Megan McArdle: normalize marriage to end poverty!

A couple of decades back, one of the standard explanations for poverty was that rich people had become too decadent and too tolerant. Decadent, in that they engaged in all sorts of reckless behavior which they could handle — their wealth would cushion them — but the working class and the poor would imitate them and didn’t have the same protections. Plus the rich were too tolerant in that they didn’t demand their inferiors behave better; David Brooks, for example, thinks the main flaw in our ruling class is that they don’t impose social conformity like the WASP elites of old.

A variation on this is that the reason poor people are poor is they don’t get married. As Roy Edroso says at the link, this is “an answer to all the liberals who think conservatives should be doing better by our poorer citizens — without costing their donors a cent (except in marriage promotion boondoggles, but those are cheap and help keep the less talented wingnut welfare cases off the street).” It’s also deeply tied in with their misogynist longing to push women out of public life and keep them barefoot and pregnant: James Taranto and other right-wingers think shotgun weddings were preferable to birth control and abortion. Taranto also thinks if we didn’t have laws that guarantee equal employment rights to women, more of them would have to marry to support themselves.

WaPo columnist Megan McArdle says the entertainment industry needs to preach marriage to fix things, which strikes me as an even more vapid solution: just have more films with marriage in them and poverty will be fixed! No need for government programs! Because it’s not like there are any programs on TV any more where people marry or want to marry … oh. Wait. There are lots. Superman and Lois and Flash are just two that immediately come to mind. Possibly she means marriage is presented as an option rather than a must-have, but it’s not treated as an aberration or something unusual.

And anything McArdle says about how to fix the problems of the poor I automatically disbelieve. Her career has been built on telling people not to worry about the poor. For example, ““it’s all too common for well-meaning middle class people to think that if the poor just had the same stuff we do, they wouldn’t be poor any more (where “stuff” includes anything from a college education to a marriage license to a home). But this is not true.” Poor people are poor because they make bad life decisions, period, end of statement — she respects poor people too much to say they’re at the mercy of outside forces. Like say, rich people giving jobs to less talented friends and family — something she supports. Who cares about equality of opportunity? And sure, Scandinavian countries may take care of your education and health needs but you can’t afford servants — who’d want to live like that?

She defends restaurants making false claims they sell locally sourced food. She argues that Hobby Lobby refusing to let employee health insurance cover contraceptives is no more unreasonable than not buying employees a car (she’s wrong. See at the link). And that the number of under-age girls needing abortion is so small denying them is no big deal (this is a common right-wing argument, I’ll note). Besides, only rich women with white-collar careers care about abortion, not working-class women!

When it comes to discussions of how to help the poor, she is not likely to be say anything worthwhile. Of coursse, few other Republicans are any better, whether it’s Fox pundit Mark Levin comparing the UAW head to Mussolini (“Making demands, making threats, trying to bully.”) or presidential candidate Tim Scott saying workers don’t have the right to strike.