Who's to blame for increasing poverty?

"Official: 'Significant' hike in U.S. poverty anticipated" – headline from Associated Press article, August 20, 2009

The Commerce Department's undersecretary of economic affairs, according to the AP article, is predicting that the final 2008 census data will likely show a "statistically significant" increase in the poverty rate, and that "The number of uninsured also is expected to increase."

If the government really wants to help the poor and the uninsured, libertarians have a few suggestions that would go a long way in actually accomplishing that, as opposed to making things worse.

Do away with the minimum wage

It's nothing more than ego-dressing for progressives anyway. Compassionate liberals like to raise the minimum wage as a way of showing they're "doing something" without actually doing something. What they actually accomplish is to raise the lowest rung on the Ladder of Success so high that it's beyond the reach of the nation's poorest and least educated citizens, meaning they can't even mount the ladder, let alone climb it. That leaves them in the "cash under the table" economy (what libertarians call the "free market") or into the criminal world where they can at least subsist in spite of what the politicians and their do-gooding enablers have done to them, or overwhelm the welfare roles to society's detriment.

Yet another federal building blackens the nation's skyline. (AP photo)

Do away with government certification and regulation.

The private sector does and can do this just fine without a single taxpayer penny, like Underwriter's Laboratories and Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval and Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) standards and the Society of Automotive Engineers (those SAE numbers you see on oil cans) and Consumer Reports and Edmunds Used Car Pricing guide and a multitude of others that will blossom overnight once the government's coercive browbeating disappears.

If private vetting organizations screw up they quickly loose their credibility and their funding and get replaced by more trustworthy sources. If government agencies fail in their mission to protect the public, congress passes even more meddlesome controls, their administrators get promotions and praise ("Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job." – Bush to FEMA director Michael Brown following the government Katrina debacle) and their budgets get doubled.

Do away with government welfare and replace it with private welfare

Ever hear of the Elks, Eagles, Odd Fellows, or Foresters? These public welfare associations began life as "fraternal organizations" or "Mutual-aid societies" that, according to a Frontier Centre for Public Policy review of Prof David Beito's book, From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State, "provided a network of services and institutions resembling virtually every aspect of today's welfare state, including health insurance, hospitals, orphanages and retirement homes.

Tens of thousands of these lodges scattered all across the country, Professor Beito writes, paid for burials, life insurance, unemployment, sick relief, and medical treatment. They were supported by voluntary dues and would have likely expanded and flourished to this day had the grasping government goliath not moved in to politicize and monopolize nearly every aspect of welfare and drive the private practitioners into near extinction.

Today, almost everyone has been so thoroughly propagandized that few have the slightest clue that private welfare not only existed but served their members better than today's bureaucracies can even dream of doing.

Abolish taxes

Stop taxing the living bejesus out of everybody to pay for the politicians' ego-engorging wet dreams, like the warfare-welfare-public policy program taxpayer-paid monuments they build to themselves and christen as personal "legacies."

One logical way to start is to abolish the federal income tax and replace it with nothing. That will go a long way in driving the genie of government back into the bottle of the Constitution. Since something like 90% of what government does today is unconstitutional anyway, the few legitimate functions of government can easily be funded by the excise taxes the founders limited them to in the first place.

But these are just a few ways that libertarians can rescue the poor from poverty and the uninsured from their political masters.

So just ask your friendly neighborhood libertarians. He and she have more helpful how-to household hints for you to learn about.
 

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