Ep. 148: Does the Left hate the poor? Are Charles Murray and Michel Foucault right?

The Mindcrime Liberty Show discusses whether Charles Murray and Michel Foucault are right that the left hates the poor? Murray and Foucault are two intellectuals whom some might categorize as being at opposite purposes, they are in fact both critical of the modern managerial welfare state. When the modern left speaks of helping the poor arguably they are “warehousing” the poor by providing them a steady dose of just enough necessities which thereby creates dependency on the state.

Are those dependent on the state likely to criticize, let alone overthrow it? Welfare robs the poor of what Murray would call agency while also demobilizing them. Certain thinkers who at times are associated with the “right” have in the past defended welfare precisely on the grounds to co-op/prevent the revolution. The revolutionary left should appreciate this argument, which is arguably Foucault's leftwing part, by saying that warehoused poor won’t make very effective elite revolutionaries. Murray of course would make the point in coming apart and losing ground that undisciplined and unskilled persons aren’t exactly “flourishing.” Murray himself states that he first recognized this in a rather anthropological manner by working for the peace corp seeing how academics treated the so called “natives.” In this manner Foucault and Murray might be much closer than some think. As the classic aphorism states, if you give a man a fish he isn’t hungry for a day, but teach a man to fish he won't be hungry for a lifetime.