Democratic Investment in Failure

Usually, I like Thomas Sowell's columns, but this one is a little too basic for him. Of course the political left, whether in this country or in others, is more interested in exploiting the very classes of people it claims to champion. Their plight does not matter as a personal matter as much as it does as a political matter.

Some of the economic policies that have led to these results are discussed in "The Economist" but it is doubtful that members of the political left will stampede there to find out what those policies were.

They have shown no such interest in how tens of millions of people in China and tens of millions of people in India have risen out of poverty within the past generation.

Despite whatever the left may say, or even believe, about their concern for the poor, their actual behavior shows their interest in the poor to be greatest when the poor can be used as a focus of the left's denunciations of society.

When the poor stop being poor, they lose the attention of the left. What actions on the part of the poor, or what changes in the economy, have led to drastic reductions in poverty seldom arouse much curiosity, much less celebration.

This is not a new development in our times. Back in the 19th century, when Karl Marx presented his vision of the impoverished working class rising to attack and destroy capitalism, he was disappointed when the workers grew less revolutionary over time, as their standards of living improved.

At one point, Marx wrote to his disciples: "The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing."

Think about that. Millions of human beings mattered to him only in so far as they could serve as cannon fodder in his jihad against the existing society.

If they refused to be pawns in his ideological game, then they were "nothing."

No one on the left would say such things so plainly today, even to themselves. But their actions speak louder than words.

Blacks are to the left today what the working class were to Marx in the 19th century -- pawns in an ideological game.

Blacks who rise out of poverty are of no great interest to the left, unless the way they do so is by attacking society.

Unfortunately, what the left has failed to realize is that there will alwasy be "poor people" when looking at any scale. Poverty is not an aboslute measurement, it is a relative measurement. Even in America, poverty is defined on a sliding scale, depending upon the number of people and the poverty line moves every year or so. But poverty is also comparative. A poor person in America is infinitely better off that a poor person in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Of course, Sowell is right, none of this really matters when it comes to politics. So long as there are poor people, there will be rich progressive out there "fighting for them" but doing little to help them.