Maid: Bad choices -- not bad policies -- create poverty

Poverty is most often the result of poor choices, not of capitalism. In fact, capitalism has been the greatest eradicator of poverty the world has ever known, as the percent of the world's people living in poverty took a precipitous decline over the past two hundred years, from over 90% of people in poverty in the early nineteenth century, to about ten percent in the early twenty-first century, at least before progressive pandemic policies pushed tens of millions back into poverty, along with perhaps forty million people in Afghanistan after the Biden administration abandoned them.

After the popular yet grossly misinterpreted Squid Game, covered earlier, there seems to be no end to the capacity for progressives to use entertaining (and often dishonest) media as inappropriate allegories for life today. In Squid Game, the claim is that the 'game' is an incisive, brilliant indictment of the inherent evil of the competitive elements of capitalism. Just as ludicrous as this analysis is the interpretation from the Left of the other very popular -- and much more realistic -- Netflix show, Maid.

Much like the also popular (and used by Loyola to 'educate' students into wokeness before the word had even emerged) yet loathsome and disingenuous, Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed ("the revealing, compelling, and widely acclaimed"), Maid the series is based on a telling of a personal story. Only the book, Maid, is ostensibly based on an honest telling of one woman's real struggle with single parenthood, Nickel and Dimed is based on a journalist's faux effort to pretend to be poor.

Ehrenreich created her own, personal hell -- temporarily, and for her own purposes -- to 'prove' how tough it is to get by in America. That hell consisted of a combination of wholly unrealistic assumptions and limitations as to how people traverse the economic landscape in this country, including those who climb out of poverty, and not by government aid (which works only if the person becomes permanently dependent on that aid) yet rather by pursuing the American Dream by making good choices, working hard, and relying on a personal social support system.

As heart-wrenchingly enjoyable Maid is, to attribute the heroine's troubles to the evils of capitalism and government bureaucracy is to miss the real points completely. And that is the self-perpetuating cycle of poverty produced by people making bad decisions and then expecting to find an escape clause provided courtesy of a munificent and all-knowing government, funded by the labors of others. Just as Squid Game is about the zero-sum nature of contrived games, Maid is about the zero-sum nature of making a bad decision and then compounding it with one bad decision after another, taking the person down a very dark rabbit hole, all the time blaming capitalism, an uncaring government, and never stopping to do a reality check.

Don't get me wrong. There is a time and place to intervene in these bad decisions, to provide assistance to people who -- "through no fault of their own" -- have fallen on hard times. But this assistance must come with a caveat, and that is that the aid is temporary and that the solution is inside the person, not inside a government bureaucracy.

For years, reality, not just rhetoric has shown that the escape to or prevention of poverty most often comes down to basic, critical choices, including choosing to have sex outside of marriage, choosing to abuse drugs, choosing to drop out of (high) school, doing a poor job of choosing a spouse or significant, choosing to pass on the low-paid, entry-level job (appropriate to people with entry-level skills or no skills at all), choosing leisure over persistence at work or resilience in living, and in choosing short-run consumption over long-term investment.

The reason the rich get richer faster than do the poor is that the rich choose savings and investment over consumption. They live within their means, meaning they spend less than they earn. They develop social support networks. They find and pursue legitimate, legal opportunities. They exhibit personal responsibility in their diet, their lifestyle, their sexual practices. They usually have a strong faith element in their lives, along with gratitude for what they have, and acceptance of personal responsibility for their own fortunes and, critically so, for their spouse and children. Intact, functioning, 'traditional' families remain the basic, essential economic unit, the cornerstone of society and the economy. Contrary to Hillary Clinton's infamous, "It takes a village" meme, it actually takes a person taking personal responsibility to learn and produce, and then to pass those values, tools and lessons to the next generation, starting in the home, and not in the village square.