Loves them just the way they are

Potato Eaters, by Albert de Vos. From Tim Harrison's blog.

Whoever said that "God must love the common folk—he made so many of them" (Dr. Google seems to be stumped on this one, with a pretty big majority going for Abraham Lincoln, but not one of them citing a source) was being snarky, but the panelists on Fox News's The Five were being something else yesterday; they said in effect that liberals must hate the poor because they are attempting to exterminate them—as ThinkProgress reports it, [jump]

that contraception is really [a] scheme of the left to eliminate poor people. Often-sarcastic co-host Greg Gutfeld first floated the idea, saying, “it’s more about getting rid of the poor.” “The right want the poor to get rich, the left want the poor not to exist,” he added. “It’s not a bad point,” former Bush Press Secretary Dana Perino chimed in. Co-host Andrea Tantaros added, “Yeah, population control.” “Did you really just say that?” liberal co-host Bob Beckel responded flabbergasted.

They were revealing more about themselves, I'd say, than they realized.

Obviously the traditional left favors there being fewer poor people. If the right really "want the poor to get rich" that'll do the trick a lot faster than family planning—all you have to do is give us a lot of money! But that would mean they want the poor not to exist too, right?

And then it would be redistribution and socialism and the wrong way. The right way to get rich would be by being a risk-taking entrepreneurial job creator, and then if everybody's rich who's going to take the jobs? So I guess they just want a few poor people to get rich.

The right doesn't want poor people not to exist. It loves poor people, and it loves them best in quantity, because they are the reserve army of the unemployed, who exist to keep a downward pressure on wages. And they hate cheaply available birth control because poor people with smaller families are more likely to stop being poor and to escape from some of that overwhelming love.*

During the Reform and Opening Up period in China after the Cultural Revolution, and then in Russia during the Yeltsin reign, I often thought that the successful fledgling capitalists, having been carefully raised by committed Communists to regard the acquisition of capital as evil behavior and a crime against suffering humanity, were the ones who got the wrong idea when their governments started encouraging them to acquire capital—they thought it meant they were supposed to start being evil and criminal, and leapt uncomplainingly in.

But when our own cheerleaders for capitalism insist on behaving like Marxist caricatures, it makes me think that Marx knew what he was talking about when he wrote about the ideology of the bourgeoisie as something strictly controlled by their class interests.

As for me, you bet I don't want poor people to exist. They don't have to be rich, either; I just want them to have decent jobs. With benefits. And health care. Including family planning.

*They love undocumented immigrants, too, which is why they're against amnesty—"Please, my darling illegal alien, never change!"