Are The Poor Responsible For Their Poverty

Liberalism vs. Conservatism part 3- taken from video series I am doing with my son

In the first installment we covered one basic difference between liberals and conservatives which is the role each groups believes the government should take in the major issues of our day. Someone on YouTube asked this question “are the poor responsible for their poverty?”  This question gives us another opportunity to review some of the differences between liberals and conservatives.

In our 2^nd topic in this series, while talking about the proper role of government, we touched on the topic of the moral responsibility to care for the truly needy, but today let's consider the poor a little more, and lets be specific while we talk about the poor- we are not talking about the truly need (those who have mental or physical issues preventing them from taking care of themselves).  We are talking about poor who are capable of taking care of themselves.

Why would someone ask such a questions as “are the poor responsible for their poverty” in the first place?  Many have learned from the liberal viewpoint that the rich only got rich by taking advantage of the poor. To put it in the words of Ronald Regan “We have so many people who can't see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion that the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one!”  This is the liberal idea that economic growth is a zero sum game, or if I get richer someone else must be getting poorer.

Conservatives recognize that economic growth is not a zero sum game.  Notice I didn't say that conservatives believe, but that conservatives recognize, because economic data does not support the idea that the rich get richer at the expense of the poor.  

In my state JR Simplot became a billionaire starting out as a farmer and getting into a lot of other businesses.  It can be temping to vilify those wealthy thinking “why should he have so much when I don't,” but what is the reality?  Because of JR’s efforts there were 10s of thousands of jobs created over his lifetime.  He branched out into electronics at one point by being the major funding partner for someone else's idea for a business.  That start of a small electronics company became one of the leading memory companies in the world with 10s of thousands of jobs created in a totally different industry from where he gained his initial wealth.  No matter how I twist it I cannot think of any way that JR Simplot’s wealth hurt the poor, but just the opposite- his success resulted in a great deal of economic growth, jobs and the improved economic condition of very many.  Through his ventures he did not end up as the only one with wealth, but there were a large number of people who have become well off because of his ventures and this spawned many more business ventures.

So are the poor responsible for their own poverty.  Well… Yes.  Who else can be responsible for it, and herein is another fundamental difference between liberals and conservatives.  Liberals teach that the poor are victims of the rich and that the wealth of the rich should be re-distributed to the poor because they only got it by taking advantage of the poor.  Conservatives on the other hand show that when given liberty the poor do not have to stay that way.  JR Simplot started out very poor- he quit school and left home when he was 14 and started working on a farm- not the typical blueprint for a future billionaire, but he was free to work hard and try for success until he found it.  Only in a free society can the poor move upward.  If we eliminate the free society, we also eliminate the ability of the poor to move upwards.  One final point to consider President Lyndon B. Johnson started “the war on poverty” and now 46 years later and nearly 17 trillion dollars poverty is winning.  The federal welfare programs which amount to an income re-distribution program have succeeded in keeping the poor poor and making poverty worse… 

So, we have two ideas- the liberal idea that the poor are victims and need to be given handouts through re-distribution of wealth.  Or, we have the conservative idea that the poor and everyone else should be given liberty and the opportunity to improve their own situation in life.

Where do you stand?