How America Punishes People for Being Poor - by Rebecca Vallas

Reproduced here for fair use and discussion purposes. My comments in bold.
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This post first appeared at TalkPoverty.org.

Before we even get started, we need to discuss the headline. America does NOT punish people for anything, let alone for being poor. This is absurd on its face, as if America is an entity with a singular consciousnesses, setting out to purposely trip up poor people. Instead, America is a country, with no emotions, thoughts, or sentience. It is a geographic region organized by political and cultural features. It does not think, feel, hate, or smile.

In fact, America is a unique political experiment in self-governance, created on the principles of liberty and self-determination in the context of Christian morality. If ever there was a place where people of every status and walk of life could work hard and make something of themselves, America is it. 

It is totally offensive for the author to assert that America punishes the poor.

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This past weekend, I was part of a panel discussion on MSNBC’s Melissa Harris Perry with New York Times reporter Michael Corkery, whose reporting on the rise in subprime auto loans is as horrifying as it is important.

In what seems a reprisal of the predatory practices that led up to the subprime mortgage crisis, low-income individuals are being sold auto loans at twice the actual value of the car, with interest rates as high as 29 percent. They can end up with monthly payments of $500 — more than most of the borrowers spend on food in a month, and certainly more than most can realistically afford. Many dealers appear in essence to be setting up low-income borrowers to fail. (We have never understood this assertion that banks want people to fail. Why? What possible good is it for the bank to not collect peoples' installments and thus ending up repossessing the car? The bank loses money!

Also, note how innocent, and apparently stupid, people are being taken advantage of by eeevil salespeople and banks. It's as if poor people are being rounded up door-to-door by dealerships and being forced to buy cars. 

Rather than people being responsible for their own choices, even their bad ones, in typical Leftist fashion someone else is always to blame. And because people need to be protected from themselves, in steps government to rescue them from their own consequences.) 

Walter E. Williams - My Hero explaining wealth creation

Understanding the liberal vision
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Posted: May 18, 2011

By Walter Williams
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The liberal vision of government is easily understood and makes perfect sense if one acknowledges their misunderstanding and implied assumptions about the sources of income. Their vision helps explain the language they use and policies they support, such as income redistribution and calls for the rich to give something back.

Suppose the true source of income was a gigantic pile of money meant to be shared equally amongst Americans. The reason some people have more money than others is because they got to the pile first and greedily took an unfair share. That being the case, justice requires that the rich give something back, and if they won't do so voluntarily, Congress should confiscate their ill-gotten gains and return them to their rightful owners.

A competing liberal implied assumption about the sources of income is that income is distributed, as in distribution of income. There might be a dealer of dollars. The reason why some people have more dollars than others is because the dollar dealer is a racist, a sexist, a multinationalist or a conservative. The only right thing to do, for those to whom the dollar dealer unfairly dealt too many dollars, is to give back their ill-gotten gains. If they refuse to do so, then it's the job of Congress to use their agents at the IRS to confiscate their ill-gotten gains and return them to their rightful owners. In a word, there must be a re-dealing of the dollars, or what some people call income redistribution.

The sane among us recognize that in a free society, income is neither taken nor distributed; for the most part, it is earned. Income is earned by pleasing one's fellow man. The greater one's ability to please his fellow man, the greater is his claim on what his fellow man produces. Those claims are represented by the number of dollars received from his fellow man.

Say I mow your lawn. For doing so, you pay me $20. I go to my grocer and demand, "Give me two pounds of steak and a six-pack of beer that my fellow man produced." In effect, the grocer asks, "Williams, you're asking your fellow man to serve you. Did you serve him?" I reply, "Yes." The grocer says, "Prove it."

That's when I pull out the $20 I earned from serving my fellow man. We can think of that $20 as "certificates of performance." They stand as proof that I served my fellow man. It would be no different if I were an orthopedic doctor, with a large clientele, earning $500,000 per year by serving my fellow man. By the way, having mowed my fellow man's lawn or set his fractured fibula, what else do I owe him or anyone else? What's the case for being forced to give anything back? If one wishes to be charitable, that's an entirely different matter.

Contrast the morality of having to serve one's fellow man in order to have a claim on what he produces with congressional handouts. In effect, Congress says, "You don't have to serve your fellow man in order to have a claim on what he produces. We'll take what he produces and give it to you. Just vote for me."

Who should give back? Sam Walton founded Wal-Mart; Bill Gates founded Microsoft; Steve Jobs founded Apple Computer. Which one of these billionaires acquired their wealth by coercing us to purchase their product? Which has taken the property of anyone?

Each of these examples, and thousands more, is a person who served his fellow men by producing products and services that made life easier. What else do they owe? They've already given.

If anyone is obliged to give something back, they are the thieves and recipients of legalized theft, namely people who've used Congress, including America's corporate welfare queens, to live at the expense of others. When a nation vilifies the productive and makes mascots of the unproductive, it doesn't bode well for its future.