"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, and they shall make a profit!": The Glory of Capitalism Part I

Opportunity without restraint is what rescues people. The measure of humanity is opportunity. A dog can love you, a new pair of heels can make you feel better, but only another human being can provide and share in opportunity.

I am a supporter of the free market, the market is the best arbiter of them all. The market is color-blind and user friendly; the market is equal opportunity. But it has a bad reputation - some of the other economic systems have been spreading rumors and lies about her. I mean, just the other day I caught socialism scribbling "Free Market is a Heartless Gold Digger" on a bathroom stall. She ran away when I saw her, but it was too late - the words were already out there. So sad - they are all just jealous...

I had someone tell me today that they believe that capitalism is good, and that the free market is a good idea in theory, but that it negatively affects (and effects) the way we view poor people. I needed no less than 2 seconds to know that I thourghly disagree with that sentiment. Over this five part series, I intend to examine these misconceptions about poverty and the market, and will answer any and all objections tossed my way.

Let's examine for one second, how we view the poor in a vacuum - objectively. What makes someone "poor" anyway? Do we all even mean the same thing when we talk about "the poor"? Are we talking about the inability to afford basic material necessities? Or, does the fact that America's "poor" have been known to possess TV's and computers mean we are talking about more than that - maybe about a general social frustration. I'm sure that everyone would agree that people without food, shelter, or access to clean water are indeed poor. We call this subsistene poverty. The difficult part is defining the rest of the strata. If you live in Hell's Kitchen, NYC are you poor? If you have a job and an apartment but are overburdened by medical bills are you poor?

To guide us through the rhetorical maze that the povery dialogue has created in the modern era, John Friedman has suggested in his watershed article has classified modern dialogue on poverty and the poor into four basic categories: burecratic; moralizing; democratic; and academic. The burecratic approach focuses on defining a poverty line with families/households falling either above or below. This "poverty line" is used (both in the US and in many European countries) as the threshold for qualifing for state aid. The academic approach is similar, although it is more likely to include in its dialogue the underlying causes of poverty. Moralizing language is to be avoided, associating poverty with negative personal characteristics such as laziness or irresponsibility, or other moral shortcomings. Dramatic language is possibly the least objective of all, describes and identifies poverty through the use of complex and dramatic narratives about "a day in the life" of someone with less money or access to society.

The very fact that we have trouble agreeing on what "poor" is is demonstrative of the evolution of social structures over time. Jesus said that the poor would always be with us, and it seems at least that much is true. It's worth mentioning though, that some of that is our own doing: as long as we define poverty in relative terms, such as the bottom 10% or 20% income bracket, we will always have poor people. But the bottom 10% income bracket in the United States still has more than the the majority of the third world, and some countries' "poor" do even better. Europe and Japan have the richest poor people in the world.

We could argue that poverty means the inability to participate fully in society. But in America, is everyone without an iPod, cell phone, and Guitar Hero World Tour "poor"? At the end of the day, defining poverty to everyone's satisfacation is nearly impossible. One thing is certian though - h istory has no better lesson than cause and effect. In his book, From Lenin to Khrushchev: The History of World Communism, Seton-Watson reminds us that "The social causes of communism are frustrtion of the intelligentsia an poverty of the masses."

So whatever poverty is, we'd better figure it out quicky, before the masses decide for us.