Why Poor People Are So Lazy (A Market Analysis)

Far be it form me to make the wild accusation that conservatives are sometimes hypocritical (like we all are, blah, blah, blah), but when discussing poverty, they take the cake. For you see, conservatives love to explain how the market solves everything -- from deciding who gets nice houses (rich people) to who gets nice cars (rich people) to who can afford to eat well (rich people) to who gets to go to the doctor and live through illnesses (rich people), the market is the force that solves all and explains everything.

Except when it comes to explaining what poor people do. For instance, they certainly don't sell drugs because they've had no educational opportunities and subsequently have no job prospects. No, they do it because they're bad people.

Or take welfare -- again, the reason poor people go on welfare is not because they've been shut out of our exclusive economic system, it's because they're lazy and don't want to work. Yet ironically, this is one of the few times market logic actually explains human behavior. Checkout the graph below:



The red line is what our government defines as the poverty line (which actually still leaves someone deeply in poverty because it's set way too low, but that's another post for another day) and the bars below represent how much someone would earn working full time at a minimum wage job (adjusted for inflation) throughout the past 70 years. Note that only once does one of those bars even come close to meeting the poverty line.

So you tell me, from a market logic standpoint, which makes more sense -- working your ass off 40 hours a week and not even earning enough to meet the poverty line, or collecting welfare and not even earning enough to meet the poverty line? Any good economist will tell you the better choice is to take the free inadequate money rather than the hard-earned inadequate money...