(03-24-2022, 01:25 PM)JasonBlack Wrote: People being poor is not necessarily a tragedy. People being poor in spite of having good work ethic and high character is a tragedy.
Lazy, wasteful, intemperate, incompetent, and (I need not load more adjectives) people deserve to be poor. People poor despite a good work ethic and high character are either just getting started in life or face a system that wastes its rewards.A good work ethic is a consequence of hope and not out of fear of the Exploiter.
Quote:Likewise, people getting rich because of high character and good work ethic should be respected and celebrated. People getting rich via coercion, manipulation and corrupt back-room deal making should be arrested.
A system that rewards rentiers at the expense of everyone else (which is how our economic system has trended in recent decades) will make a work ethic ineffective. I could make the case that speculative booms especially foster such a trend, and that the best possible end to a speculative boom is an economic meltdown that stops the flow of 'easy money'. Ideally people start shoestring businesses for the lack of any viable alternatives (that was much of the recovery from the 1929-1932 meltdown) or a government that resorts to public investment to take the place of crony capitalism. Corruption and monopolization create poverty and despair.
Quote:Attempts of make sweeping generalizations about either rich or poor people are intellectually lazy. If anything, it's the middle class that tends to be more homogeneous and conformist, while the people at either end vary to a far greater degree in terms of intelligence, character, personality and life circumstances.
I concur about middle-class conformity. It smoked until smoking became unacceptable.It was racist when racism was fashionable; it was anti-gay when the media called gays "perverts".
Quote:This doesn't mean we can't effectively categorize people. In fact, I'd argue that by definition, you have to do that to propose any kind of policy suggestion, but it does mean that your categorization needs to be more comprehensive and involve a deeper understanding of several relevant subcultures.
Most people fall into categories by ethnicity, education, religion, handicap (if any), criminal proclivity (if any), generation, sexuality, region, and class (largely as occupational grouping). Much personal identity derives from one or more of those categories.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.