Escaping Poverty

 

I just rewatched a Prager U video (3/17/2017), There Is Only One Way Out of Poverty, narrated by Arthur Brooks. I think Arthur Brooks would have a lot to teach me, but I have not followed him at all. I like how he defends capitalism, arguing that its promoters must offer a moral case for free markets as well as economics arguments about its advantages, being advanced.

 

I know Brooks was involved with the Ayn Rand crowd, and is now separate from them. It seems to me that Dennis Prager appreciates the Randian crowd advocacy of egoism, capitalism, individualism, and person pursuit of happiness in a free society, so he, the altruist, is not completely against egoist ethics, but he seems to want us to be altruists and collectivists mostly in our morals, and a little egoist and individual after that. I reverse these majority and minority moral emphases.

 

I return to Brooks on the video. Brooks argues correctly that we need governmental and private charity for the poor so that they have a basic welfare net, a minimum level of food, shelter and clothing to survive.

 

Beyond that, he criticizes the progressives and big government for wrecking the poor, assuming wrongly that grabbing wealth from the rich and prosperous and giving it to the poor will left them out of poverty. It never works. In 60 years from the 60s US spent 20 trillion dollars on welfare and the poverty rate barely budged.

 

His solution is not just to give the poor a safety net, but give them opportunity as a means of escaping poverty. I would add that we teach the poor and all American youth to individual-live and self-realize, and this self-reliance and willful, ambitious, industrious, energetic stance of living and flourishing depends upon effort and hard work by each individual so that she can gain material wealth and immaterial rewards (Her self-realizing becomes her life purpose so she can become a brilliant artist, welder, mother, poet, scientist, philosopher, garderner, entrepreneur or farmer. If 92% of the young in any generation were maverizers, the need for charity from government or privately generated would mostly disappear, and this is how we help people escape from poverty. But the poor must know what to do, how to do it, what to aim for and then get after it, or they will stay poor and unfulfilled. They must act upon what they have learned, or success will not be theirs, but the fault for the failure to perform and succeed is then all theirs.

 

Brooks wants the poor to work their way out of poverty, a moral, personal victory of earned success. To earn one’s success is dignified and fulfilling. Brooks is sharp and correct.