Poverty – “It is a theft of freedom”

From RedState:

Poverty, even the comparatively milder version we have in the United States, is an intolerable state. Intolerable not for lack of having iPhones or Mercedes; it is middle-class sensibility that perceives the envy from poverty to be a desire to possess. But it is not the having-not that stabs at the heart of the have-nots. It is life made intolerable not by absence of things but by the absence of liberty. The impoverished do not have liberty in the same way that others do. Liberty to drive to the store; liberty to purchase food. Poverty is a burden of chains, weighing down the soul. It is a theft of freedom. The impoverished are enslaved, not in a conventional sense, but bound nevertheless. It is a state of being that we who love our God wish upon no man or woman. It is a bondage from which we strive to free others through good deeds, charity, and assistance. Poverty is no mere lack of money, it is often a lack of access, of mobility, of safety, and of order; and an attendant abundance of shame, fear, and pain. Poverty is a scourge…

…Poverty is a cell in which you are deprived of your liberty. Poverty of thinking is the prison that keeps those cells shut, guarded under lock and key, free from the prying light of other ideas. Our war must be on the latter if ever there is to be true relief for the former.

- Caleb Howe

Read the entire thing – it puts the idea of Poverty into another light, another view. And some of the ideas are well worth thinking about – how the Left thinks about Poverty and tries to solve the problem vs we on the Right.