Dale Carnegie once made the obvious point, that is not obvious to stupid people, that the only way to get people to do things is to make them want to do it. If you want sustained activity, you need sustained motivation.
You can point a gun at someone’s head–or that of someone they love–and get work out of them. The NVA regulars who terrorized the South Vietnamese countryside, extracting military service in exchange for not killing young mens families, were able to get work done. But the moment those same young men were able to, they threw them out of their villages. Supporting the natural resentment these villagers felt was the whole point and purpose of Creighton Abrams pacification strategy, which mercifully included many cases of shooting the sons of bitches outright. They richly deserved it.
Economics in large measure is the study of relative motivation. Why do people hire? Why do they work? Economics oriented in the real world understands the WIIFM principle: “What’s in it for me?” You can certainly appeal to people’s moral sensibilities, or their patriotism. But in the end you MUST appeal to something they value. Nothing is more enduring than the needs for security and safety, and those in turn are best met by making enough money for economic stability; through wealth building; through profit, in short.
There is an intrinsic difference between moral appeals “we can’t let the old go hungry”, and principles of sustainable economics.
Let us do a reductio ad absurdum. If it is morally good to take money from the present generation which we don’t have, and give it to people who paid in a fraction of what they are taking out, why not do even more of this? Rather than recognize that we can’t afford the system we have created, why not double down? After all, it is not like you can live comfortably (on your own, in a retirement home, far from the family that in past ages would have kept a room for you and cared for you) on Social Security. Why not double the payments? Would this not be morally right? Why not triple them? Why not quadruple them? Why shouldn’t every elderly person be granted $1 million dollars a year? After all, they are old, and it would comfort them.
Self evidently, this line of thought ignores economic realities. So too do those who benefit from panicking little old ladies in pursuit of economic policies that are designed in no small measure to protect political power, and NOT–categorically NOT–to actually help in a sustainable way the constituencies to which their loyalty is allegedly pledged.
Obama would actually be happy to see urban blight and misery spread. He can claim that this only proves that policies which lead to the creation of massive “poverty relief” organizations–with the massive, Democrat-voting taxpayer funded payrolls that go with them–haven’t gone far enough. Inner city blacks have been conditioned to believe that they are being helped with handouts and minimum wage laws, and can thus be tricked into supporting the very policies which ensure structural unemployment among them, and the corresponding inability for all but a few to rise above their conditions.
Poor people pay, as Thomas Sowell observed three decades ago.
What is needed is not mercy, and not compassion. What is needed is freedom. The more I learn, the more I realize that the only sustainable forms of business abuses are those sanctioned and protected by the government. We the People can sort out everything else on our own.