01161 Social Justice and the Oppression of the Poor

How government makes people more miserable and reduces opportunities for all.

Now let's consider how government makes the lives of poor people more hard and miserable and prevents people from helping them. Many of these invisible structures also make our lives more unsustainable.

In many areas it is practically illegal to be homeless. Cities manage this with laws forbidding loitering, sleeping in public, criminalizing begging, etc.

Zoning laws prevent people from adding small apartments (garage, attic, basement, back-yard) that would increase the amount of rental housing and thus moderate rental prices, especially at the low end.

In most areas it would be illegal to put a trailer house in your back yard and then rent it out.

Economic redevelopment programs, using eminent domain, have attacked poor neighborhoods across the country, destroying millions of units of low income housing. This non-market, politicized process drives up the price of housing, especially at the low end. It takes property from the poor, cheats them by paying cheap, non-market, court-dictated and politicized prices for the property, and then gives that property at low prices to persons with privileged access to politicians.

Code requirements increase the cost of housing and are more related to political pressure from construction contractors than to actual safety issues.

It's illegal for poor people to live in many neighborhoods. Cities manage this by mandating minimum lot sizes, distances between houses, square feet minimums, and by forbidding any manufactured housing or trailer houses.

It's illegal to provide some kinds of useful housing to poor people. Try building hexayurt for homeless people.

It's illegal to not have electricity in your house. It's illegal to not buy water from your city utility. Many states have the authority to take your children into state custody if you don't have electricity.

It's illegal in many areas for more than four or five unrelated people to live together.

You can't raise chickens or other small animals in most cities unless you have a large (one acre or larger) lot. This inhibits economic activity and prevents people from supporting themselves by their own labor.

Police commonly allow crime that would not be tolerated in upper income neighborhoods to proliferate in low income areas.

Taxes and fees extracted from low income, working class, and middle class areas subsidize upscale development in newer areas of cities. This constantly drains older neighborhoods of revenue important for maintaining infrastructure and providing services.

The negative cumulative impacts of these prohibitions and persecutions is to —

• Make people dependent upon government social services,
• Make the lives of poor people more miserable, risky, and unhealthy,
• Suppress the price of lower-income labor,
• Keep unemployment high,
• Reduce entrepreneurial activity and thus ensure a continued supply of cheap workers,
• Increase the number of abortions due to economic distress and psychological despair.

Violations of social justice and economic persecution drive a host of negative consequences for our society, including alcoholism and drug abuse, violence against women and children, family dissolution, abortion, despair, crime, and suicide.

These issues — and consequences — are not only a problem for poor people. They are big issues for the working and middle classes.

I am not a big fan of government social programs, but since economic persecution is a reality in these United States, we have to have programs like food stamps, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and housing assistance. If we didn't have them, probably 10% of the population would be dead of starvation and exposure within the first year.

Sure, some would endeavor to help, as they do now. However, there's never enough private charity to go around.

CHARITY CANNOT DO THE WORK OF JUSTICE.

As long as our system of economic injustice prevails, people will be driven into poverty much faster and kept there longer than private and religious charities are able to cope with.

There are not enough private and religious charitable resources to go around as things stand right now. Help doesn't get to everyone. We live in a culture of death, and without the government's social safety net, as problematic as it is, mass death would be the result.

If we want to help the poor, then among other things that need to be done, the government should stop actively persecuting the poor as described herein. It is likely that there will be less need for government programs as people become more able to participate in their own lives by helping themselves by their own efforts.

The huge amount of drug business in low income areas indicates that there is an entrepreneurial streak a hundred miles wide among poor people. Ironically, it is easier and more profitable for poor people to go into the recreational drug business, than it would be for (e.g.) three young people to set up a hot dog stand at a rest stop on a freeway. That would certainly result in a major police and food regulatory bureaucracy response the first day they open for business. These hot dog entrepreneurs would be safer selling crack cocaine on the streets of a low income neighborhood than they would be selling hot dogs at a turnpike rest stop. That's a pretty sad commentary on the morality of our present system of laws enacted by our Republican and Democratic politicians, who created, preside over, and maintain this system of subjugation and domination.

They want rigged, politicized markets that reward their friends and punish their enemies.

They want all of the restrictions and subsidies that benefit their campaign contributors to stay in place.

They want the laws that oppress the poor and grind their faces into the dust to do their job to suppress wages, increase rents, promote political and economic dependency, and discourage personal and family and communal responsibility.

I hear the protests — "this isn't what we want.” However, in politics you get what you vote for. This is what our Republican and Democratic politicians have consistently voted for over the past fifty years. It's what they designed and implemented! It’s what they maintain today. It's the way the system is designed to work.

It seems at best disingenuous for them to disclaim responsibility for these consequences.

And not all of these consequences are unintended. Most of them are deliberate attacks on the poor and they work exactly as their design dictates. If you don't believe this, go to your City Council and propose amendments that would allow manufactured housing and trailer houses anywhere in the city. Follow this with a demand to allow micro-apartments (granny, attic, basement, backyard) in any neighborhood and to eliminate minimum house and lot sizes. The howls of outrage and screams of protest will come quickly and your council will dismiss you as a fool (at best) or maybe (at worst) a dangerous agitator. It's much the same reaction that prevailed 50 years ago in the United States, when some people proposed the then-radical thought that people of African descent should be able to live anywhere they choose.

Is the plan that the poor will die?

One of the points made later in this book is "Expect and design for economic contraction." This is a really hard concept for us to get our minds around because we have lived all our lives in a inflationary, expanding economy. Sure there've been recessions and etc. but "we get over it" and get back to expanding business as usual. But those days may be over.

One of the major data points that screams "deflationary contraction" is the current fascination with austerity by governments worldwide. One reason our politicians are so intent on cutting programs like education and social services is because they know that there is no longer enough to go around. They are in office to make sure that when the budgets contract, their friends and political supporters will maintain their government checks. Meanwhile, those who aren't on their list of campaign contributors and supporters will see their government funding cut.

They attempt to hide this ugly and corrupt economic reality by cloaking it with ideology and principle. Government per se is bad, they say, government should be limited, it should not do all the stuff it is doing, government checks for people are bad. But that's only rhetoric. If we look at what these politicians actually do, we see that they are not at all opposed to activist government throwing money from helicopters. They are just picky about who gets the money. As far as they are concerned, in spite of their pretensions to Judeo-Christian morality, people receiving government food benefits are useless eaters. Their plan is that the poor will get sicker, more malnourished, more vulnerable to violence, thus their mortality rates will go up, including child mortality. In other words, the establishment's plan for the poor is that they will die, and the resources that presently support them will be redistributed to those who are more worthy and better able to use those resources.

As a matter of social justice, we should always resist this program of political genocide and advocate that the government stop its persecution of the poor.

What goes around, comes around.

The Bible says — "Sow not in furrows of injustice lest you reap a seven fold harvest."

In other words, what goes around comes around. That seven-fold harvest falls upon us even as we speak. Things going from bad to worse, and while each party blames the other, a more likely explanation is that we reap the bitter fruits of the seeds of economic and ecological and social injustice and exploitation that we have sown for so many years.

This is not a problem unique to the United States. Around the world, the situation of the poor is getting worse. Everywhere we go, we find poor people are excluded from full participation in their own lives and the lives of their nations. In India, the average number of calories eaten by hundreds of millions of poor people declined 13% between 1973 and today. The quality of the food is low, with almost all the calories coming from carbohydrates. Only 2.5% of the calories come from vegetables, meat, eggs, and fish. 21% of adults and half of all children under five are malnourished. Over the past five years, food prices soared 70%. Kwashiokor, the disease of protein starvation, is on the rise. The problem is not an absolute lack of food. India has plenty of food to feed everyone. People are too poor to buy food and the government's programs to help the poor with subsidized food are rife with corruption and political criminality. In one state alone, an estimated $14.5 billion in food aid was diverted to the private market over the past decade.

None of this is an accident. The world system works as it the political and economic elites designed it to work.

Yes, I know the amount of wealth in the world is not a static fixed amount. Wealth is constantly created — and it is also constantly destroyed — every moment of every day. But the evidence seems clear that wealth is centralizing and the corruption of national and the world economies by criminal elites condemn many to marginalization and poverty. It doesn't matter if the pie continually gets bigger if the rich and powerful get a continually larger slice of the pie. And what happens when the financial methamphetamine that is driving so much of what we refer to as "economic growth" stops getting us "high" any more?

People often feel it's not their problem because this isn't a problem for them. They have jobs, they are comfortable in the middle class, but that sense of safety and security is only an illusion, as many millions have discovered since 2007. The same systems that drive the oppression of the poor are tearing into the middle class.

Although it's a slow moving catastrophe, the end result for our nation — the ash heap of history — is not in doubt. Our job is to manage that descent and to thus avoid the worst consequences of a violent and chaotic collapse. We can't do that without solidarity and enabling people to participate in their own lives. As the poor go, so will go the rest of the population.