrigerators, etc.) and food. The church has to still do its part in winning souls for Jesus.

[karl]

Originally Posted By: karl

They have stuff and food...

The ghettos are worse than ever, except people have more stuff.

Sounds like the government is being quite successful but the churches are failing to do their part. The government's war on poverty was to help the poor have more stuff (likes socks, mattresses, refrigerators, etc.) and food. The church has to still do its part in winning souls for Jesus.

Check out Revelation for how your love affair with the gov turns out.