On a New Philosophy: That Poverty Is the Best Policy [1]
William Graham
Sumner
It is commonly
asserted that there are in the
… It is very popular
to pose as a "friend of humanity," or a "friend of the working
classes." The character, however, is quite exotic in the United States….
the greatest part of the preaching in America consists in injunctions to those who
have taken care of themselves to perform their assumed duty to take care of
others. Whatever may be one’s private sentiments, the fear of appearing cold
and hard-hearted causes these conventional theories of social duty and these
assumptions of social fact to pass unchallenged....
Certain ills belong to
the hardships of human life. They are natural. They are part of the struggle
with Nature for existence. We cannot blame our fellow-men for our share of
these. My neighbor and I are both struggling to free ourselves from these ills.
The fact that my neighbor has succeeded in this struggle
better than I constitutes no grievance for me. Certain other ills are
due to the malice of men, and to the imperfections or errors of civil
institutions.....
…A man who is present
as a consumer, yet who does not contribute either by land, labor, or capital to
the work of society, is a burden. On no sound political theory ought such a
person to share in the political power of the State. He drops out of the ranks
of workers and producers. Society must support him. It accepts the burden, but
he must be cancelled from the ranks of the rulers likewise. So
much for the pauper. About him no more need be said....
…Those whom
humanitarians and philanthropists call the weak are the ones through whom the
productive and conservative forces of society are wasted. They constantly
neutralize and destroy the finest efforts of the wise and industrious, and are
a dead-weight on the society in all its struggles to realize any better things.
Whether the people who mean no harm, but are weak in the essential powers
necessary to the performance of one’s duties in life, or those who are
malicious and vicious, do the more mischief, is a question not easy to answer.
The humanitarians,
philanthropists, and reformers, looking at the facts of life as they present
themselves, find enough which is sad and unpromising in the condition of many
members of society.... In their eagerness to recommend the less fortunate
classes to pity and consideration they forget all about the rights of other
classes; they gloss over all the faults of the classes in question, and they
exaggerate their misfortunes and their virtues. They invent new theories of
property, distorting rights and perpetrating injustice, as any one is sure to
do who sets about the re-adjustment of social relations with the interests of
one group distinctly before his mind, and the interests of all other groups
thrown into the background. When I have read certain of these discussions I
have thought that it must be quite disreputable to be respectable, quite
dishonest to own property, quite unjust to go one’s own way and earn one’s own
living, and that the only really admirable person was the good-for-nothing. The
man who by his own effort raises himself above poverty appears, in these
discussions, to be of no account. The man who has done nothing to raise himself
above poverty finds that the social doctors flock about him, bringing the
capital which they have collected from the other class, and promising him the
aid of the State to give him what the other had to work for. In all these
schemes and projects the organized intervention of society through the State is
either planned or hoped for, and the State is thus made to become the protector
and guardian of certain classes. The agents who are to direct the State action are, of course, the reformers and philanthropists....
Here it may suffice to observe that, on the theories of the social philosophers
to whom I have referred, we should get a new maxim of judicious living: Poverty
is the best policy. If you get wealth, you will have to support other people;
if you do not get wealth, it will be the duty of other people to support you.
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