OF POVERTY AND WELFARE

Any study of poverty should logically begin with a definition of the problem we are trying to solve. Precisely what is poverty?

Throughout history, until about the middle of the eighteenth century, mass poverty was nearly everywhere the normal condition of man. Then capital accumulation and a series of major inventions ushered in the Industrial Revolution. In spite of occasional setbacks, economic progress became accelerative. Today, in the United States, in Canada, in nearly all of Europe, in Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, mass poverty has been practically eliminated. It has either been conquered or is in process of being conquered by a progressive capitalism.

From time immemorial there have been reformers who demanded that wealth and income should be “divided equally”—or at least divided with less glaring inequalities than the reformers saw around them.

From the beginning of history sincere reformers as well as demagogues have sought to abolish or at least to alleviate poverty through state action. In most cases their proposed remedies have only served to make the problem worse.

A group of social reformers, impatient with the present “rag bag” of measures to combat poverty, propose to wipe it out in a single swoop. The government would simply guarantee to everybody, regardless of whether or not he worked, could work, or was willing to work, a minimum income. This guaranteed income would be sufficient for his needs, “enough to enable him to live with dignity.”

The reformers estimate that the guaranteed income ought to range somewhere between $3,000 and $6,000 a year for a family of four.

Any attempt to equalize wealth or income by forced redistribution must only tend to destroy wealth and income. Historically the best the would-be equalizers have ever succeeded in doing is to equalize down-ward. This has even been caustically described as their intention. “Your levellers,” said Samuel Johnson in the mid-eighteenth century, “wish to level down as far as themselves; but they cannot bear levelling up to themselves.” And in our own day we find even an eminent liberal like the late Mr.

The theme of this study is the conquest of poverty, not its “abolition.” Poverty can be alleviated or reduced, and in the Western world in the last two centuries it has been almost miraculously alleviated and reduced; but poverty is ultimately individual, and individual poverty can no more be “abolished” than disease or death can be abolished.

The myth still assiduously cultivated in some quarters is that the Negro community has been sunk in hopeless poverty and despair, because it has not been allowed to participate in the general economic prosperity of the last ten or 20 years. The actual record does not support this.

What we find, in fact, is that the Negroes as a whole have not only made great absolute economic gains in this period, but gains at least fully proportional to those made by the white population.

Most of the self-styled liberals of the present day would be astonished to learn that the father of the welfare state that they so much admire was none other than the fervent antiliberal and advocate of “blood and iron,” Otto von Bismarck.