IRREVERENT Magazine - Features

One of the most obscene things to come out of the Hurricane Katrina disaster was the media’s spin on New Orleans poverty, as if to imply the native population’s socio-economic status served as some sort of attractor for foul weather patterns.   Liberals are always quick to engage in such obviously flawed thinking, so it’s hardly surprising here, but at the risk of sounding politically incorrect let me just say, for the record, folks: guess what?  Some people are just poor.  Some people are evil, some people are stupid, and some people are just going to be poor.  It’s a fact of life.  Get used to it.

Sometimes the truth hurts.  Poverty has been a fact of socioeconomic development throughout recorded history.  Attempts to “eradicate” it have universally failed, even under the most despotic totalitarian regimes.  Whether it’s due to unfortunate circumstances, a native inability to earn adequate wages for one’s skill, or good old fashioned laziness – encouraged by a mollycoddling culture of government entitlement – the fact remains that poverty will always be part of human civilization and it is utter money-wasting folly to try to eliminate it.

The fact that even so many on the right have apparently lost sight of this simple, basic axiom only serves to show how easily flawed logic and fuzzy, emotional thinking can cloud rational judgment.  Conservatives would do well to remember basic economic truths and stop wasting precious political capital on pointless impossibilities like the elimination of poverty.

People and people alone have the ability to reduce poverty, their own poverty.  Instead of robbing them to furnish Teddy Kennedy’s senate offices, let them keep everything they earn and save it themselves.  Not only tax cuts, but as near as possible to complete tax elimination is what’s called for here.  Put more money in people’s hands and watch them magically take care of themselves.  Self-reliance works: what a concept.

All jobs in the economy are dependent on the spending of others.  Wake up and smell the Starbucks: If people aren’t buying what your company’s selling, you won’t have a job for very long.  It’s just that simple.  Give people more money and they’ll spend it.

Now I can hear the liberals already whining about how wealthier folks, who would naturally receive the lion’s share of the tax cuts because they pay the lion’s share of the taxes, don’t spend as much as poorer people because they don’t have to, so the net effect of tax cuts is actually a decrease in aggregate spending as savings levels rise.  Once again, emotional arguments cannot replace the light of reason: wealthy individuals got wealthy in the first place by making the best use of their money.  They didn’t sit on it like hens, hoping for a return on their investment: they invested it in key, strategic areas of the economy, spurring growth and … you guessed it... JOBS for millions who would otherwise grow impoverished themselves.

The bottom line of all these half-baked liberal economic policies can be answered with a simple question: Why should anyone trust the government to spend the money wisely?  Open your newspaper on any given day and you can bask in the glory of bureaucratic blundering and the Washington Waste machine.  Bridges to nowhere?  Bloated government pension plans?  Billions of accounted for dollars?  Welfare to pay people NOT to work?  Buying land for “preserves” when it could easily be developed into much more productive use?

Now some liberals have also argued that eliminating poverty, even on a global basis, is the best way to promote democracy and secure our homeland.  This, of course, brings us to the next obvious point: Some people are just evil.

You may not want to hear it, but it’s true.  Evil exists in the world, folks, and it doesn’t matter whether people are poor, rich, brown, blue, blonde or beige: some people are just plain evil, and the only way to combat evil is to attack it head on.  It may sound very nice to “promote global prosperity,” but it’s a fool’s errand that’ll only lead to a decrease in our standard of living, while doing NOTHING to make our homeland more secure.

Osama bin Lardhead, folks, wasn’t a poor man.  He was – as many of the 911 hijackers were – from upper or upper-middle class families.  Poverty didn’t make this jerk a maniac: he’s just evil.  And there’s a cure-all for evil people who attack innocent civilians: it comes in lead form, in easy travel cartridges suitable for loading into M16 rifles.

Some are rich, some are poor, some are stupid, and some are just plain evil.  You can’t change nature, you can only change yourself.  Before we journey out to change the world, shouldn’t we spend a little time knowing ourselves?