The problem of the poor

Bruce Western, author of Punishment and Inequality in America, discusses the fact that 2/3rds of young black male high school dropouts have prison records. Bruce notes the uneasy truth that the prison system has the sort of effect upon the lives of the poor here in America that the welfare state has upon the lives of the poor in Europe. But what Bruce doesn't do is go the next logical step: acknowledge that Prison State America has substituted prison for welfare as the solution for "what do we do about all those jobless young black males?".

Now, the question is, "why do we need to do something as a society about the poor anyhow?" Well, there is a basic problem: human beings will not voluntarily starve to death simply because there is no economic niche for them. Marie Antoinette found that out the hard way... the peasants who had been shoved off of the land by the lords of the manors as less labor-intensive methods of agriculture were developed were not going to voluntarily starve to death simply because there was no place for them in the new economy, and instead offed the heads of Marie Antoinette and all those lords who had said "Let them eat cake" when presented with the problem of a starving peasantry. Given that the poor are not going to voluntarily starve themselves to death, that leaves these alternatives:

1. Extermination. Killing all of those who no longer have an economic niche in our new economy will eliminate the threat to those of wealth and power. Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot liked this one. But in the long term, it's hard to carry out, because economies are constantly changing and thus there will always be those who lack the skills or ability to compete in whatever the current economy is. Just ask the Shah of Iran just how the end game of this one works out.
2. Imprisonment. There are two ways to imprison people. The first is to place them in actual physical prisons. The second is to place them into geographic locations from which it is difficult from them to transport themselves to the geographic locations where those of wealth and power live. Thus ghettos, credit check requirements for "better" apartments (i.e., those not in the ghetto) to keep out the "ghetto" people, and "mass transit" systems that, in most of the nation, will not take you anywhere that anybody in the upper income quartile lives. We're doing a lot of this.
3. Welfare and television. This is the "bread and circuses" option -- feed and entertain the poor to keep them from rampaging and cutting off the heads of those of wealth and means. This is what LBJ and Richard Nixon put into place when the black ghettos exploded in the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., they were afraid that the residents of those ghettos were going to go Marie Antoinette their constituency, and thus created a large number of welfare programs. This option is currently out of vogue, because it is not as profitable (for the men of wealth and power) as the imprisonment option, which gives many more opportunities to siphon taxpayer money into the pockets of the rich and powerful.
4. Put them to work. You have idle men sitting around doing nothing in a threatening manner? Find them some jobs. If they lack the skills to contribute meaningfully to the economy, well, find them jobs doing things that need doing, but currently aren't being done because it'd require raising taxes to do them -- things like, say, cleaning all that f'ing trash out of the medians of our freeways (I swear, so many freeways look like trash dumps nowdays!). Or maintaining trails in parks, building park benches out of stones and mortar, whatever. Just keep'em busy. This was the option that FDR chose in the 1930's. It is currently out of vogue because it does not give profit to the rich and powerful, who would prefer to have government pay them to do this stuff.

Or, there is the 5th option: Do nothing, and find out that in Darwinian Libertopia, those who lack the skills to sustain themselves will not peaceably die -- they will come take what they need to survive. And those of us who do have property will end up dead.

One thing is clear: The prison option is horribly expensive and isn't going to be economically feasible in the long term, especially as the baby boomers retire and a sizeable chunk of the economy gets diverted to welfare for unproductive old farts. We can't both divert a huge portion of the economy to imprisoning poor people, and divert a huge part to sustaining unproductive old farts. Something is going to give. And the old farts will no more allow themselves to be starved to death than the poor will, they may not have the reflexes of young people, but they have something more important than that: an unwarranted sense of entitlement that would allow them to pull the trigger to take what they need to survive without a single moral qualm. There's a reason why old farts are the only unproductive people in America who are supported by a functioning welfare system. It is because old farts value what little remains of their life above all else, and if you get between them and what they need in order to finish out their lives comfortably, you are going to be dead.

The problem is that government as currently comprised in America is utterly incapable of taking any kind of actions. Paralysis is the norm. Excuses are the lingua franca. "It can't be done" is the chant. The days when a President could stand up, say "We will go to the moon by the end of the decade", and then *do* it, are gone. We are no longer "can-do America". We are, instead, "can't-do America". We can't provide health care to all our people because blah blah blah. We can't provide jobs rather than prison to young black men because blah blah blah. We can't do this, we can't do that, we can't do anything, because that would require us to, like, exert ourself or something.

But something is going to break if we don't change the current system. And when the economic collapse happens because so much of the economy has been diverted into prisons and supporting unproductive old farts... well, hopefully I will be rowing my iceberg far to sea by that time. Hey, a penguin can dream, eh?

-- Badtux the not-poor Penguin