认为大多数穷人宁愿要福利而不愿要一个好的工作？或者认为那些商人——公司执行官们，那些时代的重要角色真的因为工资不当而游手好闲，虚度光阴？这简直是对美国商人、一个显而易见的勤劳工作者的难以置信的可耻的指控。信念可以是真理的仆人——但更多的情况下，只是一时之需。??
17. 第四种使我们不为穷人的存在而内疚的方案是指明如果政府替穷人承担责任，可能会对自由产生不利的影响。自由包括人们自己选择花钱的最大量的权利以及允许政府拿走并花掉自己钱最少量的权利。（强调一下，花在国防上的钱除外。）正如弥尔顿?佛里德曼教授那句久为流传的名言，人们应该―自由选择‖。??
18. 这一方案中有一点是最明显的：穷人的自由和收入之间的关系没有人关注。（佛里德曼教授这里提出了反驳，他认为可以通过一些消极的税收来保证每个人的最低收入。）我们完全可以同意，没有哪一种形式比身无分文更厉害，也没用哪种对思想和行动的束缚比一无所有更全面彻底。尽管我们听到很多关于税收造成的收入减少给富人的自由权利带来种种限制，却没听说穷人多交出钱来能增加一些自由的权利。实际上富人税收是去的自由与穷人交出收入所应该得到却没有得到的自由相比实在是件微不足道的小事。我们珍惜自由是对的，正因为珍惜自由，我们才不能以此为借口，不给最需要自由的人自由。??
19. 最终，当一切办法都无济于事的时候，我们就干脆装聋作哑。对于不愉快的事情视而不见或不去想是我们普遍存在的心理倾向。正因为如此，我们才能对死亡视而不见；我们也才能不去考虑武器的种类及其将带来可能导致全部灭亡的混乱。由于同样的心理倾向我们也拒绝去考虑穷人的存在。不管他们生活在埃塞俄比亚，还是在纽约市的南部朗克斯区，甚至是洛杉矶这样的天堂，我们都决心不去为这些人操心。我们总是被建议去想愉快的事情。??
20. 这是几种躲避关心穷人的方案。除了最后一种，所有这些卓越的传统都是用来结束我们探索如何不对我们的穷人同胞内疚的历程。都来自本瑟姆、马尔萨斯、斯宾塞、罗纳德?里根及他们的后继者们的发明。所以心理学家聚集在华盛顿宣告：乔治?吉尔德，近代最有特权的人物，他极力赞许穷人应该承受一定的痛苦，只有如此他们才能受到激励而努力改变现状；他的极力拥护者查尔斯?默里也声称：―废除一切工人阶级和老人的政府福利和收入保障措施，包括对有未成年子女家庭的补助、医疗照顾、食品券、失业保险、工人失业保险金、住房补贴及伤残保险和所有其他的一切。这是一堆解不开的疙瘩，只能快刀斩乱麻，统统取消。‖按照救济的先后原则，生存者应该是经过挑选的有价值的人；其他人的灭亡是我们必须付出的代价。默里是斯宾塞在我们这一时代的代言人，如上所说，他在华盛顿高层中享有无比的威望。??
21. 同情心，加上与之相关的社会努力是我们这个时代最麻烦、最
令人不快的行为和行动方针。但是它仍然是与我们整个文明生活相符的唯一方针。而且最终，这无疑是最保守的路线。这并不是自相矛盾。对文明的不满和所带来的结果并不来自那些满足的人——这点很明显。为了能达到我们尽可能广泛地满足的程度，我们将保持并扩大社会和政治的平静，这是保守者最渴望的。
How to Get the Poor off Our Conscience
John Kenneth Galbraith
1. I would like to reflect on one of the oldest of human exercises, the process by which over the years, and indeed over the centuries, we have undertaken to get the poor off our conscience.
2. Rich and poor have lived together, always uncomfortably and sometimes perilously, since the beginning of time. Plutarch was led to say: ―An imbalance between the rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of republics.‖ And the problems that arise from the continuing co-existence of affluence and poverty–and particularly the process by which good fortune is justified in the presence of the ill fortune of others — have been an intellectual preoccupation for centuries. They continue to be so in our own time.
3. One begins with the solution proposed in the Bible: the poor suffer in this world but are wonderfully rewarded in the next. The poverty is a temporary misfortune; if they are poor and
also meek they eventually will inherit the earth. This is, in some ways, an admirable solution. It allows the rich to enjoy their wealth while envying the poor their future fortune. [Harry Crews’s ―Pages from the Life of a Georgia Innocent‖ discusses the romanticizing of poverty.]
4. Much, much later, in the twenty or thirty years following the publication in 1776 of The Wealth of Nations–the late dawn of the Industrial Revolution in Britain–the problem and its solution began to take on their modern form. Jeremy Bentham, a near contemporary of Adam Smith, came up with the formula that for perhaps fifty years was extraordinarily influential in British and, to some degree, American thought. This was utilitarianism. ―By the principle of utility,‖ Bentham said in 1789, ―is meant the principal which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question.‖ Virtue is, indeed must be, self-centered. While there were people with great good fortune and many more with great ill fortune, the social problem was solved as long as, again in Bentham’s words, there was ―the greatest good for the greatest number.‖ Society did its best for the largest possible number of people; one accepted that the result might be sadly unpleasant for the
many whose happiness was not served.
5. In the 1830’s a new formula, influential in no slight degree to this day, became available for getting the poor off the public conscience. This is associated with the names of David Ricardo, a stockbroker, and Thomas Robert Malthus, a divine. The essentials are familiar: the poverty of the poor was the fault of the poor. And it was so because it was a product of their excessive fecundity: their grievously uncontrolled lust caused them to breed up to the full limits of the available subsistence.
6. This was Malthusianism. Poverty being caused in the bed meant that the rich were not responsible for either its creation or its amelioration. However, Malthus was himself not without a certain feeling of responsibility: he urged that the marriage ceremony contain a warning against undue and irresponsible sexual intercourse–a warning, it is fair to say, that has not been accepted as a fully effective method of birth control. In more recent times, Ronald Reagan has said that the best form of population control emerges from the market. (Couples in love should repair to R. H. Macy’s, not their bedrooms.) Malthus, it must be said, was at least as relevant. 7. By the middle of the nineteenth century, a new form of denial achieved great influence, especially in the United States. The