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Who Says the Elites Are Out of Touch

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A Nobel Laureate in Economics claims that poor people in America have it worse than poor people in Africa or Bangladesh because — I am not making this up — it’s such a burden for them to have to apply for welfare benefits here.

A lot of these programs have been turned into block grants, like [the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or welfare, program], and it’s very hard for people to get them.

If you had to choose between living in a poor village in India and living in the Mississippi Delta or in a suburb of Milwaukee in a trailer park, I’m not sure who would have the better life.

Later in the article, he admits he hasn’t spent time in Appalachia or the slums of a Democrat-run American city, but he summers in Montana. That’s close enough, isn’t it?

Comments

  1. The poor guy in India doesn’t have an electric bill or a need for a plumber or have to buy gas for his automobile or pay for cable bills for his TV that crush him deeper into poverty. And he has a whole landfill of fresh garbage to scavenge. Also, his Nikes don’t go out of style, because he doesn’t have any shoes at all.

    If we “taxed” our entitlement recipients one percent for entitlement transfer to India, watch how tolerant they would be and think of the diversity dances they would undertake.

  3. Congratulations To Bolivarian Socialism — Now Even the *Cubans* are Fleeing Venezuela, as the Country Finally Declares Humanitarian Crisis

    3/25/2017

    The economic horror in Venezuela continues to unfold–the Bolivarian socialists have achieved the entirely remarkable feat of making Cubans flee the country in search of a better life.

    Seriously, Cubans, from a poverty stricken socialist dictatorship are now leaving an oil rich nation in search of a better life. It takes a serious level of economic mismanagement to achieve that.

    That serious level being exactly the one thing that Venezuela has lots of, of course. So much so that Nicolas Maduro has just appealed to the United Nations to come and organise the supply of medicines for the country. This being something that normal places can manage on their own and usually rather well too.

    The cause of all of this is that Maduro, and his predecessor Chavez, decided that the way to run an economy was to do everything that the textbooks say you shouldn’t do to an economy.

    Mr Maduro said the UN had the expertise to normalise the supply and distribution of drugs in the country.

    Venezuela’s Medical Federation said recently that hospitals had less than 5% of the medicines they needed.

    The president blames the problems on an economic war against his government and the sharp fall in oil prices.

    There is indeed an economic war going on here. And it’s one being waged by the Bolivarian socialists against the Venezuelan population. The tactic is simply to destroy the price system and thus the market. Given that non-market economies do not work this ensures the destruction of Venezuela’s economy.

    Since Hugo Chavez first took over in 1999, Venezuela has mostly relied on workers from Cuba (which at some point numbered 100,000 in-country, including doctors and nurses) to manage its health-care system.

    However, that decades-long experiment has largely failed — so much so that the government needs to ask the U.N. for help. More than half of the Cuba-manned CDI first-response centers, located mostly in Venezuela’s worst “barrios” (slums) have been closed and the Cuban doctors fled Venezuela for better lives in other countries.

    Yes, even the Cubans have left.

    But just acknowledging that Venezuela needs outside help is a telling sign of how far the nation sitting atop the world’s largest petroleum reserves has fallen under Maduro.

    To give an example of the economic lunacy under way:

    A gasoline shortage in OPEC member Venezuela was exacerbated by an increase in fuel exports to foreign allies such as Cuba and Nicaragua and an exodus of crucial personnel from state-run energy company PDVSA, according to internal PDVSA documents and sources familiar with its operations.

    You’ll not be surprised to hear that Cuba and Nicaragua do not pay market prices for that fuel. Even when there’s a domestic shortage and Venezuela is itself desperate for cash.

    Long time readers will note that I continually harp on about this Venezuelan disaster. And there’s a reason for this. It is purely and solely because the economic policy in that country is so absurdly bad. This hasn’t been caused by the oil price decline, not by the Gringos attacking the revolution, it has all happened simply because of the actions of that domestic government.

    And yet there are all too many people who were cheering them on. Like David Sirota:

    “No, Chavez became the bugaboo of American politics because his full-throated advocacy of socialism and redistributionism at once represented a fundamental critique of neoliberal economics, and also delivered some indisputably positive results.”

    …

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2017/03/25/congratulations-to-bolivarian-socialism-venezuela-declares-humanitarian-crisis

    .

  5. if this is true I hope we can convince the colonists that come to the united states illegally that they would be better off in Africa and india.
    this guy is a nobel prize winner in economics and you thought Obama winning the peace prize was an outlier.

  8. Naturally – an article in The Atlantic. Further proof that too many college educated people today are total waste.

    Even being poor in America is an first prize of birth in this world. But – yes, America is such a ‘evil’ and ‘racist’ country…

    God bless America. We need all the blessings we can get facing these waste of an ‘college education’.

  9. people in America have it worse than poor people in Africa or Bangladesh because […] it’s such a burden for them to have to apply for welfare benefits here

    I sense some tax season bitterness…

    But, worry not. CALL NOW ! 800-BERNIE-13% !

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  10. but he summers in Montana

    Right off the bat I was going to guess he doesn’t ‘summer’ near Crow Agency, or the prairies and farm country of Eastern Montana, or the now-depressed, once-booming community of Butte; then I checked his bio and found out he and his Princeton-employed wife’s leisure [pronounced ‘LEH-zhure’] pursuits are “opera and trout fishing”.

    So he might get his opera fix elsewhere, but if he likes trout fishing, I’ll bet that he therefore “summers” in either the Gallatin Valley with Ted Turner’s other well-compensated friends, or the Flathead Valley (where the poorer nouveau riche ‘summer’). Either locale is not where one finds an abundance of affordable housing or working poor (who might actually work several jobs there, but live outside the dominant communities therein). So he can spend his entire year never actually interacting with the people he claims to champion (save for the service people whom I’m guessing he barely notices except when they screw up at their jobs). Nice work if you can get it.

  11. I know that when *I* was growing up poor majority-minority (*) in Indiana, my fondest dream was to move to Bangladesh or Africa.

    (*) or is in minority-majority? Whatever, we were the only white kids for blocks around.

  14. Socialism : The Pornography of Solidarity

    I do not use the word in its etymological sense. For me, pornography is what is practiced without love. And there are many of those loveless gestures that impoverish our everyday life:

    food eaten without the taste and consciousness that it connects to our environment, background noise posing as music, and so many others.

    In the same way, I call work pornographic when it becomes a salaried and repetitive chore, and socialism, too.

    Socialism promises us a generous society. According to it, this must be done by forced redistribution of income, and mutilation of heritages.

    After a few decrees, and a few dozen years, the accounting and statistical appearance of the country will be a more egalitarian society.

    But between people, the looks will not have changed, the shadow of a more fraternal feeling will not be born.

    For, the mere gestures of solidarity are not solidarity.

    To illustrate it with an super-well-known history, suppose that a general of the Roman legion had ordered the centurion Martin to share his coat.

    The material result would have been the same, a poor half-warmed, a half-shivering.

    But, where is the solidarity? At the general’s, who does not discover anything new? With the centurion, who can only obey?

    A society is never performing solidarity. Only free men do.

    Sure, a society can be redistributive, and coercive.

    Some individuals and/or pressure groups may impose on others to have those “share” their property.

    They change the bank account numbers, they only poison human relationships.

    They change the “standard of living”, they do not make men more supportive of others.

    Solidarity escapes politics. It is not taxable. It proceeds from an uncalculated and unpredictable *inner*, individual movement (a frightening feature of spontaneity for socialism which is recognized only in planning and control).

    Solidarity always involves a risk which is its very condition.

    It was necessary that the beggar had no “right to” the coat for something to only happen, that a kind gesture comes to him (a gesture that does not give a flip to reconstruct the economico-social order of the world, and is merely satisfied in helping with someone’s life).

    Solidarity is born in the void of the regulation.

    It is in the respect of pre-existing rights, and therefore in the absence of legal impositions, that human relations can become richer, bringing more solidarity.

    In the absence of specific contracts that your own freedom could have invented or consented to, no natural person has rights over you.

    The fact of sharing the same humanity, or the same collective, or even the same blood, does not allow me to ransom you.

    I can cry misery at your feet all I want, I will not become a creditor of a penny of your wages.

    But I also believe that I can trust there will be a possibility that you will decide to help me.

    Because we are free, we have values ​​and one of them is called solidarity.

    It founds our collective, societal life of men on earth.

    I have no right to any part of your income, but you have the moral duty to support me, if you find I deserve it.

    No civil servant can impose it on you, for what sense would such a sharing make under threat?

    We can give only what we have the freedom to give.

    Socialism has succeeded in this paradox of having destroyed our personal relationships and having forced us into business relationships that we have *not* contracted.

    We have become creditors, without titles, from each other.

    Perhaps a remnant of fraternity sometimes motivates us, but it is harder and harder to discern.

    Hard to imagine in the check sent to the tax collector a mark of compassion, hard to glimpse a feeling of friendship in the “contribution”.

    Paying is not being generous. Or else, let us venerate the goodness of the billionaires, the most holy of men, since they pay so much tax; the truth is it is ridiculous.

    They are not “just” or “supportive” to all those who have been caught in the net by the bureaucracy.

    There can be morality only in freedom.

    But here it is easier to order than to convert. Work in consciousness is invisible, therefore frustrating.

    Yet it is the only one that can break our solitudes in the face of bureaucracies. If we want to build a somewhat fraternal city, we must begin by educating for long, and patiently, the sense of duty, the responsibility of each one of us towards those he can help.

    Socialism chooses another way, that of coercion.

    The compassion, which the man of liberty wants to teach society about, the socialist central state decides its destiny and kills it — forbidding any spontaneity.

    Thus the man of the left promises the solidarity society only as the prostitute promises love.

    Both of them can only offer simulacre (a temporary intoxication and frustration).

    They establish the reign of the pretend or, if you prefer, a stronger image, generalized pornography.

    Social-democracies cost us dearly for this mission impossible to eradicate miseries.

    Failing to do this, of course — one is always the poor of someone, and they hide what they can not eliminate.

    As formerly the Victorians made incomprehensible sexuality by refusing to name it, social democracies generate an impractical “social” by covering it with a veil of shame.

    Whether the disabled person becomes a person with reduced mobility, the unemployed, a worker in search of employment, and the old man reaching the third age, is not only a precious and ridiculous turn of bureaucratic language.

    This also reflects the anxiety of the planners of society to name the phenomena that their pretension to manage people like things will never take into account: physical defects and fragilities, genius, moral deviations, new ideas, caprices of crowds and disenchantment…

    Alas for the Plan! These are men!

    It would run so much better if they were not there as men, but as clay.

    Socialism does not like men, eternal conspirators and saboteurs against the Plan.

    — Christian Michel

    (My translation from the French)

    https://www.wikiberal.org/wiki/Christian_Michel