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Comment by peisistratos | Hacker News Reader

The government and corporate America is winning the war on poverty - in preserving it, as they (somewhat) openly desire to do.

Just read Businessweek or the Wall Street Journal when unemployment falls. This is not seen as a good thing but a bad thing. I can link to dozens of examples if one can't figure out how to Google that.

That this is the case has been known for a long time - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour

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I'm not expressing any strong view on what the most influential corporate and political leaders deep-down truly desire to be the case, but it can't actually be part of any coherent economic philosophy that widespread poverty is desirable, can it?

It seems to me the requirements of any growth-based economic system must be to promote total economic productivity (which includes rewarding individuals for being competent and productive employees), whilst also distributing wealth broadly enough to enable widespread consumption of/sustained demand for companies' goods and services.

Any system that fails on either count will fail overall, no?

It's fine for unemployment to exist - for people to be seeking work but not finding it. The idiotic part is that we've structured everything so the reality is, for most people, continued unemployment leads to poverty.

As opposed to leading to prosperity? Call me crazy but that makes sense

Surely there's a middle ground where you can be unemployed and not prosperous, but also not struggling for your basic necessities?

This is the entire premise behind UBI initiatives.

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