Why We Should Celebrate Columbus Day

Columbus Day has become controversial. Critics, mostly on the Left, point to Christopher Columbus's brutal treatment of New World natives and support for slavery, which they claim override his exploratory achievements that set in motion the train of events that led to the Enlightenment and ultimately the birth of America. Which holds sway; Columbus's undeniable bad aspects or his positives, which led to the such monumental turning points such as the abolition of slavery throughout most of the world?

History is messy. There are very few total heroes or total villains, if any. Historical context is crucial, and the ultimate evaluation of any achievement must be weighed against this context and the totality of the person. On balance, from a humanitarian perspective, was Columbus a positive or negative force in the overall sweep of history? He certainly is one of history's most influencial individuals, coming in Ninth in one major ranking. But does Columbus warrant celebration? 

Count me on the positive side. As my tribute to Christopher Columbus on this, his day, I present selected excerpts from selected articles by other writers:

Columbus Day Celebrates Western Civilization By Thomas Bowden

On October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus discovered the New World.

We need not evade or excuse Columbus’s flaws--his religious zealotry, his enslavement and oppression of natives--to recognize that he made history by finding new territory for a civilization that would soon show mankind how to overcome the age-old scourges of slavery, war, and forced religious conversion.

On Columbus Day, we celebrate the civilization whose philosophers and mathematicians, men such as Aristotle, Archimedes, and Euclid, displaced otherworldly mysticism by discovering the laws of logic and mathematical relationships, demonstrating to mankind that reality is a single realm accessible to human understanding.

On Columbus Day, we celebrate the civilization whose scientists, men such as Galileo, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein, banished primitive superstitions by discovering natural laws through the scientific method, demonstrating to mankind that the universe is both knowable and predictable.

On Columbus Day, we celebrate the civilization whose political geniuses, men such as John Locke and the Founding Fathers, defined the principles by which bloody tribal warfare, religious strife, and, ultimately, slavery could be eradicated by constitutional republics devoted to protecting life, liberty, property, and the selfish pursuit of individual happiness.

On Columbus Day, we celebrate the civilization whose entrepreneurs, men such as Rockefeller, Ford, and Gates, transformed an inhospitable wilderness populated by frightened savages into a wealthy nation of self-confident producers served by highways, power plants, computers, and thousands of other life-enhancing products.

On Columbus Day, in sum, we celebrate Western civilization as history’s greatest cultural achievement. What better reason could there be for a holiday?

In another op-ed on Fox News.com, Let's Take Back Columbus Day, Bowden said this:

We’ve been taught that Columbus opened the way for rapacious European settlers to unleash a stream of horrors on a virgin continent: slavery, racism, warfare, epidemic, and the cruel oppression of Indians.

This modern view of Columbus represents an unjust attack upon both our country and the civilization that made it possible. Western civilization did not originate slavery, racism, warfare, or disease--but with America as its exemplar, that civilization created the antidotes. How? By means of a set of core ideas that set Western civilization apart from all others: reason and individualism.

Excerpts from an op-ed in Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, October 10, 2008, Columbus was a hero [No longer available online]

By Dimitri Vassilaros

Christopher Columbus could not have discovered a better spokesman than Thomas A. Bowden.

The accomplishments of Columbus should speak for themselves. But thanks to political correctness, the moronic multicultural mob keeps talking them down. Mr. Bowden has been speaking passionately and forcefully about Columbus for years.

"My ancestors were savages," says Bowden matter-of-factly. Everyone can say the same, depending on how far back one is willing to look at lineage. "It's nothing racial or ethnic; it's historical fact."

"Columbus critics have a disguised criticism of Western civilization because Europeans replaced Stone Age Indians. They believe that this continent would have been better off without Europeans, that industrial civilization is an evil that is to be lamented and regretted.

"That is the real criticism of Columbus. I reject it completely."

Indians typically were widely scattered Stone Age tribes, he says. "They had little agriculture and lived in poverty, fear, ignorance and superstition. They had no concept of government, ownership or private property rights.

"Slavery was perfectly common.

Well, didn't Indians at least live in harmony with nature?

"No," says Bowden. "Man should not live in harmony with nature in the sense of simply keeping it pristine. We live by impacting the environment. The environment has no intrinsic value. Our civilization is more in harmony with nature by making it serve our ends."

Well, what about all the land supposedly stolen from the Indians by European settlers?

Indians did not own the vast reaches of land that they traveled on, Bowden says. Ownership of land is deserved, he says. By that, he means a settler can acquire property rights by making the land more valuable by, say, digging it up for farming. Or to build his homestead or business.

Columbus essentially was an explorer and discoverer bringing Western civilization's cures, science and technology, he says. The philosophical legal process was another gift the Europeans gave to the Indians, he says. "Indians got all that for free."

Columbus' critics should fall down on their knees and thank the Founding Fathers for creating a nation based on the moral principle of the individual's right to life, liberty and, Bowden stresses, the selfish pursuit of happiness.

"It's the only nation that came about in such a way. Anyone who has humanity's interest at heart should love America," he says.

Excerpts from Man's Best Came With Columbus—Michael S. Berliner

Did Columbus “discover” America? Yes, in every important respect. This does not mean that no human eye had been cast on America before Columbus arrived. It does mean that Columbus brought America to the attention of the civilized world, i.e., the developing scientific civilizations of Western Europe. The result, ultimately, was the United States of America. It was Columbus’s discovery for Western Europe that led to the influx of ideas and people on which this nation was founded and on which it still rests. The opening of America brought the ideas and achievements of Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, and the thousands of thinkers, writers, and inventors who followed. What they replaced was a way of life dominated by fatalism, passivity, superstition, and magic.

There is a movement to replace Columbus Day with something called Indigenous Peoples Day, which is "a holiday that celebrates and honors the Native Americans and commemorates their shared history and culture." "Native Americans" are no more native or indigenous than anyone else born in America. Their ancestors may have arrived in North America before others' ancestors. But so what? No race of phumans actually emerged in North America, according to the latest science. By all accounts so far, human life first evolved in Africa, before spreading around the globe. That said, if anyone wants to celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day, fine. But why replace Columbus Day? American Indian tribes had practices that were at least as vicious as Columbus, including wars of conquest and plunder, slavery, torture among each other and the slaughter of innocent European settlers including women and children. But just as American Indians may have done some good things worth commemorating, so did Columbus, in spades. It's the good of Columbus that we celebrate, not the bad. Celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day, if you like. But there's no reason for either/or. Celebrate both.

Happy Columbus Day

Related Video:

Progressive or Oppressive? Balancing the History of Manifest Destiny -- A panel discussion with Tom Clavin, Stephen Hicks Ph.D., John Prevas in Progressive or Oppressive? Balancing the History of Manifest Destiny.


Related Reading:

The enemies of Christopher Columbus—Thomas A. Bowden

Opposing Views:

On Christopher Columbus, the Far Left Is Correct—Bryan Caplan

On Universal Basic Income

Universal Basic Income, or UBI, is a darling of the Left these days. But UBI has a long history, dating back centuries, and crosses political boundaries. Recently, a friend forwarded me via e-mail an article about Republican President Richard Nixon’s 1969 push for an unconditional UBI for all poor people (however “poor” could be defined), and how he came to abandon the idea. Nixon was ready to go with his UBI plan until his advisers used a study of a type of UBI from 19th Century England to convince him to abandon his idea. The study showed that the scheme didn’t work, because it discouraged individual initiative.

Rutger Bregman, the author of The bizarre tale of President Nixon and his basic income bill, debunks the study, which analyzes the Speenhamland welfare system, to urge a universal UBI. 

My friend, who generally opposes welfare statism and socialism, nonetheless said this along with a link to Bregman’s article,

Mike - interesting read, a concept I would never have thought of. I would imagine that you would have at least some familiarity with this concept. Guaranteed income certainly does not fit into the libertarian perspective, but nevertheless this piece warrants at least a read. 

In The bizarre tale of President Nixon and his basic income bill, Rutger Bregman, also the author of Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek, tries to make the case that UBI would not discourage work. 

Here is my reply to my friend,

Hi Clay. Thanks for the article.

There’s a lot to unpack, too much for this e-mail. But I’m not buying Bregman’s argument from practicality. Furthermore, and much more fundamentally, I oppose forced government “redistribution” of wealth—more accurately, transfers— in any form, on moral grounds. 

Transferism begins with theft, which is the action of any burglar. A government that “secures our rights'' protects us from theft. It does not engage in burglary, and passing laws to make it legal doesn’t make it any less wrong. The great revolutionary innovation of the Founding generation is to subordinate society, and thus government, to the same civil and moral law as the private citizens it governs. Theft is properly forbidden to you and I as private persons, and is properly forbidden to you or I as government officials. Granted, Americans never fully achieved these ideals. And today a horde of pseudo-Americans are busy hammering ever more nails into the coffin of Americanism. But I for one will never lose sight of those ideals. 

Second, such schemes are rooted in an insidious collectivist premise -- that wealth belongs to “society,” and it is for the government to “distribute” society’s wealth “equitably.” Underpinning that premise is the twisting of individual rights into a master/slave undertaking. Rights are guarantees to freedom of action to pursue personal happiness, not an automatic claim to material benefits that others must be forced to provide. Society is made up of individuals. Wealth is produced by individual effort, and shared through trade, and belongs first and foremost to the individuals who produced it and/or traded for it—before any burglar or government steals it to fund some utopian scheme. “A life without poverty is a privilege you have to work for, rather than a right we all deserve” is no fallacy, as Bregman asserts. It is a fact of nature -- there is no “escape” from the fact that there is no way to rise above poverty without work, someone’s work. If some people are guaranteed “a life without poverty,” then others that must provide it are condemned to slave labor to enforce that guarantee. There is no way other than the master/slave premise to ensure a guarantee of that kind. Nature will not allow it.

Having said that, I generally favor any reform that moves in the direction of freedom. As such, I support such things as personal Social Security accounts and universal school choice, even though I oppose Social Security and government schools. I will acknowledge that a guaranteed basic income scheme, if it’s only for the poor a la Nixon’s plan, can be a marginal improvement to the welfare state, but only if it is coupled with the elimination of the entire hodgepodge of existing welfare state programs, including Medicaid and food stamps. Basic income would have the virtue of simplicity, and would leave more spending choices in the hands of the recipients. But this would only be a step, not an end.

I don’t know if Nixon’s basic income scheme, or Bregman’s UPI scheme, does or does not “fit into the libertarian perspective,” whatever that is. But it doesn’t fit with a free society.

Finally, I noticed that Bregman takes a potshot at Ayn Rand, equating her philosophy to utopia. His false choice is, her utopia or mine. Critics almost ALWAYS misrepresent her ideas. There is nothing utopian about a free market or of the broader aspects of Rand’s philosophy, because they are consistent with, not opposed to, human nature. Her thought is part of a line of thinking that stretches back to the Enlightenment, including natural rights theory and republican government checked by individual rights. As to Rutger’s book, in which everyone [UBI], not just the poor [Nixon], in effect get all of their needs covered in exchange for giving up to the state control of the proceeds of their labor: Well, isn't that the same basic premise of the slave plantation of the Old South -- which in fact the South’s intellectuals defended as “the beau ideal of Communism?”  Yes. The difference is only a matter of degree, not essence. The master is simply replaced by the state. Evil ideas never seem to die. They just morph, because greed, powerlust, and envy are ever-present. Whose ideas, then -- Rand’s or Bregman’s -- are utopian?

As an aside, I voted for Nixon twice, first because I believed he was an advocate of a free market, which it turned out he was not, and the second time because the alternative was McGovern. 

I will add one observation that favors UBI, as opposed to Nixon’s scheme targeting only the poor, as well as the broader welfare “War on Poverty” approach. The New Jersey Star-Ledger, in a rare fit of candor for a Leftist mouthpiece, put it well. In an editorial, Obamacare's collateral damage, the editorial board put it well, all italics are mine:

A new report on President Obama’s health reform from the Congressional Budget Office, the closest thing Washington has to an impartial referee, points to a fundamental problem in America’s approach to its welfare state. 

The report predicts that the Affordable Care Act will reduce the hours worked by the equivalent of 2 million full-time jobs by 2017, rising to 2.5 million by 2024. 

The reason is not that this reform adds massive costs that will cause businesses to scale back or go bankrupt, as Republicans routinely charge. The main reason is that low-wage workers will lose subsidies as their earnings increase, giving them less incentive to work hard and climb the income ladder. Much of what they gain in earnings, in other words, they will lose in subsidies. 

This is a problem liberals need to face squarely, especially as calls for greater economic justice grow louder. As we expand means-tested programs such as Obama­care, food stamps and the earned-income tax credit, this effect will be magnified. The attempt to help low-income families eventually creates a perverse effect.

We can find a middle ground by tweaking means-tested programs so that benefits phase out more gradually and extend to higher incomes. But eventually, as efforts to help low-wage families increase, any means-tested approach will hit the same wall.

A Universal Basic Income paid to all Americans, without conditions, no questions asked, would fix that “fundamental problem in America’s approach to its welfare state.” But at what practical and moral cost? A UBI would lead to calls for universal this, that, and the other thing, just as the Star-Ledger calls for universal health care (socialized medicine) in response to the “fundamental problem” it highlights in Obamacare. Ultimately, we would end in full-blown socialism, with its inevitable economic paralysis and collapse, and loss of freedom to tyranny.

LINKS:

Obamacare's collateral damage by the New Jersey Star-Ledger editorial board

Ayn Rand Anticipated Obama's "You Didn't Build That" Outrage

How You Build That

From ‘You Didn’t Build That’ to ‘The Nation's Wealth’

How Universal Basic Income Could Be Used to Suppress Free Speech: Such a system could not possibly remain universal.

Finland To End Its Experiment with Universal Basic Income: The Finnish government has decided to stop handing out requirement-free money.

And in a report on basic income last year, the OECD poured more cold water on the idea.

The bizarre tale of President Nixon and his basic income bill

Joe Biden is Right about Universal Basic Income: THE DIGNITY OF WORK AND SELF-SUFFICIENCY IS VERY IMPORTANT

Our current welfare system is a dysfunctional mess. It’s bad for taxpayers and recipients. Replacing it with a universal basic income probably would make the system simpler, but at a potentially very high cost in terms of cultural capital.

The Slippery Slope of Wealth Redistribution by Donald J. Boudreaux

Once you start redistributing wealth, there is no principled stopping point other than strict, universal equality.

The Basic Income Is the Worst Response to Automation

 

"Yes, automation is going to disrupt the economy, just as technological progress has always disrupted the economy, continually, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. But helping people to adjust by putting them on a permanent welfare subsidy is the worst and cruelest response, precisely because it pays them not to adapt to the new economy."

 

The Worst Thing about a Basic Income: You'll Never Get Rid of It

by Preston Cooper

Welfare that targets specific groups is easier to reform than universal programs.

"The basic idea of UBI [universal basic income] is that instead of a complicated system of welfare programs — TANF, EITC, Medicaid, CHIP, Food Stamps, Section 8, unemployment insurance, etc. — every citizen in the country will receive a check from the government, no questions asked."

QUORA: ‘What are the practical proofs that the profits arise from labour which produces surplus value?'

 QUORA: ‘What are the practical proofs that the profits arise from labour which produces surplus value? I recommend only positive answers in favour of labour being a source of value.’

Business profit: Where does it come from? Is it taken from the worker, as Marx and his ilk claim? It’s a question that has plagued Capitalism since it arose out of the Enlightenment. I attempt to answer that question here, with a huge assist from a great economist.

I posted this answer:

You “recommend only positive answers in favour of labour being a source of value?” What if the labor theory of value is wrong?* What if the theory that “profits arise from labor” is wrong?**

Well, there are no practical proofs that profits arise from labor, because there is no such thing as “surplus value.” There is only the value created by work -- physical as well as, and especially, intellectual labor. Wages, in fact, arise out of profits. That is what I intend to show, as briefly as I can.

First, the “labor theory of value” assumes that the value of a product can be mechanically or mathematically determined by adding up the labor input. But that is arbitrary and silly. The objective value of a finished product is actually determined by the value judgement of consumers. If consumers - i.e., the market - values the product more than the sum of the labor input, there is a profit to the business. If not, there is a loss or, at best, break-even. A profit does not indicate “surplus” value. It simply means the business is competently run by the people supplying the intellectual labor input -- the process of thinking, planning, decision-making, market judgements, etc.

But, doesn’t that mean that profits are extracted from labor -- i.e., wages? No, not at all. Which leads to the next fallacy; that profit proves that workers are underpaid, or “exploited.” 

Early exponents of the “labor theory of value,” from Adam Smith to Karl Marx, assume a pre-Capitalist starting point of some ideal economy where the worker directly sells his work output as a finished product. The worker pockets all of the sales revenue from his work. The mistake Smith et al make is to call the worker’s sales revenue wages. It is not. The hypothetical worker is not a wage laborer. He is, in fact, a businessman of the sole proprietor variety. Profit is a financial gain, arising from the difference between the final sale and the amount spent to bring the product to market. Therefore, since the hypothetical worker’s input was only his labor, with no financial input, the net gain from the worker’s sales revenue is 100% profit. Why? Because there are no wages paid out in support of the final product. The sole proprietor does all of the labor himself, both intellectual (thinking, planning, etc.) and physical. The sales revenue minus whatever monetary input our businessman/worker expends is 100% profit, not wages. What wages do his profits arise from? 

To clarify further, let’s concretize things. Say, in a pre-Capitalist economy, a person decides to make tables for a living. He (or she) cuts down trees, refines the trees into raw lumber, cuts and assembles the lumber into tables, finishes them off, and sells them. He has no monetary input, including no wage input. Therefore, his profit margin is 100%. Now suppose he decides to hire someone for wages to cut and refine the trees to produce raw lumber rather than do it himself, so he can devote more time to making tables. Let’s say the cost in wages for this new employee comes to 20% of the final sales. Well, his profit is cut to 80%. The worker’s wage is paid prior to sale, and, assuming a profit is earned, results in a reduction of the original sole proprietor's profit. The new worker’s wage arises out of profit. Now, suppose our table-maker businessman/worker (who is also now a capitalist due to his investment of part of his prior profit in wage labor, an expense he didn’t have before) needs more help to keep up with orders from consumers. He hires another worker for wages to make tables. Let’s say the new employee’s wages amount to another 20% of his sales revenue. His profit margin is thereby reduced to 60%. That’s ok, because the business can make up for the reduced profit margin by selling more tables, thanks to the financial investment in wage labor. 

Notice that profits, not wages, come first. Notice that our original sole proprietor, who had 100% profits, is now making 60%. The wages of his workers arose from his profits, not the other way around. As his business grows, our original pre-Capitalist worker hires more wage labor, reducing his profits further. Though his profits are shrinking, he is “making it up on volume.” Hopefully, he manages his business well enough to sell for more than his wage financial input. His own livelihood, as well as his hired workers, depends on it.

Though all the complexities of a modern advanced Capitalist economy, the reality remains the same. A company may incorporate. It may grow into a public company, in which ownership is dispersed into shares traded on stock exchanges. The shareholders hire management, including the CEO, to do the intellectual work -- the thinking, planning, decision-making, market analysis, and other factors of production -- that keeps the company going. By adding management jobs, the owners’ profits are reduced further. Through it all, managers cannot simply add up labor inputs to determine the price of the final product, then tack on some “surplus” and call it profit. There is no “surplus” value. There is only value as measured by the market of consumer choice. If the product is not valued by consumers more than the cost of producing it, there is no financial reward to the shareholders who invest the money, and ultimately no company. Workers are not being exploited. Labor’s wages arise from profits--no profits, not jobs. As the brilliant George Reisman, to whom I owe my understanding of this issue, observes,

As the economic degree of capitalism rises, not only do profit margins and the rate of profit fall, but wage payments come into being and then rise both absolutely and relative to profits. [my emphasis]

This is demonstrably true. Wages arise because of profits.*** It’s not that labor doesn’t produce value. Of course every individual who contributes time, effort, and labor, both intellectual and physical, contributes to the productive mission of the company. But what labor produces is not necessarily a value, or enough of a value to be worth doing. Value is determined by consumers’ assessment, as determined by the choice on whether to buy, or not buy, the final product. Profits do not represent “surplus” value, either. Any individual wage worker’s input, on its own, is not of much value apart from the overall enterprise, especially the intellectual labor of running the enterprise. His value increases by being part of the enterprise, which only exists because the final product is the result of the sum of all inputs, successfully integrated and coordinated by the decision-makers of the enterprise. 

Marx had it backwards. So did his mentor, Adam Smith. If we take at his word that exploitation is taking place in business, then it is not capital that exploits labor for profit. It is labor that exploits capital for wages. Of course, this is absurd either way. There is no exploitation going on. A job is a mutual agreement between employer and employee, each acting for his own benefit. 

As to the question  ‘What are the practical proofs that the profits arise from labour which produces surplus value? I recommend only positive answers in favour of labour being a source of value,’ there are no practical proofs that profits arise from labour, or that profits are generated from surplus value produced by labor. The premise behind the question fails to understand that profit, not wages, is the original form of labor income.

* [“Labor” in this context means strictly physical work.] 

**[I’m assuming here that by “labor” the question refers to employee wages, or wage labor.]

*** [I want to stress that the above explanations and examples are solely my own, based on my understanding of Reisman’s theory that “PROFIT, not wages, is the original and primary form {of} labor income.” See also Capitalism by George Reisman, 1998, from page 478.]

Related Reading:

Marx and His Exploitation Theory BY GEORGE REISMAN 

Atlas Shrugged—Ayn Rand

To Whom Does the American Worker Owe His Prowess?

Did Unions Create the Middle Class?

The Myth of the Entrepreneurial State by Deirdre McCloskey and Alberto Mingardi, especially Chapter 24, The Enchaining of Human Action Reverts to a Labor Theory of Value.

George Reisman on Ludwig von Mises, Ayn Rand, and Capitalism, interview with Jim Brown for The Objective Standard

On this Labor Day, Celebrate Intellectual Labor

The Moral Injustice of the Assault on the Space Billionaires

QUORA: 'How is becoming a billionaire even possible, chronologically?'

Capitalism by George Reisman

The Capitalist Manifesto by Andrew Bernstein  

What is Capitalism? by Ayn Rand 

[Compare: What is Socialism?--Robert Heilbroner, 1982]

No, Covid Relief Spending Didn’t Lift ‘millions of Americans out of poverty last year.’

The word is circulating that the massive COVID relief spending of the past year and a half has pulled the poverty rate down, lifting millions out of poverty. Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar reports for the Associated Press: 

Massive government relief passed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic moved millions of Americans out of poverty last year, even as the official poverty rate increased slightly, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday.

The official poverty measure rose 1 percentage point in 2020, with 11.4% of Americans living in poverty, or more than 37 million people. It was the first increase in poverty after five consecutive annual declines.

But the Census Bureau’s supplemental measure of poverty, which takes into account government benefit programs and stimulus payments, showed that the share of people in poverty dropped significantly after the aid was factored in.

The supplemental poverty measure was 2.6 percentage points lower than its pre-pandemic level in 2019. Stimulus payments moved 11.7 million people out of poverty, while expanded unemployment benefits kept 5.5 million from falling into poverty. Social Security continued to be the nation’s most effective anti-poverty program.

And it is being cited by the Democrats as justification for its drive to massively increase and expand the welfare dependency state. The New York Times front page headlines U.S. Poverty Rate Falls To a Record Low as Aid Helps Offset Job Losses. Success of Pandemic Relief Could Bolster Democrats’ Bid for an Expansion.

But how does one define “success?” If it means giving people a temporary financial lifeline after the mostly government-imposed shutdowns crushed their livelihoods, then I guess in that sense one can call that successful. But actually lifting people out of poverty?

True, forced government wealth transfers from people who earned it to people who didn't can create a statistical illusion of alleviating poverty. But so can any common looter. 

And since these transfer programs are funded by seizing earnings from productive people, all they do is pull more people down into poverty, properly defined. As Ayn Rand, in her eloquently understandable way, foresaw in the onset of the welfare state 5 decades ago:

Morally and economically, the welfare state creates an ever accelerating downward pull. Morally, the chance to satisfy demands by force spreads the demands wider and wider, with less and less pretense at justification. Economically, the forced demands of one group create hardships for all others, thus producing an inextricable mixture of actual victims and plain parasites. Since need, not achievement, is held as the criterion of rewards, the government necessarily keeps sacrificing the more productive groups to the less productive, gradually chaining the top level of the economy, then the next level, then the next. (How else are unachieved rewards to be provided?).5

My emphasis. The failed history of the 1960s Great Society "War on Poverty" is proof of that. Even by proponents own standards, the welfare state—aka, “social safety net”— has failed. Said Andre Perry, senior fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Left-leaning Brookings Institution, 

“We haven’t seen a shift like this [Democrats Covid relief bill] since FDR. It’s saying families are too big to fail, children are too big to fail, the elderly are too big to fail. It’s a recognition that the social safety net is not working and was not working prior to the pandemic.” 

My emphasis. If it hasn’t failed, then why, after more than half a century and untold $trillions in welfare spending, is poverty still near the top of the political agenda, especially of the Left. Worse, why do Democrats’ welfare schemes keep climbing the economic ladder, cutting ever deeper into what we once called “the middle class?” If it has failed, then what’s the logic of doubling down on a 55-year failure? 

Why, indeed?

Properly defined, in my view, poverty is the state of not earning enough to provide for one's basic necessities and well-being. The only true way to alleviate poverty is to work your way out of it. Those millions may have been "moved" out of poverty, statistically. But they didn't work their way out. Without continued dependence on those who still produce, they are right back to where they started—poor—because poverty is a state that they never really left.

The greatest champions of the poor are business entrepreneurs and innovators who make the investments in machines and work processes that raise worker productivity. They are the heroes—if I can use that overused word accurately—creating opportunities for people to rise out of poverty with honor and dignity. 

The welfare statists are not interested in alleviating poverty, of course -- if they ever were. If they were, they would expand the opportunities for such innovation by reducing the regulatory burden on business and entrepreneurship and the tax burden on all workers at every income level—including the indirect tax on workers and consumers that is the corporate income tax—thus minimizing the “need” for transfer payments.* 

They won't, because their aim is to expand the permanent welfare poverty class to as many as possible, and keep doing so until dependence poverty swallows up the middle class. As Ayn Rand has observed, “The politicians who implement the welfare state and the intellectuals who advise them are the crucial invisible profiteers on this system, because of the power over others it gives them.

Universal poverty is the only societal state that can result from steadily disincentivizing productive work and expanding parasitism. This, of course, is the economic history of socialism. 

* [“Minimizing” from the welfare state perspective. In fact, forced government wealth transfer, sometimes called “redistribution,” is immoral and never justified by need.]

Related Reading:

From Middle Class to Welfare Class

‘We’ Did Not Create the ‘Mighty Middle Class’: ‘I’ Did

Governor Murphy’s Plan to ‘Make New Jersey Great Again’

From ‘You Didn’t Build That’ to ‘The Nation's Wealth’

Ayn Rand Anticipated Obama's "You Didn't Build That" Outrage

Productivity, Not Labor unions, Created the Middle Class

Great Society: A New History by Amity Shlaes  

The "Relative" Poverty Gimmick

The "Relative Poverty Gimmick" Revisited

Redefining Poverty to Reignite Big Government Expansion

"Shared Prosperity" Another Name for Failed Policies