Argue for or against the following question Millions of people live in poverty,

Question

Argue for or against the following question

Millions of people live in poverty, creating disheartening pictures of suffering, but the problem is what to do about it. Poverty is the outcome of market processes; some people make much less money than others. The market mechanism about which we have studied so much in this course says that market processes ensure that effort is rewarded and resources (people, capital, etc.) go where society--not just employees or employers--value them most highly . Efforts to eliminate poverty inevitably interfere with this process making markets work less well and the economy less efficient. The result of a full fledged war on poverty would be to reduce the poverty of some target groups probably, but make the whole economy--that's most of us--less well off. To the extent that taxes would be higher to pay for the anti-poverty programs the negative impact would be even greater on the majority of the population. It's not clear that the tradeoff is worth it.

Explanation / Answer

Am I arguing from an economics or a social perspective? If I take a Kantian perspective it's pretty easy to argue that it's immoral to let one suffer and not all, so we should all suffer equally. From a political perspective, it looks good to remove poverty = reelection. From the perspective I think I am supposed to be arguing from (mail me if you want a different one) 1. We don't live in the long term. Sure, in the long term people are better off, but what does that mean? Why does an increase in real output mean anything? For example, I can now travel further in cars, go on the internet faster etc. But if that is the gains at the costs of millions of people in poverty, letting people suffer all over the world, is it worth it? 2. We will remain a super power even with helping people (we have thousands of nukes). At that point, we must look historically. Let's say we let the great depression keep going: a) that would have destroyed all of people's trust in government, collapsing society to be one ruled entirely by the elite corporations. Those corporations would have been unable to provide for defense of our country and allowed Hitler to win WWII, taking over the world. At that point any economics arguments go out: sure we make more money, but go argue that Hitler is better off. b) the average person would have been better off if we hadn't helped. The problem is most of our population would have died. At that point we would have lost our superpower status, the corporations would have had nowhere near the workforce we would have needed and we would have lost. c) look to Lyndon B. Johnson's plan. It was an extremely popular plan, destroyed poverty, and at the same time Real GDP soared. Government spending is great economically - it doubles the multiplier effect in most instance, clearly outweighing the cost due to taxes, helps the poorest people who are most likely to spend get money, and keeps our work force alive. This is likely the argument you want. I could make this much longer, and believe people have, but this should be sufficient to get you started. Mail with any questions.

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