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Poverty amid Wealth
Henry George: The
Crime of Poverty (1885 speech)
What more unnatural than this? There is nothing in
nature like this poverty which today curses us. We see
rapine in nature; we see one species destroying another;
but as a general thing animals do not feed on their own
kind; and, wherever we see one kind enjoying plenty, all
creatures of that kind share it. No man, I think, ever
saw a herd of buffalo, of which a few were fat and the
great majority lean. No man ever saw a flock of birds, of
which two or three were swimming in grease and the others
all skin and bone. Nor in savage life is there anything
like the poverty that festers in our
civilisation.
In a rude state of society there are seasons of
want, seasons when people starve; but they are seasons
when the earth has refused to yield her increase, when
the rain has not fallen from the heavens, or when the
land has been swept by some foe – not when there is
plenty. And yet the peculiar characteristic of this
modern poverty of ours is that it is deepest where wealth
most abounds.
Why, today, while over the civilised world there
is so much distress, so much want, what is the cry that
goes up? What is the current explanation of the hard
times? Overproduction! There are so many clothes that men
must go ragged, so much coal that in the bitter winters
people have to shiver, such over-filled granaries that
people actually die by starvation! Want due to
over-production! Was a greater absurdity ever uttered?
How can there be over-production till all have enough? It
is not over-production; it is unjust distribution.
...
If the animals can reason what must
they think of us? Look at one of those great ocean steamers
ploughing her way across the Atlantic, against wind,
against wave, absolutely setting at defiance the utmost
power of the elements. If the gulls that hover over her
were thinking beings could they imagine that the animal
that could create such a structure as that could actually
want for enough to eat? Yet, so it is. How many even of
those of us who find life easiest are there who really live
a rational life? Think of it, you who believe that there is
only one life for man—what a fool at the very best is
a man to pass his life in this struggle to merely live? And
you who believe, as I believe, that this is not the last of
man, that this is a life that opens but another life, think
how nine tenths, aye, I do not know but
ninety-nine-hundredths of all our vital powers are spent in
a mere effort to get a living; or to heap together that
which we cannot by any possibility take away. Take the life
of the average workingman. Is that the life for which the
human brain was intended and the human heart was made? Look
at the factories scattered through our country. They are
little better than penitentiaries. ... read the
whole speech
Al Hartheimer: Affordable Housing and
the Land Value Tax Perspective
In addition, more recently, in the Fifties, new
high-rise housing was built for the poor. Those buildings
were destroyed by the tenants and for a long time stood
as empty shells, then the government spent more millions
rehabilitating them, and today they do house some of the
poor. It would have been better and cheaper if the
"Pruitt-Igoe" solution had been used, that is, blow up
the buildings and get rid of them entirely.
More recently, having learned that the poor do not
want to be housed in high-rise buildings, the government
has financed low-rise row houses, garden apartments and
single-family houses. These have been more successful,
but they all have what to me is a great disadvantage:
they ghetto-ize the poor.
There have been many other programs,
with which you are undoubtedly more familiar than I am,
for providing affordable housing. But the supply has
never been able to catch up with the demand, and that's
where we are now. ...
After expending billions of our tax dollars on an
unending variety of programs, we still have the problem
that there is not enough "affordable housing". Why is
that? It is because all of the solutions for the problem
have been topical. If you don't have enough housing,
build houses! If the banks won't lend money, guarantee
the loans! And so it goes. None of the
solutions have recognized the economic root cause of the
problem. And that's what we're going to discuss.
Now, however, I want to describe the typical small
American city today. Usually there is a "downtown,"
usually consisting of the City Hall, some banks, some
office buildings, some museums, some institutional
buildings like the YMCA, and a regional hospital. There
are also some stores, but the big department stores have
gone to the suburbs and the "big-box" stores, Wal-Mart,
Home Depot and the rest, are nowhere to be seen. There
are also some residences, most likely for the poor and
some for the wealthy, but the middle class has fled. And
then there is vacant land, lots of it. ... read the whole
article
Martin Luther King, Jr: Where Do We
Go From Here? (1967)
... I am now convinced that the simplest approach will
prove to be the most effective -- the solution to poverty
is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed
measure: the guaranteed income. ...
Our nation's adjustment to a new mode of thinking will
be facilitated if we realize that for nearly forty years
two groups in our society have already been enjoying a
guaranteed income. Indeed, it is a symptom of our
confused social values that these two groups turn out to
be the richest and the poorest. The wealthy who own
securities have always had an assured income; and their
polar opposite, the relief client, has been guaranteed an
income, however miniscule, through welfare benefits.
John Kenneth Galbraith has estimated that $20 billion
a year would effect a guaranteed income, which he
describes as "not much more than we will spend the next
fiscal year to rescue freedom and democracy and religious
liberty as these are defined by 'experts' in
Vietnam."
The contemporary tendency in our society is to base
our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to
compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the
middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity.
If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is
necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral,
but it is also intelligent. We are wasting and degrading
human life by clinging to archaic thinking.
The curse of poverty has no justification in our age.
It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of
cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate
each other because they had not yet learned to take food
from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life
around them. The time has come for us to civilize
ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of
poverty. ...
...
I want to say to you as I move to my conclusion, as we
talk about "Where do we go from here," that we honestly
face the fact that the Movement must address itself to
the question of restructuring the whole of American
society. There are forty million poor people here. And
one day we must ask the question, "Why are there forty
million poor people in America?" And when you begin to
ask that question, you are raising questions about the
economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth.
When you ask that question, you begin to question the
capitalistic economy. And I'm simply saying that more and
more, we've got to begin to ask questions about the whole
society. We are called upon to help the discouraged
beggars in life's market place. But one day we must come
to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs
restructuring. It means that questions must be raised.
You see, my friends, when you deal with this,
* you begin to ask the question, "Who owns the
oil?"
* You begin to ask the question, "Who owns the iron
ore?"
* You begin to ask the question, "Why is it that people
have to pay water bills in a world that is two thirds
water?"
These are questions that must be asked. ... read the
book excerpt and whole speech
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