"Poor people" brings up different images for people. For folks like this its the welfare leaches. Folks who've made a way of life collecting welfare. This image of poor people takes sympathy away from the working poor who they still manage to criticize for using food-stamps. Either way poor people make an excellent scapegoat for our nation's bigger issues.

Based on the poor people I know, there are a number of factors that make it difficult for them to get ahead. Matters as fundamental as reliable transportation can make the difference between holding down a job and not ... and of course, cars can easily become an unaffordable expense, so you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.

There are also factors that are harder to nail down, such as, some folks simply aren't wired to understand how to manage their lives. One woman I know -- a mother of five (soon to be six) on welfare with a working husband -- cannot get it through her thick skull that paying your bills today means not getting into trouble tomorrow. This is someone who can't even internalize that, when you take stuff out from the library, the way you avoid those nasty bills is by returning what you borrowed. I really wish I knew what Doc Savage brain surgery would fix her wiring.

Where I'm going with all this: there can be a number of factors that play into poverty, some external, some psychological, and some simply a matter of poor education; but the one thing I've never seen is people remaining in squalor simply because they prefer it to getting a job.

Why don't you ask Cena, he's poor. I suspect most if not all of his friends are poor as well. I'm kind of curious if he's found the government to be the primary reason for his poverty?

I'm not poor. I live fly. I never said the government was a source of poverty. I know plenty of factors make people poor, but the biggest one is usually your parents.

"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
- John Steinbeck -

Maybe they mean there will be less poor people because a lot of them will starve to death or die in sweatshops?

She just wants to make sure all us dumb non-Libertarians can understand her!

and don't forget 'ending the Fed' is apparently a magic bullet that kills all known economic problems!

Or whatever the fuck kind of speech impediment she has?

The most nearly related delusion are people who are into past lives because they know they were an important figure, and not the poopsmith.

Libertarians and quasi libertarians like myself are not scum. I just wish the libertarian movement would stop being so radical. When I first started calling myself a Libertarian I didn't see it as a total flipping of our system, I saw it as being a cool Republican that didn't cock block.

There are a few different types of libertarians, I think:

- Republicans who realize being a Republican equals being an idiot, so they fancy themselves a cut above the rest while being fundamentally no different.

- People who like being an asshole and have found a political philosophy that can frame assholery as a virtue.

- People who genuinely believe market forces are ideally suited (or at least better-suited than anything else) to improve peoples' quality of life.

- People who believe individual rights should always trump group rights (example: opposition to the part of the Civil Rights Act that prohibits discrimination in hiring or commerce).

I've got little patience for the first two groups; I disagree with the latter two, and I think they're naive, but that doesn't make them bad people.

and stoners

Um, bort, the last ones are just racists that have found a political philosophy that can frame racism as a virtue.

SolRo, those would fall into the "asshole" category above. I am also allowing for the possibility of chuckleheads who have no historical perspective, and who think, just because a racist bistro in Ypsilanti would drive itself out of business today, it has always been that way.

What you are is all right, Cena. I won't try to classify you, but you think about your positions and whether they hold up, and that's way cool. A lot of politically involved people won't do as much.

There's a spread of defensible opinions these days (which BTW tend to fall within the bounds of the Democratic Party), so form your opinions on an issue-by-issue basis. By some standards I'm a bleeding heart liberal (free contraception from puberty onward, sex ed in all the schools, abortion on demand), in other ways I'm way more conservative than HuffPo ninnies (I dig ObamaCare even if I would have liked to have seen more, I supported the Libya War and am elated it was prosecuted properly).