[ExI] A Small Request [was Re: Impressive book: Farewell to Alms]

[hkhenson]

At 08:00 PM 2/6/2008, you wrote:
>On Tue, 2008-02-05 at 17:29 +0000, someone wrote:
> > A Google search indicates that Libertarians are coming out in support
> > of this book as providing support for  their claim that 'the poor
> > deserve to be poor'.
>
>Can we please raise the level of discourse here?  The unqualified
>statement about 'Libertarians' as a group is just not useful.  First not
>all Libertarians have commented on the book, in fact there not all
>Libertarians have even read it.  And to say that the claim that 'the
>poor deserve to be poor' is part of the Libertarian philosophy is just
>plain false.

I have hung out with libertarians both upper and lower case for most 
of my life and can't remember hearing it either.  It seems to me that 
if you are concerned about the poor, it would be darn useful to know 
why they are poor, for that matter why the average person wasn't even 
as well off before about 1800 as his stone age ancestors had been.

Incidentally, if you read the last part of the book, Clark does talk 
about a well tested method that is known to get *some* of the poor 
out of poverty.

snip

Agree with the rest.

Keith