To feed poverty is to increase poverty and handicap the poor. To feed the hungry poor is humanitarian and something we all must do it, but does nothing more than keep them alive until the next day, and then what? Feed them again. Don’t get me wrong, feeding the poor is a moral obligation, but only half of the moral obligation. The other half is solving the problem by facing the challenge. An apparent moral action can become immoral if incomplete.
To give constant free health care is to condemn more poor people to dependency and perpetual poverty. Good health is a necessary struggle. A personal responsibility. The easier we make it, the more obesity and unhealthy people we have, but good health is needed to be able to pull oneself out of poverty. Therefore, feeding the poor can ONLY be considered as a crisis remedy, a temporary action, followed up by solutions. The tools that assist people out of poverty contain the only intelligent long-range answer. It is not only one tool. It’s a collection of tools.
You don’t fight poverty by ignoring it either. In instances of crisis following an earthquake, you do act for the moment, concentrate on helping the poor and use the emergency as a catalyst to have a positive effect on the situation reversing the causes of poverty. Don’t let a crisis go to waste. Remember that a great part of the cause of poverty is corruption on someone’s part, but it’s mathematically impossible to reduce the numbers of ongoing poverty by just feeding people. Again, an act of kindness and not a solution. Let’s not confuse ‘giving a hand’ with a ‘handout’. The one institution that feeds the most people in the world, by far, is the Catholic Church. Many want the government to replace the Catholic Church, as well as Anglicans and all others. Both, churches and governments must seriously reconsider their approach to this issue. The churches should concentrate on crisis hunger and the government on promoting, not funding, skill training, education, and transportation that will help people get out of poverty. Skill training should come from the private sector and non-profit agencies. Education is the one power-sharing solution that has no equal, but not by the government. Judaism has incorporated both ends of the equation in their approach to life. Jewish people - except for the ‘new’ stupid Jewish intellectuals - believe in the personal responsibility of each person not to be poor in life. To them, to be a burden to others is a social injustice. That is very smart! Mobility or transportation is another overlooked factor.
Displacement simply moves the displaced family to another location. It is not a solution to either displace them or to prevent their displacement. Some people prefer the survival of the weak and the incompetent at the expense of sacrificing all others. This translates into increasing taxes, which I oppose as it erodes the emerging strong youth who would lead others. A safety net is necessary. However, the first source of support originate from family, individuals dedicated to providing such support, not government, which specializes in self-serving bureaucracy and really does not care. Also, and more importantly, valuable research will consistently show that inhabitants of countries with more economic freedom suffer less poverty. The more freedom, the less poverty. The lesser the government intervention, the less poverty a society can have.
When talking about the correlation between corruption and poverty, Ray would say in jest, “a simple solution to poverty is to shoot all dictators.” Unfortunately, they can get replaced by others equally as corrupt.
We did our part. If we implement the 20-60-20 Theory, which I will explain in detailed later, 20% will move up in the world and will influence the other 60% to follow along. But what about the lower 20%?
The answer is not with the elected government. Its role is not to be custodians. Besides, the bureaucrats in government often overrules elected officials, but when bureaucrats and politicians realize they can join forces for mutual advantage, they convince the needy to stay dependent on them and to blame someone else for their negative conditions. Then the ‘safety net’ becomes the ‘snare net’. Manipulated elections can create a revolving money-door of politicians, public unions, and bureaucrats fed by more needy people without redemption. It takes a herculean act to filter the corruption out of a snare-net and go back to the groundwork of doing things right. Whichever politician who tries it, will undergo a backlash from all the corrupt players.
The way to do things right is to get every possible poor person into the trickle-up stream, at any entry level, and work toward moving them up through their own initiative, up-and-up from there. It happens to 90% of all immigrants who come to this country and accept our laws, so why not to ALL 90% of every born citizen? This will only leave less than 10% of our population who are too chronically ill equipped to take care of themselves needing a safety net, not a snare net. It is much too easy to say, “let someone else handle it.” I would say never, never give up.
Then there is another 10% who are caught in a culture within groups who have convinced themselves that poverty is a way of life due to fate and nothing can change that since others will prevent it, a self-fulfilling prophesy. And thus, it requires a self-induced corrective action.
I failed to correct my deficiencies at the Free Clinic at the time. I didn’t connect health with the larger picture; how it affects cultures and genders. I would try hard not to fail with letting that happen to me in the Barrio. To use poverty as a way of making a living is not an option. To avoid that, I had to stop looking at poverty and instead seek the end solutions. I found the answer, which will be covered later in this book in the chapters TRICKLE-UP and MONEY MANAGEMENT ($500,000). I don’t want agreement or disagreement, but listening to and understanding this concept is key in all that follows as the basis for this book.