Tracy Kidder is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and famously a liberal who exposes injustices. Kidder has a guest essay in the NYT titled, “A New Era of Hunger Has Begun.”
Kidder’s describes, with great sympathy for the clients of, and the woman who operates, a food distribution center in “Easthampton, an old mill town in western Massachusetts.” Kidder discusses how Trump’s BBB-Act will increase the already large number of Americans who experience hunger (and not from dieting, he points out.)
One main way the BBB-Act will increase the number of people experiencing hunger, Kidder explains, is by creating work requirements for people to be eligible to get food stamps, which can be used to buy food, and which are distributed to people by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.
Why does the NYT, a ruling class propaganda newspaper, give Tracy Kidder a big platform?
To answer this question, I wish to call your attention to how Kidder—typical of liberals in the United States with a big platform such as the NYT—discusses the question of work requirements in his article. Here are his words:
The work rules, new and bolstered, also serve an ideological purpose. They reassert the age-old distinction between the poor and the “deserving” poor. I prefer the alternative suggested by Shakespeare’s Prince Hamlet. He declares that if everyone got what they deserved, no one would escape whipping. Better, he says, to treat others according to our “own honor and dignity.” Then the less a person deserves, the more credit to us.
Kidder agrees with Hamlet’s words that say, essentially, that we (those of us who are not hungry) should provide people with food even if they don’t deserve it, in order to maintain our “own honor and dignity.”
Many liberal Americans would no doubt nod their head in agreement with Hamlet’s words. People like doing what adds to their “honor and dignity.”
But Hamlet’s words and Kidder’s viewpoint tell us to treat freeloaders the same as people who are not freeloaders, to bestow on them the same right to whatever it is they want from the fruits of the labor of others.
Lots of Americans, however, for very understandable reasons (that I share), do NOT agree with Hamlet’s words. Why not? Think about it. Why exactly would somebody not be deserving of food or something else that YOU labored to produce? (I invite you to read a parable about this to clarify your own thinking on this topic; here it is. You might find that your thinking changes after you read this parable.)
Let me introduce you to a person that I encountered several years ago, a person I definitely think does NOT deserve—i.e., has no RIGHT to receive—anything produced by the labor of others. His name is Christie. He is a thirty-something year old man, in perfect physical and mental health, who got in touch with, and visited, me several years ago because he thought that, as an egalitarian, I would admire his life style. (He was mistaken.), This was his life style.
He began—as he proudly explained to me—by staging a fake mental breakdown in front of the Boston Public library, by which he got the police involved and a public report created. He then went to a psychiatrist and on the basis of this report of his (fake) mental breakdown he got the psychiatrist to sign a document affirming that he was mentally unfit to work. He then used this document to obtain monthly disability checks (indefinitely) from Social Security (i.e., from you and other tax-payers who do the work that produces food and other social wealth.) With these monthly Social Security checks, Christie lived the “good life” traveling around the world sampling the various local recreational drugs he obtained here and there.
Christie, of course, was a freeloader. But not all freeloaders are at the bottom of the economic hierarchy. Take Alice Walton, for example. Alice is a member of the Walton family that owns Walmart. She is fabulously rich; her net wealth is currently $105 Billion.
Alice Walton engages in hobbies such as curating art, and “creating opportunities that help people” doncha know? Alice Walton is as much a freeloader as Christie. The difference is that Alice Walton’s freeloading is legal in our class inequality society, whereas Christie’s is (if he were caught committing fraud) illegal.
Many Americans, to their credit, do not approve of freeloading of either the Christie or the Alice Walton kind (and neither do I.) The egalitarian economic principle is an anti-freeloading principle. It is, “From each according to reasonable ability, to each according to need or reasonable desire with scarce things equitably rationed according to need.” The vast majority of people strongly approve of this economic principle when they hear it expressed; they seldom do hear it expressed because the ruling class—both the liberal and the conservative wings—censors it
Note what contributing “according to reasonable ability” means. Consider a person who, because of some physical or mental disability or because they are too young or too old to be expected to work, cannot (or is not reasonably expected to) contribute at all. Such a person is entitled to what they need or reasonably desire because their reasonable economic contribution happens to be zero. Likewise, if a person, due the lack of job opportunities or, say, a lack of transportation to get to a job site, or, say, a lack of affordable child care to make it possible to work, is unable to contribute by working at a job, then that person also has a right to what they need or reasonably desire because their reasonable ability to contribute economically happens to be zero. And note that taking care of one’s children or the children of others does count as contributing reasonably according to ability. So does going to school or an apprentice program, etc.
But staging a phony mental breakdown does NOT count as contributing reasonably according to ability, right?
Many Americans reading the pro-freeloading views of people such as Tracy Kidder say, “No! I am not going to labor so that the fruits of my labor are handed over to freeloaders.”
The establishment liberals never address this perfectly valid moral position of many Americans. They dismiss this moral position by saying things such as what Hamlet said, and also by saying, for example, “Oh come on! There are hardly any real freeloaders. Why are you so hung up on freeloaders?” This is just a way of refusing to deal with, or even acknowledge the existence of, the moral question, and it understandably annoys the hell out of people who don’t want to be taxed to pay freeloaders no matter how many or how few freeloaders there are, be they ones such as Christie or Alice Walton.
These establishment liberals will not embrace the egalitarian “From each according….” principle and they use every excuse they can come up with to avoid doing so. Here’s why. The billionaire class (to whom establishment liberals are beholden) fears that the egalitarian principle (“From each according…”) would, if widely heard, unite the vast majority of people against the billionaire class (including freeloaders such as Alice Walton.)
As I wrote earlier here, the refusal of establishment liberals to champion the egalitarian “From each according…” principle makes it easy for conservative politicians to vote for legislation such as the BBB-Act. All such politicians have to do is say that they’re voting against the liberal freeloader-friendly policies. This explains why the likes of Tracy Kidder get platformed in places such as the NYT, while those who advocate the egalitarian principle—which is enormously popular when people hear it expressed—are censored.