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sixes_and_sevens comments on Politics Discussion Thread September 2012 - Less Wrong
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The telltale symptom of being poor is not having money. The problem with being poor is not being able to engage properly with the wealth-generating activities of society, and that happens for a variety of reasons.
Some of those (such as cyclical unemployment or childcare needs) are absolutely best tackled by direct wealth redistribution. Others (such as disability, substance dependency, a criminal record or a lack of marketable skills) by the provision of services, which government may be best placed to orchestrate. Others still (such as statistical discrimination) are most directly addressed by employment legislation, which only the government is in a position to carry out.
All of these interventions can be carried out badly. Since mechanisms of social welfare tend to be one of the big issues on the table for party politics, they usually are carried out badly. This is a problem with prevailing methods of governance, not with welfare programs in and of themselves. It's far from clear (although quite plausible) that no welfare is preferable to bad welfare.
Why should every member of a society be wealth generating? Let alone net wealth generating.
To the first approximation people want to do something about poverty because they feel sympathy for people who can't afford various worldly goods, what they however don't realize is that above some very low level (above which starvation and death from exposure aren't factors) their sympathy for the poor is rooted in the poor not being able to afford status markers that if all the poor could afford would cease to be status markers.
I didn't say they should be.
I have mixed support for your second paragraph, but I'm reluctant to properly respond to it since I don't see how this comment is a response to the points in mine.
I made a poorly written post if that is the case. I hope this might clarify:
I dispute this is actually the problem people have with poverty.
Right. That makes more sense.
I wasn't talking about the issue non-impoverished people have with poverty, but trying to characterise the sort of situation that makes someone poor. Simply not having much money is the symptom; there are many causes, generally describable as systematic obstacles to acquiring and using capital.
For purposes of this discussion, I don't especially care why most people don't like other people being poor. Although making the public feel better about the society they live in shouldn't be discounted as a positive outcome, this is by no means the primary function of a welfare system.
No, actually the lack of money is the problem.
Give a poor person $10mil, and his poverty problem is solved.
Are you being serious?