Free market advocates often hear the charge that they don’t care about the poor. That their belief in the power of markets driven by self-interest and the profit motive implies they’re selfish and egotistical. That the rich exploit the poor. That without government help, the poor would starve.
“Bah!” says the research data, “Humbug!”
Those who place themselves on the right of the political spectrum, according to the General Social Survey in the United States, “are happier, more generous to charities, less likely to commit suicide — and even hug their children more than those on the Left.”
The article in the UK’s Daily Mail is written by Peter Schweizer, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. It begins light-heartedly, but makes a few telling observations.
It would seem that those who believe in the altruistic power of government merely shift their own feelings of responsibility (or guilt) onto others. They feel they have the right to force their own notions of what is good, and what needs doing, on their fellow citizens, so they don’t have to bear the cost themselves.
By contrast, capitalists recognise that poverty is good for neither the poor nor the rich. You can’t get rich selling stuff to people with no money. They also can, and do, organise well-targeted charity intervention, promoting voluntarily the things they believe will help other people. Nobody has to accept the charity, and nobody is forced to pay for it against their will. If it doesn’t work, they pull the plug, and the freed capital is allocated to where it might do more good. Just like in the real world. That’s why it works.
What, then, explains the apparent leftward tilt of so many non-governmental organisations and charities? Perhaps they recognise that it is far easier just to get money from government, than to have to answer to private donors who actively manage their charity funding. Perhaps they seek to profit themselves from the “generosity” they enforce on others, and fail to recognise that the funding they draw a salary from has to be created by someone in the first place. Perhaps they just feel the selfish need for self-validation. “Look how unbearably good I am!”
Meanwhile, they apologise for having babies (truly, a friend of mine did so the other day!) and alarm those who share their pessimistic world-view with stories of population explosions and running out of resources. Who was it that said, “If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population”? Oh yes, that was Scrooge, in Charles Dickens’ rendition of the fictional character.
The survey data quoted by Schweizer puts larges holes in the popular notion that free-market capitalists are simply greedy, or define their self-interest narrowly, or have a “stuff the poor” attitude towards the world. On the contrary: Those on the left who (incorrectly) call themselves “progressive” or “liberal” are more likely to fit the generalisation of self-absorbed misanthropy.
Private charity, whether inspired by religion, personal morals or economic interests, predated the modern welfare state by centuries. It now has formidable competition, however, from monopoly services funded by the taxes of the rich. Let’s hope the private charity of generous capitalists doesn’t bleed to death, as the welfare state cuts away at the tastier bits of the goose that lays the golden eggs.
(First published on my own blog.)
I notice that you fail to mention worker’s rights and conditions and that modern health and safety regulations were only brought about by campaigns and union power.
Or are we led to believe that the old Dark Satanic Mills and the modern child miners of Bolivia are altruistic creations of capitalists?
OR did this survey only include WASP American Citizens?
Agreed, I reckon the rich help the poor as most rich people have dabbled with being poor and know how difficult it is not to be poor. One cannot be rich by working for someone else, one has to learn ‘rich’ in the school of hard knocks.
Whereas most middle class liberals or lefties have always had a cosy job and cosy career be they in the private sector or in civil service. They have to protect their middle class status and don’t live their ideals. They cannot accept the loss a mistake would cost them whereas a rich guy knows he can get up and start again. So a rich guy will take risks easier.
Ivo
Well written and well said.
Andrew Carnegie who was a typiclal tight fisted capitalist when he was building up his empire; became one of the world’s biggest philantropists after he had accumulated wealth. He built over 1000 libraries around the world ( he was joint bread winner of his family, in the slums, from age 14 and self taught from libraries ). But he was still a businessman – he would only build a library in a community which could proove it could maintain and support the library in the future.
He believed in giving away your wealth in your lifetime, nor after death in your will and wrote “a man who dies rich, dies disgraced”
Bill Gates is called “the new Carnegie”
Why do so many feel that “the poor” are so wonderful that the rest of us ought to be falling in love with them?
Lots and lots of “the poor” are not very nice people. People best avoided. Dodgy people.
Not so?
Most of what you write is simply the truth. People who use others peoples money (tax money) to help the poor are more often arrogent, self righteous and never stop telling everyone how wonderful they are.
In the so called greedy 80′s of Reagan/Thatcher private giving to the needy exceeded by huge amounts past charity.
Brent
http://sda.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/hsda?harcsda+gss06
If you run “SHOULD AGED LIVE WITH THEIR CHILDREN” with reference to “THINKS OF SELF AS CONSERVATIVE OR LIBERAL”, you find that 55% of extreme liberals vs 46% for extreme conservatives agree with this. In every category a greater percentage of liberals think it’s a good idea.
Besides that, the article you link to seriously misrepresents several of the questions.
He says: “‘Is it your obligation to care for a seriously injured/ill spouse or parent, or should you give care only if you really want to?’”
The ACTUAL question is: “Sometimes people are asked to make great sacrifices for others in their family by caring for an elderly parent or a spouse who is seriously ill or injured. When someone is asked to give such care, is it their obligation to do so, or should they give care only if they really want to?”
(See the OBTOHELP question.)
He says: “‘Do you get happiness by putting someone else’s happiness ahead of your own?’”
The ACTUAL question reads: “I cannot be happy unless I place the one I love’s happiness before my own.”
(see the AGAPE2 question)
Subtly, but profoundly, different questions.
@Jon
Totally agree with you. What’s so darn special about the “poor”, the “workers”, the “disadvantaged”. Why do they get free food and clothing, guaranteed job security, preferential treatment in contravention of most of our constitution. Flood victims I can understand helping, but life’s victims?
My favourite headline: “World ends! Poor hardest hit.”
LordFoom
I think it depends on the parents. If they looked after you – look after them. If they were s..ts – dump them!
Oh great, I don’t get e-mail notification of comments on my posts any more. Sorry, all. I’ll respond when I have a bit more time.
Apologies for the delay in responding. Been felled by a particularly wretched cold.
@ Alisdair: Despite the common misperception that the US is (or ever was) a colonial power, the “General Social Survey in the United States” takes a less expansive view, and indeed does not extend to Bolivia, nor to 18th century Britain. It is, however, not limited to WASPs.
Well done on appealing to emotion, however, and on citing extreme counter-examples to dispute a fact that is ordinary, obvious and objective — albeit inconvenient for your world-view.
I will answer your charge, lest you continue to labour under the misapprehension that free-market capitalists have no answer. The “dark satanic mills” were, as you may be aware, a creation of William Blake. Because it appears in such a beautiful hymn, I happen to have given this phrase some thought.
The description was probably not intended to refer to factories at all, but to pre-Christian religions and their monuments, such as Stonehenge.
If you were to read an industrial-revolution interpretation into the phrase, however, it contrasts the secular and mundane with the divine, and contrasts the hard work of the present with the rewards of the future. One can surmise that the people who worked in the factories of Blake’s poetic dramatisation are the people who would build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land. They went there because they would otherwise be destitute and starving, or because the British government forced them to work there by means of the Poor Law. (Many of the caricatures of early industrial-era Britain, in fact, derive from the Poor Houses, established by the state to force the poor into labour it deemed productive.)
In the intervening two centuries, the dark satanic mills — in the latter interpretation of Blake — created prosperity for enough people that the modern world, in which the middle class is large, hunger is rare, and charity could reach even beyond England’s pleasant pastures. In that sense, they were indeed the altruistic creations of capitalists.
I know little about child labour in Bolivia, or the laws that pertain there, so I won’t comment on the subject beyond noting that Bolivia is hardly an icon of free-market capitalism.
I did, however, a while ago address child labour in China. With respect to child labour during the industrial revolution, that post contains a link to an instructive piece on the subject. It contains a similar reference to a defence of sweatshops. While I am appalled by both child labour and sweatshops, and would strongly support charities designed to address the reasons they continue to exist in some poor communities, rational objectivity trumps emotional subjectivity, and considering all sides of a complex issue of history and economics is nothing more than intellectual due diligence.
That said, neither child labour in Bolivia nor working conditions in 18th century England are to the point. Neither dispute the basic premise of my post: that in the modern, rich world, free-market capitalists are, in general, more generous in private than left-wing welfare-statists pretend to be in public. Yes, there are exceptions, but that’s why they do a “general survey”.
@ Lyndall Beddy: Thanks very much. You’re right about Carnegie. Few super-rich fail to end up as overt philantropists, these days. Such generosity isn’t limited to the super-rich, though. Ordinary people might not found a thousand libraries, but they might believe that education is the best way to reduce poverty, and donate R100 a month to a charity that funds libraries, or volunteer there on Saturday mornings. Or if they don’t have R100, they might contribute to their school or church’s bake sale. Or buy what they need at shops that commit to supporting education charities. Whatever they choose, they will likewise insist that their donation is well spent, as Carnegie did.
@ Jon: True, but the same goes for many rich people. This isn’t about personal like and dislike. It’s about recognising that general prosperity benefits a society, and that in turn benefits you.
@ LordFoom: I agree that the second example you cite is substantially (though probably unintentionally) different. The first is a fairly reasonable contraction, however, and since good reporting values concise statements, this version doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. I don’t see how this invalidates the findings reported in the article I quoted.
Ivo
Some common sense on child labour – at last!
What is wrong with a child working – provided they are also getting an education. Children with work are not the problem – the problem all over the world is children WITHOUT work, without money, sometimes without parents, and often without hope. They turn to drugs and to crime for an income because they can’t legally work.
If you look at societies that are undeveloped, agrarian and rural you’ll typically find most families and communities live by subsistence farming (as well as other forms of husbandry such as fishing and hunting). This form of food and income provision is extremely labour intensive and typically demands contribution from the entire family and community as a whole.
In this example children would (in some way, shape or form) be working from an extremely young age. Not “stitching shoes together” work- intensive, tedious, time-consuming, labouriously manual work. Typically the child will grow and, eventually, have to support his aging parents and grand parents and even newly born children. They would burn wood for light, cooking, warmth and boiling water. They would have limited access to medicines, perhaps preferring traditional botanical and other “natural” remedies.
Their quality-of-life would have to contend with constant extreme physical exertion, crowded living quarters and amenities, exposure to the elements and pathogens as well as the slow poisoning from carbon monoxide emitted from their wood fires.
They would be trapped in a subsistence cycle- forced to provide and work for mere survival as generations, future and past, would have and will.
Certainly the path to industrialization and development is no picnic but it is, at the very least, a progressive path and, in the modern world, it is a path “run-at-a-brisk” rather than the slow crawl of developments in 18th century Europe and America.
Surely it is better to have a path with objectives rather than a carousel of subsistence and meek survival?
The indefatigable EU Referendum way in on “food aid”, agriculture and the current food crisis with reference to aforementioned subsistence farmers:
“Despite the current global stresses, there is actually no shortage of food. Most commonly, in developing countries, the problem is lack of purchasing power. The food is available but the very poor simply cannot afford to buy it.
[...]
This lack of purchasing power is especially the case with subsistence farmers, who most often eke out an existence by selling small surpluses in times of plenty, and by selling their labour to larger farmers who have a market for their produce.
An emphasis on production, per se in these circumstances, especially when it is focused on low value commodity crops, is – as we have sought to demonstrate – positively harmful. This creates local surpluses which, without the marketing infrastructures and alternative markets, drive down the prices and leave the poorer worse off.”
Read it all: http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2008/07/stupidity-squared.html
Hard Rain
I think surpluses driving down prices are going to be much less likely a problem in the future. If there is a surplus for consumption – turn it into biofuel.
“Biofuel” is folly, Lyndall. Look, I’m all for private companies developing new means of business but when the industry is state-mandated and backed up by even more subsidizing I get a really bad taste in mouth.
Hard Rain
Biofuel is NOT folly. It is there for the surplus. Intelligent governments SUBSIDISE food, and public transport, and health, and education. ALL of them!
@ Lyndall Beddy: Why should governments subsidise anything? Why not just give me my money back, so I can make up my own mind which foods I prefer, or which forms of transport meet my needs, or how I would like to be treated and by which doctors? Why should I have to pay ten times as much for the priviledge of deciding how and by whom my children should be educated, because the government subsidises to public schools compete private schools right out of the market for anyone except the super-rich? Why should the super-rich get that choice, but you and I not?
You’re more of a socialist than I thought if you want the government to make such uniform decisions on behalf of all of us, thereby permanently hobbling any existing or future competitors or alternatives to what the bureaucrats, in their infinite wisdom, chose.
I’d prefer to have a little more freedom than having the government decide what goods and services I need, and should therefore be subsidised with my money. It’s only a hop, skip and a jump from such a state-centric world to one in which you get ration cards to spend at the government food depot of your choice.
Ivo
Because it is not about YOU or ME. It is about a minimum standard of living for EVERYONE.
And yes – I have always been a socialist! AND a capitalist. They are not exclusionary you know.
I used to be a Cosatu supporter in the Old SA days – never had any problems with them, never had a strike, worked with my door open to all the shop stewards. UNTILL they supported Zuma!
It’s no coincidence that the countries seemingly “hardest hit” by rising prices in fuel and food have these commodities heavily subsidized by the state. You need only observe the countries where people are protesting the most…
And just as Ivo and capitalism predicts, where there is price fixing (like in Europe and India) there will be shortages and there will be extreme discomfort in the market as free natural forces are not able to adequately adjust to the rise.
And this is what happens when an entire industry is not market-driven but a mandate of the state…
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2008/07/priced-out-of-market.html
You will note, Lyndall, the problem has nothing to do with surplus. Farmers, already heavily subsidized, are subsidized further for this state-created charade but, unfortunately, the input costs versus viability versus profitability = failure. I guess more subsidies are the answer? I guess ramming biofuel down people’s throats is the answer? Oh, but please, only if the government then subsidizes the cost to the consumer as well!
Bankruptcy, production slows loom for US ethanol producers… http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2008/07/priced-out-of-market.html
Hard Rain
Where does that statistic come from? There may be more protests – but is that because they are harder hit, or because they are democracies?
Intelligent countries subsidise their farmers or their food – dumb ones don’t. There are now 27 countries in the world restricting their exports of food to feed their locals first – AND this has nothing to do with biofuels, but with bad planning and not looking after farmers.
SA used to subsidise farmers and protect prices and we EXPORTED our surplus. Even today, with all the hassles farmers get, farming exports are about 12-16% of our GDP.
Blame it on Mbeki’s phobia about Doha for the last 7 years. Continual complaints about the West producing surpluses – which they then agreed not to do! So now there is not enough food! Half the countries of Southern Africa have Aid as about half their GDP. That Aid IS subsidies! So why must the West subsidise African farmers and not their own? Who do you think is their electorate?
Nigeria is the powerhouse of West Africa – 50% of the area’s GDP comes from there. They used to be able to feed themselves. Till they discovered oil – and corruption!