Consider an 8-year-old boy in a small farm in Missouri born into a struggling family that is so destitute it can no longer afford to buy him clothes. In order to provide for himself, the boy is forced to make ends meet by finding work at a young age. After several years of this, he can look forward to a minimum-wage job at a local facility.
Contrast this with the story of the rich owner of a retail empire spanning thousands of stores across the nation. This corporate executive and businessman is a millionaire many times over — one of the wealthiest people in the country. Directing thousands of employees and enjoying vast amounts of investment capital, the cost of his next pair of shoes is the furthest thing from his mind.
In today’s political climate, it is easy to think of ways these two stories could be used. The media could use them to highlight the growing “income gap” in America and show calculations of how many years of the poor youth’s salary the rich CEO earns in one day. A Democratic candidate might represent the boy and the man as opposite citizens of the “Two Americas,” a term meant to capture the country’s two classes — one that is “set for life” and the other doomed to live “paycheck to paycheck.” A sociology professor might offer the man as someone born into “privilege” and the boy as someone cursed to a “cycle of poverty.”
All these conclusions would be wrong. In fact, the impoverished boy and the prosperous man are the same person – James Cash Penney, founder of the department store chain JCPenney. He is just one of countless people who have defied their humble beginnings to achieve spectacular successes.
But their stories are ignored by those who still attempt to spread the idea of economic determinism – the theory that one’s financial status at birth determines his life path. To the economic determinist, poverty is a “curse” beyond a person’s control, not a temporary condition to be solved by effort and determination.
Society is thus divided into the “haves” and the “have-nots,” and one’s membership is decided in the delivery room. This is a theory of many who do not want to explore poverty beyond the ÔcausesÕ created by Ôthe systemÕ.
This view does not allow for the American Dream, and instead encourages the belief that individuals cannot help themselves. The virtues of determination, hard work, responsibility and self reliance are dismissed as irrelevant to one’s financial success. Finances have been glorified at the expense of values.
The idea that personal decisions are paramount is replaced with the conviction that the course of one’s life is subject to forces beyond his or her control.
To the extent that one accepts this outlook, poverty does become an inescapable trap, a self-imposed one. If your goal were to break this “cycle of poverty,” why not offer the lives of those like Penney who overcame early hardship to build their fortunes? It was Penney who once said, “I would never have amounted to anything were it not for adversity.”
Instead, successful people, and especially businessmen like Penney, are often cast by the left and the media as corrupt and immoral. Business leaders are constantly accused of “corporate greed” and portrayed as “fat cats” who are motivated solely by a supposedly evil “profit motive.”
Corporations are often characterized as “faceless” entities responsible for all the world’s ills.
A poor youth like J. C. Penney is to be pitied while his subsequent corporate wealth is to be despised. As a consequence of their adherence to the flawed theory of economic determinism, the same people who urge a war on poverty simultaneously conduct a war on the wealthy.
This contradiction needs to be resolved if poverty is ever to be eradicated. Wealth and the profit motive must not be viewed so negatively. Most importantly, leaders like J. C. Penney should not be chastised or ignored, but rather admired and emulated for achieving the American Dream against all odds.
E-mail Amy at viewpoint@technicianonline.com.
