Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts is still waiting to hear from the poor (column in Dallas Morning News 6/12/2008, Viewpoints page).  He will have a long wait.

Two thousand years ago, someone observed that the poor we will always have with us.  This observation is most often attributed to Jesus in the Gospels, but it does not matter who actually voiced it.  It is an observation that anyone could have made, and it is true enough.  In any given population, there will be a certain percentage of low-functioning people.  The more primitive the society and culture, the greater that percentage will be.  These are “the poor.”

Quoting Mr. Pitts: “If the poor ever recognized this, got mad about it and began to coalesce irrespective of race, they could realign politics as we know it, require the nation to grapple with, and construct remedies for, their suffering.”  It is not entirely clear from the context of his column what “the poor” are supposed “to recognize,”@ but the notion that they could ever coalesce has been a socialist-anarchist fantasy for a long time.  Emma Goldman sought to organize “the poor” with hardly any success, in between inspiring her various lovers and admirers to attempt the assassination of Presidents and industrialists (and in the case of William McKinley, succeed).  The latter day pseudo-historian Howard Zinn had the same hallucination as Goldman and Mr. Pitts in the conclusion to his “People’s History of the United States,” which is mostly a left-wing diatribe rather than a serious history textbook, although it has its amusing moments.  Even more recently, one of David E. Kelley’s “Boston Legal” characters, in a voice filled with awe, wondered what 20 million poor people could do if they were aroused.  Of course, it will never happen.

Just why that is so is best demonstrated by George Orwell in his magnificent dystopia, Nineteen Eighty-Four.  In Orwell=s fictional Oceania, society was stratified into three castes, the Inner Party, perhaps 1% of the population, the Outer Party, maybe 15 - 20%, and the “Proles,” i.e. the poor, who were the rest.  Protagonist Winston Smith, an Outer Party member and dissident, wrote in his illegal diary (it was “thoughtcrime”) that “if there is hope [to overthrow the existing totalitarian order] it lies in the Proles.”  Utter fantasy, it turned out.  Winston got a clue of the improbability of the Proles ability to do anything that had a semblance of revolutionary organization when he visited (again, illegally) the Prole quarter of the city and tried without success to engage a denizen in a coherent conversation about the sad state of the society and regime.  Later, after his arrest and during the re-education session, Inner Party member O’Brien explains why the Proles will never rise up.  They are low-functioning to begin with, and have no foresight beyond immediate gratification.  That is why they are Proles.

Many commentators like to point to the French and First Russian Revolutions as examples of an oppressed poor rising up and overthrowing their rich masters.  Not so.  Both revolutions began as middle class movements to protest and remove a decadent, parasitical aristocracy.  Both were hijacked by radical leaders who organized mobs to gain control of the apparatus of government, and a monopoly of force.  Both resulted in military dictatorship in which “the poor” were valued mainly as cannon-fodder, unless they were physically strong enough and sufficiently depraved, in which case they became goons to keep the rest of the hoi polloi in line.

Mr. Pitts, and numerous others, seem to assume that there is virtue in poverty, as well as in self-sacrifice.  That is part of the altruist-collectivist culture that has been pervasive in Western Civilization, at least up until the Enlightenment.  I do not mean to exempt other societies from this accusation, but the West has come to dominate the world at present.  It has done so because of the economic power that emanated from the scientific capitalist industrialist system spawned by the ideas of Francis Bacon, Adam Smith, Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, and others.  There is no virtue in being poor.  There may or may not be vice; a lot of poor people are in that state manifestly because of their moral depravity.  Perhaps, though, the worst vice is practiced by the affluent nags and busybodies who use the moral bludgeon of altruism to extort other people=s money to spend in their quixotic schemes to eliminate poverty (with a percentage for themselves, of course).

There is only one solution for the problem of poverty, and it is apparent all around us here in the United States.  That is, the individual freedom that fosters a vigorous capitalist economy.  The freedom to innovate, to trade goods, services, and most importantly, ideas, has ended already poverty in America for the vast majority of people.  It cannot, however, end it for all.  There will always be a small percentage of low-functioning people, for which nothing is to be done.  It is said perfection is the enemy of the good.  The good is most people having adequate, while not all having opulent, food, clothing, and shelter.  The perfect would be everybody equally miserable.  Capitalism requires that there be some losers, though it is mostly win-win, and for it to work there must be acceptance of some socioeconomic inequality.   The good news is that the number of genuinely poor people grows less and less under capitalism and freedom.  Nowhere will the poor will ever organize and coalesce, and, in America, there are not enough of them to make a difference if they did.

Bob Reagan is a lawyer in private practice and Adjunct Instructor of History for the Dallas County Community College District. 

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