Hi Greg.
Took me awhile. As I sketched in my mind what to say, my original plan was just to ask you to take out my last letter or two and look again. I had broken your previous statement into its implied component questions; got your agreement that I was reading you clearly; and then offered responses to each. But what I thought (and still think) would help us would be for you to give at least a quick response to each numbered point. If on some of your points you believe I've successfully answered your question, you could gratify me by so stipulating. And then for those points where you remain unsatisfied, you could focus your logical firepower and ask for further response.
The alternative, which I'd prefer to avoid, is one in which I respond with my best to each point you make; and then without comment you simply come back with yet another point. "But what about this; but what about this?" So I was going to reiterate my previous answers and then ask you how well each of them satisfies you. And I would have put off my response to your most recent, holding that off as an incentive to getting you at the same table with me.
But I do see some things in the most recent that I'd like to respond to now. So:
To quote you again, you say, "I think history shows that the private means would address poverty more efficiently and effectively. (and permanently!)" Now that's a fascinating statement to me. If that statement were true, then why do we in America have such an obscene level of poverty in our nation?
Your argument begs the question. In fact, the level of poverty is stunningly low in our nation. We, and a few other capitalistic states, have become a historical anomaly, in which poverty is the exception rather than the rule. And that reduction of poverty has come about almost entirely by private means. By that I mean that entrepreneurs have created ways to make us far more productive of the things we desire. In order to find even the small amount of poverty we do, and to make it seem large enough that we would need government's forceful hand to correct it, we have to keep on redefining poverty upward. Where once it meant widespread lack of food and shelter; today it means not feeling confident that these will continue, or receiving less material goods than others. Even a glance at most people in the world, or at most people in our country prior to the last century or so, show how little poverty we have by comparison with either. Did you maybe mean "obscure" rather than "obscene"?
One would also expect... that an unregulated economy like ours would witness wealthy philanthropists, profitable corporations, and the private sector freely utilizing their funds to eliminate poverty, but that is very far from the reality on the ground. (I do not mean to dismiss the incredible generosity of some wealthy philanthropists. My point is that what is given does not meet the level of need.)
The US economy has a huge rate of private giving, compared to that of any other country. The more socialistic the country, the less private giving there is, as a percentage of income. But when a commodity is free, the quantity demanded will always exceed the quantity supplied; this applies to philanthropic gifts as much as to anything else.
However, you want to know why profitable corporations don't do more to eliminate poverty. And once again I point out that elimination of poverty, wherever it has happened, as resulted from companies engaging in the earning of profit. To earn profit, you take resources and convert them in to products and services whose value exceeds that of the resources. "Resources" here includes labor, and in fact labor is the predominant resource in business. When we convert labor into products worth more than the labor, we create wealth. The process of hiring the labor puts more income into the laborer's pocket than he could earn elsewhere, and so his wealth has increased. That is how people escape poverty, and there is no other way. (Unless you count Taking by Force, which is how Royal Families get their wealth)
We could add that the profitable company also is producing good we desire at lower prices than previously achieved; which means that this poor laborer, now with higher wages, finds that each dollar of his wages goes a bit further in exchanging for the things he desires. As they say in math, Q.E.D.
Because, as you know, to compete in today's marketplace you gotta keep spending money to make money. (I've never been quite sure about this: when does a business have enough? When do corporations get to a place where they are content with their current level of profit?)
Turn your questions around; you're still seeing people (and by extension corporations) as consumers rather than creator/producers. As (businessman) Oskar Schindler asks himself in the movie, "How many more could I have saved?, so we could ask "When has a business created enough new wealth to be shared by its workers and customers and owners? Or "When do corporations get to a place where they are content with how much better off they have made their society (and their owners)?"
As you express your sincere frustration over being unable to find resources to solve a $65,000 medical problem; think about how odd that is. If not for all the great wealth creation of American corporations, you wouldn't even be able to find this woman among the vast hordes of people in similar positions. The very fact that she stands out attests to what our economic system has done for most of us. And it allows us the "luxury" of being able to look at the isolated problems of ones like her and trying to find solutions for them, too.
And lest you think that there aren't enough well-off people willing to help, look in the yellow pages for a big city's hospitals and notice how they're spelled. A huge number come under "S" for "Saint-something." They exist because of Christians who wanted to give their own money to establish a facility that would help everyone, especially the poor. (The rich, remember, would have had doctors and nurses come to their home a century or more ago.)
Call it the lesser of two evils. Prying taxes away from people is less evil than watching people starve. Of course, I wish we didn't live in a world where that was necessary.
We do live in such a world. First, because capitalists love to set up business arrangements that benefit both themselves and their prospective laborer. (If it didn't benefit the laborer, he wouldn't stop doing whatever else he would have been doing.) Second, because as people grow wealthier they love to give more to those who suffer.
We might point out something about that, however. There are two kinds of compassion: one which speaks compassionately and likes to persuade or compel others to behave benevolently but gives little personally; and the other which actually gives, from their own means, to those who suffer. The first we call "liberal Democrats"; the second "conservative Republicans." Wait now, that sounded snarky, you're thinking. It comes from a recent census study by economist Arthur Brooks of Syracuse University, currently president of the American Enterprise Institute; published in his recent book, "Who Really Cares."
Therefore, even if the government is less efficient, at least the job gets done, or partly done. It's better as a poor person to have some inefficient help than to have no help.
I need to clarify the meaning of economic efficiency here. I mean much more than it seems. When I say that government is less efficient, it leaves you to think I mean that even though they were a bit slow and wasteful, they still achieved a positive result that is better than no result at all. But that's not what I mean. When I say government is inefficient I mean that government has wasted resources that could have done far more for these poor had they been left in the hands of those who created the resources. The government action, in the big picture, has left the poor worse off than they would have been.
I'll strain for an example. Say, a major flood has numerous families clinging to their rooftops, while some of the local boat owners drive around rescuing them. Now the government confiscates all their boat fuel to power a government barge that creates huge waves that wash the families off their rooftops as it lumbers around. Those in government who sent the barge and grabbed the fuel feel very compassionate; but they are the definition of inefficiency: They do a poor job; and they waste resources that could have been used to do a good job, and they have reduced the condition of those they said they wanted to help. And they took resources by force from their rightful owners.
But that isn't happening in America's inner cities. Sure there are the occasional rags-to-riches stories but, it simply isn't happening on a grand scale. In this nation -- the freest market in the developed world -- we still see masses of the poor who try to climb out of poverty and cannot.
That sounds like saying that medicine isn't working because the hospitals are still full of sick people. Poor people who emerge from poverty cease to be visible as poor people. What you see are those that remain. But poor families, over spans of a decade or two, cease to be poor. Only a few of those in the lowest quintile of family income--maybe 3-5% of them--remain there after a US census or two. And that fact does, in fact, come from the US census. It's hard to picture the people who have ceased to be poor, because they have escaped from the inner cities and reduced these masses of the poor from what they would have been.
Greg, I hope that my selection of quotes from you is a fair sampling of what you were saying. It may be that I cherry-picked statements I thought I could most readily answer, and omitted some compelling points you think I should have addressed. If you think that, be sure to try not to do the same to me! Oh, and tell me.
