Wealth and poverty, two sides, same coin

The most recent edition of Harvard Magazine (Mrs. Discipulus is an alumna) contains a silly screed inveighing against income disparity. That's predictable enough. Contemporary liberals adhere to the ridiculous notion that your financial success is a net loss to someone who is less successful, even if that person is better off as a result. So the corporate shareholders who succeed in business and create jobs for working-class families are, in the twisted lib worldview, harming those very same working-class families for whom they are creating jobs and, therefore, wealth.

The HM author introduces a new term to summarize this concept: "relative deprivation." I quote directly: "The idea is that, even when we have enough money to cover basic needs, it may harm us psychologically to see that other people have more."

To articulate such nonsense is to refute it. However, liberal fascination with inequality (and attendant, maleable concepts such as "poverty") flows out of a much deeper metaphysical misunderstanding about the world in which we live. For whatever reason, contemporary liberals have it stuck in their heads that human conditions like poverty and wealth, sickness and health, pleasure and pain, are the really important things in life. This is a narrow, dogmatic view of life.

Mature, reasoning people recognize that the really important things in life are basic human goods, such as knowledge and beauty, and the great virtues, such as love and charity. The human conditions are merely the occasions -- opportunities, if you will -- to practice the great virtues and to enjoy the basic goods.

For this reason, mature, reasoning persons have the capacity to be truly joyful in wealth or poverty, sickness or health, pain or ecstatic pleasure. Liberals lack this capacity. Instead, they look around at the greatest, most just nation in the history of the world and complain that biology has left the genders unequal. They live in the most prosperous time in history, in the most prosperous nation on earth, but they are obsessed with the psychological harm that a middle-class college professor ostensibly suffers by watching his CEO neighbor drive to work every day in his Benz.

These are useful observations to bear in mind as we listen to "progressive Christians" in the coming months drone on and on about inequality in America. Having grown up the oldest of six children in a ten-foot wide trailer and having worked my way into the upper middle class, I look at inequality in the most prosperous nation in history as an amazing opportunity. So who is narrow-minded? The Harvard Magazine-Sojourners crowd, or me?

For Americans, Life's Not So Bad After All

Check out this Steve Moore piece from the Wall Street Journal over the weekend. While acknowledging that the economy has slowed and that times are tough in many parts of the country, Moore contends that Americans so take for granted the "necessities" of modern life that we have lost touch with what it really means to face difficult financial times:

Here's the intro:

A few weeks ago I gave a talk on the state of the economy to a group of
college students -- almost all Barack Obama enthusiasts -- who were griping
about how downright awful things are in America today. As they sipped their
Starbucks lattes and adjusted their designer sunglasses, they recited their
grievances: The country is awash in debt "that we will have to pay off"; the
middle class in shrinking; the polar ice caps are melting; and college is
too expensive.

And the clincher graph:

Times are tough in many old industrial areas of the country. And middle-class anxiety about the costs of health care and higher education is real. But new data from the Census Bureau reveal that Americans of all income groups have made enormous gains in their standard of living in recent decades. As late as 1970, air conditioning, color TVs, washing machines, dryers and microwaves were considered luxuries. Today the vast majority of even poor families have these things in their homes. Almost one in three "poor" families has not one but at least two cars.

This column reminded me of a classic Walter Williams piece from a
while back. Williams noted that even a "poor" American is
the envy of the world:

Poverty in the United States, in an absolute sense, has virtually
disappeared. Today, there's nothing remotely resembling poverty of yesteryear. However, if poverty is defined in the relative sense, the lowest fifth of income-earners, "poverty" will always be with us. No matter how poverty is defined, if I were an unborn spirit, condemned to a life of poverty, but God allowed me to choose which nation I wanted to be poor in, I'd choose the United States. Our poor must be the envy of the world's poor.

Both the Moore and Williams columns also reminded me of a conversation I had with a former co-worker of mine. She was a bright girl, far more intelligent than I am, and a graduate of an elite East Coast college. She had a high-paying job, two professional parents who loved and supported her, and a decent, loving boyfriend to boot. And yet, despite such obvious advantages, she was remarkably pessimistic about her own future. Not because of lingering doubt in her own abilities, mind you, but because of the conditions of the country which have made it "much more difficult to achieve success" than it was for her parents. I pressed, but never could quite figure out just what those "conditions" were. Ultimately, like the students mentioned by Moore and the "poor" described by Williams, she never realized that she, barely into her late 20s, already lived a life of ease and prosperity that is the envy of most of the world, if not her own parents.

More disingenuous Wallis

I will refrain from commenting on most of the misguided op-ed Jim Wallis wrote in the Boston Globe yesterday. But I feel compelled to dispel one (deliberate) misstatement of his.

Speaking of a crowd he addressed at Boston's Park Street Church, Wallis wrote, "They suspect that Jesus would likely care more about the 30,000 children who die globally each day due to unnecessary poverty and preventable disease than he might worry about gay marriage amendments in Ohio." (How he discerned the thoughts of hundreds of silent audience members is a mystery.) This is yet another of Wallis' incendiary assertions predicated upon a slander.

The presuppositional slander is that those who disagree with Wallis (conservatives) care more about "gay marriage" than they do about children dying of diseases and poverty. I can only speak for me and my family, but I resent Wallis' slander. I believe very much in conjugal marriage and defend it at every turn. Meanwhile, my wife and I are heavily involved with a non-profit religious organization that performs development work and provides disease-prevention services in the developing world. We have given thousands of dollars to it. We have each provided dozens of hours of pro bono consulting services to it. (My wife's services are much more valuable than my own.) And we support numerous other organizations that do very good work for children and adults in other parts of the world and here in the United States.

To suggest that defending conjugal marriage and saving dying children is an either-or proposition is offensive. This is merely the latest of Wallis' detestable remarks. It is consistent with his modus operendi. But to use children? This man has no scruples.

An aside: Those of us who defend conjugal marriage do not oppose gay marriage. Indeed, we support homosexuals who get married. We oppose the creation of a same-sex marriage institution, or any civil union institution that discriminates against non-homosexual, same-sex couples. Add this to the growing list of Wallis' misstatements.

A reparable wrong

Senator and presidential aspirant Barack Obama has sponsored the aptly-titled "Global Poverty Act of 2007." The title is apt because the bill is sure to make Americans on the whole poorer and is likely to affect poverty worldwide not very much. (Why, given his misguided notions, did the Senator not name the bill "The Global Poverty Reduction Act"? That would have been a misnomer but, I suspect, it also would have been better marketing.)

The bill is getting unqualified bad press from some conservative organizations, such as the Family Research Council, which is unfortunate for two reasons. First, it's never a good idea to confirm the mistaken stereotype that we conservatives don't care about the poor. In fact, recent studies have demonstrated that conservatives are much more generous to the poor and downtrodden that are liberals.

Second, the bill isn't all bad. I defer to FRC's assertion that the bill will cost American taxpayers an additional $845 billion. That part is bad. By taking money out of the hands of Americans, the most generous people on the planet, and putting it into the hands of US and UN bureaucrats, the bill would ensure that every person on Earth who is not a bureaucrat is poorer.

But the bill has some redeeming qualities. Section 4(c)(4) would require the US to reduce poverty by "Leveraging United States trade policy where possible to enhance economic development prospects for developing countries." Putting free market principles to work in our trade policy in order to help poor nations develop is a conservative and laudable practice. We're for this.

Section 4(c)(6) would require the US to "Mobiliz[e] and leverag[e] the participation of businesses, United States and international nongovernmental organizations, civil society, and public-private partnerships." Privatized poverty solutions: we're in favor of this, too.

The bill is a mitigated disaster. Rather than make easy negative headlines for the liberal media -- "Conservative Evangelicals Oppose Measure to Assist the Poor!!!" -- let's work to fix the bill before it gets out of the Senate.