There are SOME free market ideologues who believe that unrestrained corporations will enrich the poor, however I believe they are in the minority. You may be one of them.
The majority of libertarians believe that individual property rights are sacrosanct and that it is wrong to forcibly redistribute wealth to prevent poverty, hunger, suffering. This is the argument of the Tea Party to my knowledge. Am I wrong?
Right now the excess wealth is in the hands of the rich, especially the top one-tenth-of-one-percent (0.1%). Society is presented with a choice: (a) we can take it from them and redistribute it to the bottom 80%, or (b) we can let them keep it and allow people to suffer.
(a) is a moral statement, that the poverty of the poor trumps the property rights of the rich.
(b) is a moral statement, that the property rights of the rich trump the poverty of the poor.
Almost all proposed actions in this situation amount to either (a) or (b). The wealth of society can increase over time, but at any single point in time it is a fixed quantity whose distribution is intimately related to whether poor people exist or not.
Assuming one does believe (a), and also believes that our current level of redistribution is lower than X, it still does not follow that we need to redistribute from the rich. We could also redistribute from politically connected insiders (e.g., teachers unions, the military, real estate speculators) to the poor.
Your dichotomy of helping the poor also excludes a third possibility:
(c) Some of the poor are deserving of assistance, and some are undeserving. It is morally right to redistribute to the deserving poor, and morally wrong to redistribute to the undeserving.
(I tend to favor policies which automatically make the deserving/undeserving distinction. E.g., eliminate welfare/unemployment and replace them with unpleasant, low skill government jobs that pay welfare-like wages. Poor people willing to work get the benefits and those unwilling to work do not.)
There are ALWAYS more assumptions available to be challenged. Plenty in your post for instance. Turtles (assumptions) all the way down.
For instance, if the goal is to reduce poverty, you assume that it is mathematically possibly to take money from teachers. But if teachers are already on the brink of poverty, that won't work to reduce poverty. You're creating new poverty cases as you solve old ones.
Politically connected insiders are less relevant than those who actually have the majority of the money. It's not teachers, and it's not unions. It's software entrepreneurs, MBAs, and oligopolists. They have the far majority.
That's not an assumption, it's a simple fact.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=teacher+salary
Teacher wages are not even close to poverty, and they get lots of non-wage compensation which costs real money (not to mention they only work 9 months/year).
Politically connected insiders are less relevant than those who actually have the majority of the money.
On the contrary, the existence of politically connected insiders mooching off the system is evidence that we can provide more assistance to the poor without raising taxes.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=income+inequality+in+america
That puts them well below the mark where they'd need to be to be to place in the top X% (10-30, depending on what study you use) that own 80% of American wealth. If you believe that shuffling around the remaining 20% will work, more power to you. But I'd have to disagree.
I will, however, agree that politically connected insiders mooching off the system is DEFINITELY an issue in the US. I would just point to Corporations and the Rich in place of Teachers on your list.
The fact that teachers may receive average pay for below average work does not put them at the "brink of poverty".
As for finding the insiders, follow the money. Teachers and old people are some of the biggest recipients of government money.
"we can let them keep it and allow people to suffer."
Using your feelings to guide your monetary policy decisions is no better than the creationists forcing ID to be taught in schools. If your hunch is that a Keynesian approach is ideal, cool. Many would agree. But choosing it because it's the obvious "moral" choice just dumbs down the whole debate, opens the door to all sorts of emotional reactionary ignorance, and doesn't get us any closer to the right answer.
Questions like "is better aggregate economic growth a justification for disproportionate tax increases for these people?" or "if the bottom percentile are hungry, should feeding them take precedence over growth objectives?" are inherently moral
If I may say so, that is a rather refreshingly humble statement for an economist to make.
Of course the government is not the only actor that can, or should, address moral problems.
As I understand libertarianism, they are not at all against solving issues of poverty or hunger. But they do believe that the government is not necessarily the best solution to every problem. Of course that statement should be obvious, as government tends to be less efficient and more watered down than other organizations. So the question is in the details.
When the government gives poor single moms peanut butter to make sure that her kids have protein to eat, that gets measured, and we can perform efficacy studies on it. When the government gives housing stipends to poor families so that they have a home to live in, we can measure that too.
If the enormous segment of the population that doesn't believe the government should be helping the poor is initiating some kind of private action that has broad, measurable effects on the plight of the poor, I would be delighted to hear about it. If not, then this claim that some other action should be taken kind of seems like a red herring in the discussion, because that means that the only practical options on the table are for the government to do something or for the government to not do something.
Today, helping the poor largely means lobbying for more spending for some program.
The reason that the government should provide this welfare service, however, is that it results in an incredibly desirable situation where any citizen of the United States would know that, no matter what the state of the (semi-)unregulated economy, it is guaranteed that they will be taken care of.
Were welfare left to the emergent logic of the market, somebody who, say, depends on medication to fight a chronic condition or somebody who cannot for some reason hold a job reliably (like my pan-handler friend who can't get a job because of his face tattoo and rotting teeth) would not be able to count on being able to survive should there be a severe economic depression or a war.
To live in a society where somebody who depends on an external institution to them to keep them alive cannot absolutely depend on that regardless of the economic climate is, in my opinion, uncivilized, and for such a person, downright hellish.
If you could convince me that the market is more reliable over time than the US government, then by all means, I might consider the dismantling of the welfare state a viable option.
I don't see it desirable to disconnect causes from consequences. Quite the opposite. Society functions best when people are very aware that their choices have consequences and when they choose to act in ways that produce good consequences. In fact, individual responsibility is essential to civilization. Society would just fall apart if more than a few percent of people began acting irresponsibly.
For example, America has a problem with education. There are a lot of children not learning despite a lot of money being spent. I think a root cause of the problem is students knowing that nothing bad will happen to them if they don't work hard in school. If all the unmotivated students would be put to work for a few weeks in picking crops, with the promise that this will be their lot in life if they don't learn, I suspect the education problem would solve itself quickly.
We live in a world where it is possible to be tremendously productive and wealthy. But it is still necessary to labor and be disciplined to achieve wealth.
Retirement, doing nothing productive knowing that you will still be able to eat tomorrow, should be the reward of years of diligent work, not the entitlement of the lazy who want to benefit from the toil of others without contributing.
Except this wouldn't work for the kids of rich parents who wouldn't have to worry about that actually being their lot in life. Also people can say "fuck that" & go to a life of crime. This also assumes that our agriculture sector would even want these legal workers who they'd have to provide at least minimum wage to.
While it might not be your view, the notion that the poor "deserve their lot" and even that their being poor is the Will of God (evangelical prosperity theology) is literally a mainstream conservative position.
If this doesn't ring a bell then you haven't actually been paying attention.
I have never met a conservative who believed that the poor "deserve their lot." And I can't think of one single conservative I know who wouldn't love to see the elimination of poverty. They just disagree with the liberal method.
If this were really the case why would conservatives donate money to charity? Why would conservative churches run food kitchens?
It's funny how people can skim through a 1200 page book and select just the parts they want to emphasize. I could go on, but I'm getting way off topic.
You've turned a political disagreement about the methods to accomplish some desirable goal do so into a moral argument. You've decided that if I think there is a better way to elevate the poor than your way, I must want them to stay poor and thus must be evil.
Why do you feel you need to frame the argument as such?