You've got to wonder why anyone takes the National Review's Jonah Goldberg seriously. He starts following what may or may not be a reasonable argument and winds up smack dab in the middle of Crazytown. In the column I read yesterday, Goldberg begins by saying that the economy is a largely out of the hands of politicians. Not unreasonable, right?
Well, not until he gives an example, anyway. "The biggest picture is the one most obscured by our dated arguments," Goldberg tells us. "Poverty, as defined for millennia, is pretty much nonexistent in the United States." You read that right, there aren't any poor people in the US. To back this up, he quotes what amounts to sociological voodoo. '""If poverty today remains a serious problem," Christopher DeMuth noted in Commentary magazine nearly a decade ago, "it is a problem of individual behavior, social organization and public policy. This was not so 50 years ago, or ever before."'
If poverty wasn't about 'individual behavior, social organization and public policy,' what did it used be? And that really should be an 'or', not an 'and.' There are plenty of people for whom the social structure and public policy is the entire reason and behavior doesn't enter into it at all.
People who argue that poverty is the fault of the poor are missing a big chunk of reality. In their world, everyone working at a wage near the legal minimum has made a bad choice. But what they fail to see is that we need those people doing those jobs -- even Caesar needed someone to shovel out the stables. Their 'perfect' world would either have CEOs swabbing out their own executive bathrooms or toilet swabbies making $15/hour...
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Tags: news politics economy poverty media business financial morons Jonah Goldberg National Review
Monday, October 30, 2006
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