From the insightful Natasha at Pacific Views, writing on the recent attempt by four congressman to live on the typical food stamp allotment:

Someone once said that the poor would always be with us. It’s probably true. Some people just aren’t very good at capitalism. Some people don’t know how to make powerful friends and grease the system or rig it in their favor. Some people can work hard all day at something they’re good at and that people need done, but just never manage to earn very much. And then they have to go shop for food like everybody else and very often, they have to make do with the leftovers that the rest of us wouldn’t eat on our brokest days.

It’s not a moral failing to be bad at capitalism, because it’s not a moral system. It isn’t immoral, either. It’s just a system, a game. Like chess, poker, or Monopoly. It’s a good game for distributing resources efficiently, but if it was the ultimate arbiter of personal worth, then it would be the near-saintly among us who’d be rich and the near-demonic who were poor. And everybody knows, if they think about it at all seriously, that this just isn’t the way things are. It’s why we don’t call the Great Depression the Era Of Complete Moral Breakdown Among The Untermenschen. [...]

As John Ikerd notes in Sustainable Capitalism, the statement that “all men are created equal” is a moral proposition. The document in which it’s included says unambiguously that we should all have equal access to the blessings of liberty and justice, while our moral journey as a nation has been to expand our conception of “all men” farther and farther past its original meaning of ‘all white, male property owners.’ However, the market doesn’t and can’t treat all people as equal. That’s explicitly not the point of a capitalist economy. And that’s why we have a democratic government, to express the moral and collective will of a nation’s citizenry in cases where our individual efforts just aren’t going to cut it.

If a society’s sense of right and wrong isn’t twitched by hunger or malnourishment, are the poor really the ones with the serious moral failings?