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This is, of course, the nature of life in a free society, without artificial barriers to success. Success builds on success, after all.

But the poor aren't poor because the wealthy are wealthy, they're poor because they and their parents didn't do what ceasing to be poor required. So if we're going to abandon a commitment to freedom, (And it IS a choice between egalitarianism and liberty.) maybe we should explore encouraging the empoverished to improve themselves, instead of just induging in spiteful attacks on the people whose behavior already IS successful?

Spite doesn't smell any better, just because you dress it up in fancy theory, and call it "egalitarianism".

Brett Bellmore said: "But the poor aren't poor because the wealthy are wealthy, they're poor because they and their parents didn't do what ceasing to be poor required."

Oh come on. Everyone I've ever heard say this has had an immeasurable greater opportunity than say an inner city black or a white kid from a trailer park in Alabama.

Do these classes of people fail over generations because of laziness? How about you, would you have thrived if you were born in such a situation? Lots of people feel they have worked very hard for what they have, but others work just as hard at WalMart or whatever and die owning nothing.

"The people whose behavior already IS successful" of course includes all those who took the forward-thinking step of being born into a wealthy family. If the poor had only applied themselves, they could have done the same.

As Barry Goldwater said (well, a cartoon version of him did anyway), "Why don't you show some initiative? Why don't you go out and inherit a department store like I did?"

I'll have to quibble about your doomsday scenario, specifically about the last sentence, "In contrast to Rome, nobody will be able to say exactly when the American republic dies."

I don't think anyone can reasonably say exactly when the Roman republic died, not even to the nearest century. The Social War? Sulla's dictatorship? Caesar's dictatorship? The Principate of Augustus? The Visigothic kingdom? The formal structures of the Republic lasted through all those things; they just became increasingly unimportant. I think it would be hard to pick a particular moment beyond which one would say that the Republic was completely irrelevant to the real business of government.

Only a prodigy is going to go from the ghetto to wealth, but an ordinary person, by not making a whole series of mistakes, can go from the ghetto to the middle class. And a journey of a thousand miles DOES start with a single step. Maybe we should encourage those steps, instead of making it easier to not take them?

My chief proposal is that all public assistance over more than a short period should involve a requirement that you move to someplace with a lower unemployment rate. Why pay people to stay where they have no prospects?

"Why pay people to stay where they have no prospects?"

So you're proposing to pay people to move to parts of the country that won't welcome them, where they have no roots or understanding of how things work, to take jobs for which they are in all likelihood untrained?

And are there actually areas of the country with low unemployment rates looking for influxes of non-transient low-skill labor?

Brett Bellmore wrote, "This is, of course, the nature of life in a free society, without artificial barriers to success. Success builds on success, after all."

No artificial barriers to success? What do you call the government forcing renters to pay landowners for the use of land, which the landowners didn't produce or contribute?

I think you're wrong about what "elasticity" means. As you're using the words, a *slope* of .2 would mean $1000 more for the father corresponds to $200 more for the son, but an *elasticity* means (roughly) 10% more for the father corresponds to 2% more for the son. Formally speaking, the elasticity is the slope after taking logarithms. Depending on how they've transformed the variables, it could be a little more complicated than that, though I'd have to read the paper to know for sure.

It should actually not surprise us. In the Nordic countries, reducing inequality of condition is the central aim of huge and expensive welfare states, with not only income support for the poor, but excellent education and health care at all income levels. Britain is somewhat less serious, and the USA hasn't been serious since Roosevelt. The American left has come to focus its efforts on discrimination; success, it seems, is for different ethnic groups to share the same inequalities.

American liberalism began to focus on discrimination and social issues during the 1950s and 1960s, and at the time it actually made sense. During this era, good middle-class union jobs were plentiful, income inequality was relatively low, marginal tax rates were high, and it seemed that things would continue to get better for most Americans. Then, the challenge became integrating groups that had been historically excluded from the American dream, such as blacks.

However, this liberal paradigm really started to fall apart during the 1980s, with Reagan's concentrated assault on American labor and the American middle class. Liberalism just hasn't shifted gears. It has been far too cowed by phony cries of "class warfare" from the right - cries that even a Canadian or British liberal party, let alone a Scandinavian one, would dismiss with a contemptuous horselaugh.

BTW, ignore Brett. He's been on this same tired libertarian schtick for the past seven years. Just remember that Libertarians are about 1% of the American population, so we don't really need to care what they think.

Sam (and others), I think Brett is both correct and terribly unfair to the poor. I tend to side with Jane Galt: the poor are poor because they don't do the things they would need to be un-poor, but they mostly don't do those things because they aren't raised in an environment that encourages it. She says something like, "High schoolers are incredibly vulnerable to peer pressure. If I'd gone to a school where the cool thing to do, what all my friends were doing, was to drop out and sell drugs, I'm sure I would have done that in a heartbeat. I had the good fortune to instead go to a school where getting an education and going to an elite college was considered the most important thing, so I did that instead."

Basically, I don't think the problem of poverty is lack of access to material resources. No matter how much money we pump into the inner cities, kids there aren't raised with the skills and desires to take advantage of that. This is a cultural problem, and thus very difficult; I don't know a good solution. The best solution certainly isn't to say, "well, it's their fault, so we don't need to worry about it." The solution also isn't to say, "the solution is that they have no money, so we'll give them a lot." I think you have to find some way to encourage kids to want an education, to want to succeed.

Matt Austern: in conventional rhetoric, the Republic died when Caesar crossed the Rubicon on January 10 of 49 BC. OK, you're right in that it was in fact a long-drawn out process. But only the forms survived under Augustus, like the Supreme Soviet under Stalin.

In Brett's odd worldview, how exactly is the child of a Swedish dropout mother unfree? Since the rich and poor in both countries can both do more or less what they want with their lives and property, the Swedish rich are only less "free" than the American ones in that they pay a lot more taxes. If you treat the loss in the rich man's income as a reduction in his practical freedom (rights x talents x resources x environment), you must treat the greater resources of the Swedish poor as a gain in their practical freedom. Where's the net loss?

Incidentally, the study is limited to sons with easily traced fathers - the comparison would surely be much more unfavourable to the USA for the fatherless.

"What do you call the government forcing renters to pay landowners for the use of land, which the landowners didn't produce or contribute?"

Property rights, without which there wouldn't BE any rental property for renters to steal.

"So you're proposing to pay people to move to parts of the country that won't welcome them.... And are there actually areas of the country with low unemployment rates looking for influxes of non-transient low-skill labor?"

Gosh, I wasn't aware that we didn't have freedom of movement in this country, and that my neighbors actually posessed a veto over whether I moved here. I guess well off people can be forced to pay taxes, but asking them to have poor people move in nearby is just too out there...

"This is a cultural problem, and thus very difficult; I don't know a good solution."

That's what my "Move to get welfare" proposal aims at: By paying people to stay in economicly depressed areas, we deny the next generation the crucial role models of gainfully employed neighbors, and CREATE a culture of poverty. I want to break up that culture, and see to it that if your (probably single) parent is on welfare, at least your neighbors aren't, too.

The children of poor people need to associate with people who are actually gainfully employeed, so that they see working for a living as a real prospect. They need that just as much as they need to be living in a place where there ARE jobs to be had.

One contributor to Swedish social mobility is a pure voucher scheme for the financing of education, any two qualified teachers can set up a school and get paid acording to the pupils they attract.

I’m looking forward to that being proposed in the US from the left/liberal side as a contributor to the social mobility said to be so important.

"the poor are poor because they don't do the things they would need to be un-poor, but they mostly don't do those things because they aren't raised in an environment that encourages it"

I know this is what you believe, but this paper says its untrue, and they have the numbers to back it up. Oh, I know - It sounds good, it feels good, those lazy poor people who don't know how to manage their lives. But, its false.

Certainly, Tim. Right after *you* support Swedish taxes on the rich. And I mean that - hold me to this. Just send me your clippings.

Brett: "...but an ordinary person, by not making a whole series of mistakes, can go from the ghetto to the middle class."

Last I heard, the record for surviving a free fall with no parachute is 37K feet. So a person *can* survive that. Likelihood is a whole other thing, of course, and likelihood is what statements about societies are all about.

Surviving a free fall from 37,000 feet is the prodigy going from rags to riches. Going from rags to merely middle class is easy enough that merely not making a series of major mistakes is enough to accomplish it.

Of course, we've allowed a culture that *admires* making those serious mistakes to form. Short of destroying that culture, we're never going to solve poverty in this country. You can't save people from their own self-destructive behavior, if you're going to humor them in thinking that self destruction is cool.

"Going from rags to merely middle class is easy enough that merely not making a series of major mistakes is enough to accomplish it."

Brett, you keep saying this.

"Going from rags to merely middle class is easy enough that merely not making a series of major mistakes is enough to accomplish it."

We know this isn't true, just from personal experience. Why? If it were the case, there would be tons of middle class people falling into poverty every year, and poverty in the US isn't pleasant, and those former middle class people would be complaining LOTS..

> but an ordinary person, by not making
> a whole series of mistakes, can go from
> the ghetto to the middle class.

From 1940-1975ish, when there were a fair number of manufacturing (and other value-added) jobs available to those willing to work hard, I would say that was somewhat true (considering racism, etc). A year on a mop crew allows you to get a cook's job at a hamburger stand allows you to get a dishwasher job at a fancy resturant allows you to get a low-end manufacturing job allows you (with some luck) to get a good unionized manufacturing job that pays a middle-class salary and benefits.

Today? A job at a fast food joint gets you a job as a Wal-Mart clerk gets you a job as a Sam's Club greeter gets you... not much of anything. The pyramid at Wal-Mart is fierce: perhaps 1% of their store positions pay a middle-class wage. Solid blue collar/lower middle class jobs are moving to India faster than you can snap your wallet shut.

Cranky

"Brett, you keep saying this."

And you keep denying it. Maybe you think your denial is the default position that doesn't need any evidence?

"If it were the case, there would be tons of middle class people falling into poverty every year."

It does not logically follow that if getting out of poverty is simple, that falling into it is easy. In fact, it pretty much logically does NOT follow.

Come on, guys, it isn't exactly a secret that if you just follow the straight and narrow, avoid vices, finish school, don't have kids out of wedlock, and work even if the only thing available pays badly, you improve your situation. It's right on a level with the secret to losing weight: Eat less and exercise.

Boring, at times unpleasant, but it works.

Brett Bellmore wrote, "Property rights, without which there wouldn't BE any rental property for renters to steal."

False, if you construe "property rights" to include "the right of the landowner to capture all or most of land rent."

Which was known to folks like Smith and Mill centuries ago.

Brett Bellmore wrote, "Come on, guys, it isn't exactly a secret that if you just follow the straight and narrow, avoid vices, finish school, don't have kids out of wedlock, and work even if the only thing available pays badly, you improve your situation."

Why do it that way? Far better to inherit land and allow the government to force others to hand over a toll to you for using it, even though you had nothing whatsoever to do with it being there in the first place, or having the value it does.

Georgists. As crazy as Scientologists, without the entertaining mythology.... LOL

Why do it that way? Well, um, because you can't arrange to be the heir of a great fortune, but you CAN decide to work for a living, and not destroy your own prospects.

Most of us know this already but Brett Baltimore lives in Dreamland.

I was born into a working-class family. I am the first person in my immediate family to finish college. The pressures on me, all the way through, to quit school, stay home, get a clerical job to help support and look after aging elatives, and eventually get married, WERE the straight and narrow, morally acceptable path when I was in high school and college. I was considered a seriously immoral rebel for being a girl who dared to say I did not want to spend my life in the traditional way, to such a degree that various relatives refused to speak to me for years. Not to mention the financial problems of scholarships/loans/financial aid, any one of which might have derailed me and all of which have only increased for kids now starting college. None of the reasons i was told/asked to drop out of school had a damned thing to do with drugs or out of wedlock births.

Now I work with a woman who did not go to college and asked me for information and help when her own daughter was a sophomore in high school. She wanted her daughter to go to college, but since she hadn't been herself she had no idea what was involved. For example, she had never heard of the PSATs, which are the first step to apply for a national merit scholarship; she hadn't been considered to be college material when she herself was in high school so this information was not conveyed to her, any more than I ever was told how to apply for med school. and the financially strapped, budget-cut high school her daughter attended did not have the resources to tell students these things. The school tells kids there is a college guidance office where information is available, but there is no full time college counselor. My colleague also did not know what kinds of financial aid might be available; I was able to help her with that as well.

Middle-class kids have parents who know this stuff, and they tell the kids. Or they are placed in schools that hold meetings for parents and kids to get the word out - "this is what you have to do if you want to go to college."

Anyone who thinks kids in poor-district high schools have the same access to these resources as middle class kids in private schools, or good public schools, is smoking something I'd like to get my hands on.

"Middle-class kids have parents who know this stuff, and they tell the kids. Or they are placed in schools that hold meetings for parents and kids to get the word out - "this is what you have to do if you want to go to college.""

THIS IS MY POINT!

We created a self-perpetuating culture of poverty in this country, by handing people money to live on, without their having to work for it, without their having to leave the ghettos they were living in. People without jobs raised children without good role models, and the whole thing snowballed to the point where they think the things you have to do to succeed are *bad*!

You can redistribute income until the cows come home, and all you're going to do is help that culture spread further through society. Because redistribution treats the symptoms, while making the disease itself worse.

We need to destroy the culture of poverty. Eradicate it, root and branch. We need to teach the poor what it takes to stop being poor, and disabuse them of their warped value system.

We need to stop ENABLING poverty. Because that's all income redistribution does. It doesn't cure poverty, it enables it.

There are lots of "formerly middle class" people falling into poverty: single mothers. No, not all single mothers are black or from poor families - there are plenty of young women from middle-class backgrounds who have kids with men who don't stick around. They become poor. Though quite often, they become un-poor in a few years, because they know what it is that middle-class people do that makes them be not-poor.

It might help if the US were to stop importing large numbers of low-skilled people from other countries to compete against the low-skilled people who were born here, and if we stopped importing large numbers of non-english-speaking children so that the schools might have a chance of teaching something useful to the children of poor people, instead of collapsing under the burden of teaching a second language to upwards of 50% of their charges in poor neighborhoods.

Brett Bellmore wrote, "Georgists. As crazy as Scientologists, without the entertaining mythology.... LOL"

Thanks for conceding the argument by providing no reasoning or evidence.

I'm also not a Georgist, since I'm not a "single taxer."

As for Georgists being crazy...was Adam Smith a Georgist?

"Both ground-rents and the ordinary rent of land are a species of revenue which the owner, in many cases, enjoys without any care or attention of his own. Though a part of this revenue should be taken from him in order to defray the expenses of the state, no discouragement will thereby be given to any sort of industry. The annual produce of the land and labour of the society, the real wealth and revenue of the great body of the people, might be the same after such a tax as before. Ground-rents and the ordinary rent of land are, therefore, perhaps, the species of revenue which can best bear to have a peculiar tax imposed upon them."

How about John Stuart Mill?

"The ordinary progress of a society which increases in wealth, is at all times tending to augment the incomes of landlords; to give them both a greater amount and a greater proportion of the wealth of the community, independently of any trouble or outlay incurred by themselves. They grow richer, as it were in their sleep, without working, risking, or economizing. What claim have they, on the general principle of social justice, to this accession of riches?"

’m looking forward to that being proposed in the US from the left/liberal side as a contributor to the social mobility said to be so important.

I'll call you out on this too, Tim. I might be mistaken, but aren't Swedish vouchers similar to the Dutch model, wherein the voucher is completely funded by the state, and schools aren't allowed to top it up? (The Dutch model is hyper-egalitarian: schools get 1x worth of funding for each rich kid who chooses to attend, and 1.9x for a kid in the lowest quintile, with graduated bands in between.) I'd like to see someone on the British or American right support that. Apologies if I'm wrong about the swedish model, of course, but I frequently see righties such as Melanie Phillips offer support for Dutch vouchers, but pretending that these vouchers aren't far more egalitarian in nature than the right would ever be willing to accept.

Going a bit further on that topic, a recent OECD Equity in Education report argues that the key educational contributors to social mobility are comprehensive education and Sweden's strong system of support for second chances for troubled students. It also concluded that the biggest influence on Sweden's highly eglalitarian ed system (it's the only OECD country in which children's educational attainment has become less closely correlated with parental income over the last few decades) were non-educational. These were low overall inequality, and low job insecurity among parents.

You can redistribute income until the cows come home, and all you're going to do is help that culture spread further through society. Because redistribution treats the symptoms, while making the disease itself worse.

Out of curiosity, Brett, why is it that countries with more redistribution than the US also have greater social mobility? If we're claiming that redistribution makes it too easy to not get out there and make something of yourself, then why do Sweden and Denmark, with their high social spending, have more intergenerational mobility than the US, which, in international terms, is very non-redistributive? If you want to argue that redistribution has different effects in teh US and UK than in Scandinavia, I'm up for listening, and have some theories on that myself, but intellectual rigour would seem to demand that you not say that variable Y is clearly the problem, when the data show that having something like twice as much Y in other countries does not lead to as much of the problem as we see in teh US and UK, in terms of social mobility.

"...nobody will be able to say exactly when the American republic dies."

The first American Republic died on December 12, 2000. I put first in there as I still hope we can restore it.

I have to commend Brett for trying to intelligently respond to the posts of the lefties here.

«I have to commend Brett for trying to intelligently respond to the posts of the lefties here.»

I would grant that his replies are polite and sound also heartfelt, but I would not ascribe intelligence to them: because it is not that intelligent to try to persuade people just by waving hands and repeating comfortable wishful thinking that flies in the face of statistics and experience.

Middle and upper class parents spend fortunes to buy advantage for their children, from prep schools to college application consultants to trusts: all that looks money wasted, because «if you just follow the straight and narrow, avoid vices, finish school, don't have kids out of wedlock, and work even if the only thing available pays badly, you improve your situation».

Now, it is pretty obvious that the parasitical poor think that they are entitled to their current life of idle luxury -- why take jobs that «pay badly» when you can enjoy the fruits of exploiting the deserving, hard working rich (who have no vices, follow the straight and narrow, finish school, never have kids out of wedlock, and work even if it pays badly)?

«We need to destroy the culture of poverty. Eradicate it, root and branch. We need to teach the poor what it takes to stop being poor, and disabuse them of their warped value system.
We need to stop ENABLING poverty. Because that's all income redistribution does. It doesn't cure poverty, it enables it.»

Exactly! The parasitical poor are enjoying their lives of idle luxury because of taxes and redistribution.

I have then A Modest Proposal: the obvious solution is to tax low wages severely, to force the exploitative, parasitical poor into abandoning their lives of idle luxury and become hard working, deserving rich people.

High taxes on the rich punish them as they create wealth and reduce the incentive to become richer; in the same way high taxes on the poor would punish them as they steal walth and reduce the incentive to be poor.

The idea is to make poverty so expensive that nobody could afford to be an exploitative parasite like the poor are today.

I would start with a an 50% tax rate on incomes below $30,000 to discourage people from lying back lazily, going down to 25% on incomes $30,000-$100,000, to reward the somewhat more enterprising ones that are starting to give a contribution to the wealth of the country, a 0% tax rates on incomes between $100,000 to $1,000,000, as these people are working hard and contributing to the national wealth, and a tax credit of 10% on incomes above $10,000,000, to show the nation's appreciation for those who succeed at creating the most wealth.

Brett - There is a far easier way to change cultural ideals and teach low income children how to behave. Get your ass out and volunteer. Show these youngsters appropriate ways of behaving and realign their value systems.

Also... You can talk all day about forcing welfare and unemployment recipients to move, but even a person with a mediocre understanding of the american government can predict that something like that would never get passed.

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