How Government Hurts The Poor

laliberty:

Just a few quick examples, as to elaborate on this question:

1. Minimum wage laws ostensibly exist to offer poorer workers better pay, but tend to leave the lower-skilled workers unemployed instead. ¹
2. Tariffs and tough anti-immigration laws purportedly protect American citizens – poor, lower-skilled individuals in particular – from the “unfair” competition of cheap foreigners. Instead, it drives businesses to other countries or raises prices on products, burdens which weigh much more heavily on the poor. ^{2, 3}
3. Drug prohibition is intended to help rid the streets of dangers, particularly in lower-income neighborhoods; instead, outrageous numbers of poor people are incarcerated (or worse) for non-violent activity. ^{4, 5}
4. The Welfare State, which supposedly functions as a “safety net” for individuals in unfortunate circumstances by providing them assistance (mostly financial), is not only wasteful and corrupt when run through the bureaucratic, palm-greasing sausage-factory that is the state – it also has been shown to function as an impediment in allowing the downtrodden to escape from the cycle of poverty and dependence. ^{6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12}  
5. And then there is war itself, that definitionally destructive and deadly effort, which recruits heavily in poorer communities (the military billboards and recruiting offices in the neighborhoods near me are innumerable) as a way to give poor kids an alternative to gangs and a means to pay for higher education. Yet, in too many cases, it simply offers them death. There are conflicting reports as to whether the composition of military personnel is dominated by recruits from lower-income homes, but it seems at least anecdotally evident that there is a concerted effort to “help” the poor by offering them this “opportunity.” ^{13, 14}

Put frankly: government is no friend of the poor.

Lovely and concise!

statehate: The U.S. Supreme Court has unanimously decided today to uphold citizens’ Fourth Amendement rights in the GPS tracking case which would have allowed the U.S. government to track a suspects’ cars without a warrant. The court states that the Fourth Amendement’s protection of “persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,” extends to vehicles. According to the ruling (PDF version here), a warrant is required “[w]here, as here, the government obtains information by physically intruding on a constitutionally protected area,” including a car. The case stems from a case involving the nightclub owner Antoine Jones, who was sentenced to life in prison for drug dealing before the appeals court overturned the ruling. The government had installed a GPS device on the suspect’s Jeep, which led to his later arrest. The government tracked Jones over four weeks in order as a part of its case proving Jones was distributing cocaine and storing it and money in a suburban house outside Washington D.C. In today’s ruling, five Supreme Court justices, Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Sonia Sotomayor, and Chief Justice John Roberts, agreed that attaching a GPS to a car would violate a person’s Fourth Amendment rights. The other four justices, led by Samuel Alito, agreed in the Jones judgement itself, saying that the move to attach the GPS violated Jones’ “reasonable expectations of privacy.” All judges agreed that GPS tracking should require warrants, which upheld the appeals court decision. The ruling will have a serious impact on police investigations going forward, as GPS tracking has become a common means of obtaining information on a suspect’s movements. The case had Big Brother-esque implications, however, despite the Justice Department’s argument that the government was not after “24-hour surveillance of every citizen in the U.S.” The idea that the government walk up to your driveway and plant a GPS device (originally a military technology) on your car, had left many with a feeling of unease. Even though I don’t think the justices deserve much credit for this, seeing as the correct ruling was so obvious, I was actually expecting this case to go the other way, so I’ve gotta give credit where some credit is due. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure this is one of <20 unanimous decisions by the Court since Brown v. Board of Education. That’s kind of a big deal.

Supreme Court unanimously rules search warrant needed for GPS tracking