Merit and Motivation

[virginia_fell]

The next time someone tells you that poor people don't deserve help because the real problem is that they don't work hard enough to deserve food, health care, and homes, remember how many of them are being deliberately obstructed.I know that we like to act in America like our culture is a perfect meritocracy, that rich people earned their money and

Comments

[lepusdomesticus]

Thank you for the link. That article was absolutely chilling. What struck me most about it, though, was the consistent theme of these women not graduating high school or completing their GED because they had to get some awful job just to survive. People can pull themselves up by their bootstraps with a lot of luck if they have an education so that they can get a good job. It's not enough to have a public school system. We have to make sure every student can actually complete her schooling.

We are often told that we (Americans) are our government. But it's not true. Congress is not even close to actually being representative of the population in terms of diversity of life experience and understanding of the lives of the most disadvantaged. And the system of seniority, committees, favors, and corruption in our gevernment actively prevents new voices getting in, perpetuating the culture of self-service and leading to travesties like Georgia's TANF system as illustrated in the article.

A country is only as rich as its poorest resident. It's not about charity. Purposefully keeping a significant portion of the adults in this country underemployed makes us all poorer. And creating a class of disadvantaged children only prolongs the problem.