To help the poor or boost self-image
Published December 18, 2014
by Jon Sanders, John Locke Foundation, December 18, 2014.
What can be done to help the poor is a perennial issue in politics, and with it comes what is to me a real puzzler: Why do those who seem most adamant that government programs are the best way to serve the needs of the poor also seem the least interested in whether those programs actually work?
It’s an item the “Rights & Regulation Update” newsletter has revisited regularly, sometimes in reference to specific policies (such as minimum-wage laws, electricity mandates, and occupational licensing), and sometimes taking the broader picture. An example of the latter discussed “Effectively fighting poverty through freedom.”
Here is a chart from that issue showing the dismaying — or what should be dismaying — lack of effect of the trillion-dollars-per-year “War on Poverty,” especially compared with how the poverty rate was steadily falling on its own before the government intervened:
The Pope Center’s George Leef called it a “crucial distinction between actually helping the poor and what politicians usually do, which is spending money or enacting laws that are supposed to make it look as if they’re helping the poor” (emphasis added).
A virtue actually possessed
This crucial distinction — being vs. seeming — is so important that in 1893 North Carolina leaders made Esse Quam Videri (to be rather than to seem) the official state motto. The North Carolina History Project gives the origin:
The origin of Esse Quam Videri is traced to a sentence in Marcus Tullius Cicero's “On Friendship.” It reads: “Virtute enim ipsa non tam multi praediti esse quam videri volunt.”
Professor Emeritus of Latin at University of Michigan, Frank Copely, translated the entire sentence to read: “[N]ot nearly so many people want actually to be possessed of virtue as want to appear to be possessed of it.”
Cicero’s observation — not nearly so many people want actually to be possessed of virtue as want to appear to be possessed of it — still holds. Consider Michael Knox Beran’s review of The Pity Party, a new book by William Voegeli, a senior editor at the Claremont Review of Books (emphasis added):
The obvious inference to be drawn is that the purveyors of kindliness in politics are less interested in helping the unfortunate than in seeming to help them. Voegeli observes that for the political do-gooder, it is often a matter of indifference whether his policies work as they are meant to; the do-gooder is concerned less with the happiness of the objects of his pity than with the perfection of his own self-image. A “defining characteristic” of this politics, Voegeli writes, “is a strong preference for political stances that demonstrate one’s heart is in the right place, combined with a relative indifference to whether the policies based on those stances, as actually implemented, do or even can achieve their intended results.”
In other words, the politics of kindness is another pretty flower in the modern epicure’s garden of earthly delights. Such a politics is agreeable to behold; its aroma is pleasant. That it is also, in certain cases, toxic to those whom it is intended to help is beside the point, for its purpose is not to lift up the struggling poor man, but to soothe the conscience of the anxious rich man. It is the hypocritical engine of the higher narcissism.
This regrettable human inclination makes what should be an obvious point -— helping the poor should, if it does nothing else, actually help the poor — more like a radical statement. Nevertheless, policies put forth to help the poor should actually work to help the poor.
Going further, those policies that fail — which are legion (and by Cicero, they are invariably favored by activists whose rhetorical cudgel is trumpeting their own virtue) — should not be kept in place on the thin basis of their having been instituted with good will toward the poor.
If there is an actual desire to help the poor involved, failing policies should be abandoned and more empirically proven strategies adopted in their place.
Jon Sanders (@jonpsanders) is Director of Regulatory Studies for the John Locke Foundation.
December 18, 2014 at 11:46 am
Richard Bunce says:
Elected officials buying votes with these policies and the legion of government bureaucrats overseeing them are doing well though...
So scrap every last one of them and go to a guaranteed income program funded by the Federal government and implemented through the IRS or State revenue departments? IF everyone has income above the poverty line there will be no more poor... right? I have a million dollars in the bank but have an "income" of below the poverty line... am I poor?
December 18, 2014 at 1:52 pm
Norm Kelly says:
Being rather than seeming goes against EVERYTHING lib. Socialists have historical proof that their schemes fail. Not just a little, but fail monumentally. Yet, socialists, and American Progressives, continue to push their agenda for the sole purpose of APPEARING to care and APPEARING to implement solutions that actually HELP the intended. The challenge is that almost ALL of the schemes implemented by leftists are demonstrably failures. Oh, they do a good job of making some people feel good. They may even benefit a small minority of the intended, but the vast majority suffer under the schemes of the progressive. And when one scheme of the progressive left fails to achieve it's stated goal, how does a dedicated socialist, American Progressive, respond. Eliminate the scheme? Nope, not on your life. Socialists NEVER admit defeat or failure. The existing scheme stays in place, continuing to cost money & do damage. But the left-winger simply implements another scheme, with a different mission/intended goal, and funds that one, trumpeting their good efforts. Take expanding medicaid for instance. Already over budget. Already uncontrollable. The central planners promise to pay for as much as 90% of the cost to the state. Libs/socialists/left-wingers love this idea! Does it actually help people MORE than any other alternative? Demonstrably, no. Can the state afford the 10+% increase in the cost of medicare coverage? Demonstrably, no. The cost of not a single government scheme comes in under budget, so we can expect the cost of socialized medicine expansion in the state to cost considerably more than pols/leftists tell us it will cost. (as in the case of obamascare predicted to cost less than $1trillion; current estimates approach $3trillion!) At the same time that we can't afford expansion, we are also implementing regional rail, which we can't afford and will be severely underused. Add to this the idea of high-speed rail. A plan rejected by other states when offered by the central planners, yet accepted by our pols in order to support their allies in the central planner community. Because it will be good for the region? Because it will at least cover it's cost? No, to all questions of the viability of high-speed rail. Yet our lib pols accepted it, rather than admit that it's failure is built into the plan. Not accepted because it will actually help people. Not accepted because it will spur the state economy. Accepted because it makes some lib somewhere FEEL good. Like ALL good lib schemes, the goal is to feel good about it! If it were EVER to have a positive impact, the lib considers this icing on the cake, not the purpose of the cake!
