Capitol Ideas/Thoughts on Poverty

...Once again, land was taken from one group of citizens and "given" to another, who in this instance were not allowed to sell it for 15 years...

...Communism fails an empirical test, whatever one thinks of the theory underlying it...

...Jackson refused to disavow Farrakhan's support and spoke sanctimoniously about Farrakhan's "redemption...

...This is pretty incendiary stuff...

...The basic problem is that organizing production from a central post is too complicated and posits a form of human nature that does not correspond to reality...

...Land was seized from one group of citizens-against whom there had been no showing of wrongdoing--and then allegedly "given" to another group--the tenants...

...Does poverty have a cause, then...

...And looking back on my mental state then, I can now see that it was non-thought that characterized my a t t i t u d e much more than wrong-thought...

...Moreover in political terms what do the growing number of professionals who are Hispanic, black, or Oriental have in common with lowincome Hispanics, blacks, and Orientals, aside from blood...

...They seek to arouse envy, and thus bring down the vengeful wrath of Communism upon the heads of those whose material circumstances of life improve more rapidly than those of their fellow citizens...

...Anything else might get him into trouble, or at least cause eyebrow raising, and that is what he wants to avoid more than anything...

...By the way, Time's evidence that "conservatives" think such pusillanimous thoughts appears to be nothing more than the next sentence in the Time article, reading: "The bipartisan Kissinger commission recommended an economic aid program along the lines of the Marshall P l a n . . . " Well I suppose some people might say that Kissinger is a conservative...

...All four displayed an insouciance that was quite appalling...

...That is, we don't even pretend to ourselves that we know anything about the subject...

...That is the deepest problem with the arrival of Black Muslim Louis Farrakhan upon the American political scene...

...P o v e r t y " seems only to be noticeable when some are rising out of it...

...Wherever such a primitive political value exists there is violence, and, as the liberals so often tell us, injustice...

...A good response would be: "We should not look for Reds under them...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1984 11...

...Liberals merely obey it...

...Marxism, the ideology of revenge, depended on the increasing prosperity of industrialized Europe to attract its adherents...

...A liberal, in fact, may be defined as someone whose mental state is one of deference to the unwritten rules of sociopolitical etiquette...

...poverty is the problem...

...For example, they would say that poverty was caused by "oppression," or by "U.S...

...that is, until the notion of property rights became incorporated into the rule of law...

...All of which is to say that when race becomes a political value democratic process is threatened...

...I am thinking in particular of the "land reform" program in E1 Salvador--an assault on property rights in the guise of an expansion of them...

...It is time our liberals see this campaign for what it is, to wit: one that has lowered our democratic standards to a dangerous level...

...You too would be flummoxed...

...I think not...

...He hasn't really given the matter any thought, and the reason is not that he is stupid but that he already has too many things to think about-wife, kids, mortgage, school fees, and next week's business trip--and he just wants to get through the day without making too many sociopolitical "gaffes" (to use a favorite Hive word...

...He views those who do not approve of Jesse Jackson's candidacy as people bent on Jackson's "destruction...

...If you do begin to think about poverty, one of the first conclusions you must come to is that it was universal until the Industrial Revolution...

...Fully decentralized decision-making, with the government confining itself to the neutral role of umpire, merely enforcing the agreements between decisionmakers, is another way of describing private property...

...It was only gradually, and primarily in England at first, that government accepted the idea that it should be umpire rather than teamplayer...

...Last month on the "CBS Morning News," Jackson and three distinguished blacks discussed the whole imbroglio with Diane Sawyer...

...That is the system of production that America opted for in the late eighteenth century...

...Of course, liberals don't think along these lines at all...

...Because it has no rainfall," you might feebly respond...

...An American family of four earning less than $9860 is "below the poverty line," but we do not think of a New Guinea tribe as being even further below the poverty line, because we think of the New Guinea tribesman in absolute, not relative, terms...

...He is not in sympathy with the spirit of the democratic proccess...

...All Communist countries are impoverished, and the more strictly the edicts of the central planners are enforced, the Tom Betheil is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...

...Likewise, Americans noticed "poverty" in Latin American countries once they began to climb out of it but not before...

...She interviewed peasants who had been "given" land and they would say to her: " I f the Shah has the power to take this land from the most powerful people in the country, think what he could do to us...

...It may be said that poverty is detected and deplored in inverse proportion to the number of people who experience it...

...The great struggle of American leftists today is to get the government out of its umpire role and onto the team of play, taking one side against the other...

...The lesson seems to be that countries are particularly exposed to the danger of Communism at the time when they are most rapidly, and therefore most conspicuously, moving out of poverty...

...greater will be the impoverishment...

...As a coda a good liberal might then add: "What people do in them is their own business...

...It's a pretty good bet that the Shah wouldn't have imposed such a cockeyed system of revenge upon his own country without outside advice-almost certainly American...

...Furthermore, there are enormities that areporter is duty-bound to put on the record, for instance: ethnic slurs...

...Time magazine, April 23, 1984 We had better learn how to respond to this latest specimen of cant because we are going to hear it repeated a few thousand times before the November election...

...More recently he harangued' 'white America," saying in a 90-minute diatribe, "Everything we have we have offered it to you, and the reward we get is the destruction of our h e r o e s . . . You no longer are our judge...

...In the ensuing conversation with the other blacks, one of whom was Andy Young, it was explained that Jackson was performing a valuable service by bringing Farrakhan into the political process and that the black reporter responsible for exposing Jackson's ethnic slurs acted improperly for the slurs were off the record...

...Well, it didn't take the Communists that long to take over...

...That, I regret to say, is still state-of-the-art thinking at the multilateral aid institutions...

...God now is making us the judge...

...Yes, but why doesn't it rain in that part of the world...

...If for instance he hears someone at the other end of the table THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1984 9 say "Communism," he knows that it is perfectly safe to respond, "Is not the problem...

...Moreover, it is easy to demonstrate why in principle it cannot succeed in mobilizing production...

...He makes threats against them and against reporters who report stories that he does not approve of, notwithstanding the fact that the reports are true...

...As such it strikes me that those who cry "poverty" are in fact giving vent to envy...

...Certainly we hear nothing at all in the news media about the poverty in Communist countries, despite the very conspicuous existence of a privileged class of rulers in all such countries...

...You might even try to make some lame reference to "trade winds...

...Is that good...

...But he won't remain a liberal because that is simply the position of someone who wishes to be in conformity with the fashionable consensus without devoting any thought to the matter...

...Poverty is the problem, not Communism...

...Thieu destabilized his own country with land reform...

...You pick up the right responses in college, and by reading the newspapers--the "style" section especially...

...imagine if someone were to ask you, "Why is the Sahara a desert...

...IGary Hart, presidential campaign 1984 "'Many liberals and conservatives argue that the real enemy in Central America is poverty, not Communism...

...I do know that Americans advised President Thieu to implement land reform in South Vietnam in 1970...

...If you were to ask your average college or garden liberal this, he most likely would be perplexed, because for him "poverty" is not so much a state to be explained as it is a stimulus to which he is expected to respond appropriately--perhaps with some phrase including the word "compassionate...

...Money stands in the same relationship to poverty as rain does to deserts...

...By bringing Farrakhan along in his political entourage Jesse Jackson has introduced two new elements into presidential politics, open racialism and the death threat...

...That is the true meaning of the phrase "social justice," by the way-revenge...

...The liberal may sense that there is something wrong with that analysis but he knows that he doesn't know enough to argue and, as I say, he has more mundane matters to worry about...

...Communism causes poverty--let us get that straight at the outset...

...The point is, no thought is needed...

...So he follows etiquette, which means following the example of others...

...And just as irrigation can "cure" a desert, so foreign aid can cure poverty...

...But in fact the new "owners" cannot sell this land (for 30 years...

...In fact, according to my definition we are almost all liberals with respect to one issue or another...

...Also, the liberal is not alone...

...Charles Dickens noticed poverty in nineteenth-century England, when absolute poverty was diminishing more rapidly than at any earlier period of British history...

...The one thing that can be said for certain is that if certain U.S.-supported policies in Latin America are allowed to continue unabated, then poverty will actually increase and Communism will no doubt prevail...

...imperialism," or by "multinational corporations...

...Moreover I do not believe that any presidential contender in this century has had a man so close to him who speaks as violently as Farrakhan...

...This has had a devastating effect on the El Salvador economy...

...If, on the other hand, decision-making is decentralized, then you no longer have Communism...

...This has been explained in detail by an Austrian economist named Von Mises and I won't bore you with the details...

...The answer is very little, and to say that they do have much in common is to insist on racial politics--that is to say deciding political issues on the basis of race...

...Among other things the democratic process demands that we live peacefully with our disappointments, and Farrakhan appears to be decidedly unpeaceful...

...In many ways, you cannot really blame liberals for this...

...Most development economists - - I would estimate 50 percent of those employed by the World Bank and by the International Monetary Fund-think that poverty is caused by a shortage of money...

...You might have some dim recollection of a global weather map covered with arrows...

...To the black reporter responsible for passing on the report that Jackson applied ethnic slurs to Jews, Farrakhan warned in a March 11 radio broadcast, "One day soon we will punish you with death...

...The truth is that Jackson is endangering the democratic process by bringing into it a man who utters death threats...

...At a dinner party he doesn't want to say the wrong thing, any more than he wants to use the wrong fork or arrive wearing the wrong clothes...

...I am talking about liberals, now, not leftists, who indeed would have an answer albeit a wrong one...

...Ask former Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz...

...To the extent that they do think about the matter, they probably think of Communism as a response to poverty--a kind of retribution...

...I understand that President Reagan's butler, called Deaver, is also sometimes called a conservative...

...Grace Goodell, the Harvard-based anthropologist who has done field research in land reform, told me that the Shah of Iran destabilized his own country with land reform in the 1960s...

...It has never been known to succeed anywhere except in small communities with voluntary membership...

...Confidence about the future is eroded, and so the disciplines of saving and effort, which are essential if material prosperity is to increase, are undermined: Why save for the future if you don't know what power (and savings) the government is going to seize in the future...

...I claim to speak with authority about liberals because I was one myself not too many years ago...

...The expropriated class has received no recompense, and the new owners can enjoy no sense of predictability about the future: If the government could assume the power to seize property from one group of citizens, what is to stop it from doing the same thing again...

...I am indebted to my friend Joe Sobran for that little aper~u...

...Today, we seem to think of poverty 10 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1984 only in relative terms...

...If he does at some point in his life have the luxury of thinking about the cause of poverty in foreign landsmif, for example, he lands a job as a college prof or finds a berth in a think tank--then he will certainly move either to the right or to the left...

...The Left has established our sociopolitical etiquette...

...To find its equivalent issuing from a white politician you would have to go quite beyond the early George Wallace to some Ku Kluxian on the march in the 1920s...

...we just mouth the cliche that seems most likely to keep us out of trouble should the topic arise...

...Did someone say "bed...

...Now you know how the liberal feels when he is asked about the causes ot poverty...

...For that is the time when feelings of envy, and the thirst for vengeance against the productive, are at their most virulent...