how about supercuts, john-boy?

John Edwards tossed in the towel, and hardly anyone noticed.

One thing did strike me as interesting about his “I’m out” speech. He wants the remaining candidates to pledge their intentions to fight poverty, and he says that the fight against poverty and economic inequality is “the cause of my life.”

Disregard for a moment the cognitive dissonance you may feel when listening to a multimillionaire trial lawyer who gets $400 haircuts talk about ending poverty, and look at the core of those statements.

Let’s deal with “economic inequality” first. That one’s pretty much a given, and it’s one of the main things that the socialists/social Democrats/welfare state proponents get wrong 100% of the time. Economic inequality is inevitable in a society where people have varying marketable skills, financial sense, work ethics, and backgrounds. Equality is a laudable goal, but what’s necessary for a just society is equality before the law, not equality of economic outcome. You might as well take up the cause of fighting against “aesthetic inequality” and rail against the injustice of the fact that there are some people who are better looking than others.

(Laugh now, but think about how one’s appearance influences one’s economic opportunities–good-looking folks get hired more easily and into better-paying jobs than ugly people–and then picture some future pocket Trotskyist incorporating “non-discrimination of ugly/fat people” into their platform…at first. Mandatory cosmetic surgery would be next, downgrading the good-looking folks and upgrading the not-so-good-looking ones. The trees were all kept equal, by hatchet, axe and saw…)

Economic inequality will always be a factor, as long as there are folks smarter, better-looking, or more driven than others. Look, all you have to do is to take your own family and circle of friends as an example. Almost everyone has that certain friend or family member who couldn’t hold a job if you duct-taped them to an office chair and personally delivered them to their office every morning. You know the kind, and you also know that there’s not a force in the world that can make your slacker brother/nephew/friend acquire the will to be productive. If you give him money, he spends it. If you offer him education or training, he won’t attend classes. Everyone knows at least one person in their circle of family and friends who is very much content with coasting through life going from couch to couch, and mooching off of friends and relatives for as long as they let him. Is it then “unjust” when Joe makes minimum wage (or lives off the dole) because he wants to spend his life surfing the web for porn and leveling his World of Warcraft gnome warlock, and his sister Amy makes eighty grand a year and can afford a Mustang because she actually got up at six in the morning for four years to go to college?

Then there’s the thing about poverty, and if there ever was a vague catch-all phrase designed to make the speaker appear compassionate and socially progressive, it’s the pledge to “end poverty”.

The question, of course, is “How the hell are you going to do that?”

Since Johnson’s “Great Society” programs kicked off in the 1960s, this country has literally spent trillions of tax dollars on the fight against poverty in some way or another. What’s the end result of those programs? Income redistribution is now by far the biggest slice of the federal budget–the government pays close to seven hundred billion dollars every fiscal year on Medicare/Medicaid alone, and two thirds of the federal budget is eaten up by entitlement programs.

(That’s before even considering Social Security, which is not counted into the Federal budget, but which makes up another 600+ billion per year. The reason they count it separately is because they pay out the benefits directly out of the contributions–and then “borrow” the rest, so there’s no impact on the General Fund…yet. In 2017 or so, the contributions from wage earners aren’t going to cover the Social Security checks anymore, and the SS Trust Fund will need to call in all those IOUs the government’s been leaving in the till for the last thirty-odd years.)

So, obviously, chucking money at poverty has failed to eliminate it. In fact, it hasn’t even really made a dent in the national poverty rate. On the contrary, as we spend more and more money on those programs, the poverty rate seems to be creeping upwards, not downwards. I won’t even address at length the culture of dependency and entitlement that has permeated the country since we started tossing taxpayer dollars at poverty, but I dare you to tell me that the welfare system, public housing, and all the other well-intentioned creations of the “Great Society” programs are empowering. Those are not hand-ups, they’re hand-outs–hay and a barn for human cattle, as P.J. O’Rourke puts it. Those programs don’t empower people, they foster a culture of resentment, abject apathy and dependency. We can kid ourselves and others with political rhetoric and philosophical justifications, but in the end we know exactly when we’re relying on someone else to do for us what we ought to be able to do for ourselves, and that kind of knowledge causes us to resent the hand that feeds us.

To be sure, there is much injustice in our country, but that has to do with equality of opportunity and access, not equality of paychecks. (Those are also precisely the factors of poverty that the government is least equipped to address.) Maybe some day we’ll find a way to remove those obstacles for achievement without spending other people’s money to do so, but two things are for sure: there will always be some people who will happily not work if they’re not required to do so in order to have a full fridge and a PlayStation 3…and the solution to all those issues isn’t going to come from some two-bit socialist millionaire lawyer styling himself the Champion of the Proletariat.

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