Dead Broke...

How many of you started out your adult life dead broke? I know I did. Entry level jobs were available. Thank God. They made the difference between having food and shelter and not. I was struck the other day by an advertisement showing President Clinton and the title "The Poverty Trap." I didn't follow up on this. I only thought about the title. The first thing that came to my mind is the suggestion that poverty is a trap. One never hears the statement, "The Middle Class Trap." Or even better, "The Wealth Trap." Somehow only poverty is a trap. This statement or some form of it has been floating around for as long as I have been alive. Statements like "breaking out of poverty," or,"caught in the endless cycle of poverty." To me, this perpetuates the idea that poverty, as opposed to any other style of living, has some kind of additional unseen force that holds people in it's clutches. And those forces are regularly defined as external. Lack of education, limited opportunities, substandard health care, discriminative hiring practices, and so on.

In actuality, there are challenges, disappointments, uncertainties and discrimination at every financial level. Most wage earners and entrepreneurs have faced these truths from the time they stepped into adulthood.

People are moral agents. They have the capacity for both good and evil. They have within them the free will to make choices everyday that directly effect their lives and the lives of their families. The central difference between individuals who stay in poverty and those who do not, lies in the willingness of the individual to make choices that will change their lives. Programs are not the answer. Public housing, food stamps, welfare, child care, and educational opportunities cannot in and of themselves end poverty. Actually these things are destructive in many ways because they are dehumanizing. Social engineering by its very nature suggests that there is a technical solution to poverty, denying individuals their human dignity.

It comes back to being a moral agent. If we want to strip people of their dignity all we have to do is deny the Christian world view, and it's teachings on sin and moral responsibility. In its place we embrace the more enlightened or scientific view that fosters social engineering, eventually treating people as less than human. Once that is accomplished, poverty flourishes, particularly poverty of the human soul.

I am basically lazy. I have been ever since I can remember. I did very poorly in school, failing to graduate. I didn't like advice and I didn't want other peoples opinions and I didn't want anyone to train me to do anything. All I ever wanted was an easy life. Just make it easy for me, so I don't really have to put out too much. I think the only reason that I forced myself to participate was the unacceptable results that laziness yielded. Were it not for that I would no doubt still be dead broke.

Do you see what I mean. Poverty, particularly as it pertains to living conditions, is directly linked to our free will. And poverty of the soul has been with us since the fall of mankind.