Who cares how "deserving" the poor are?

Noah gets cheezed off slightly at the upcoming "Deserve to be poor" debate, asking, "Who cares how "deserving" the poor are?

Regarding the first of my questions, "Do we want to make poor people less poor", it may be that your sense of morality tells you that if someone is in a condition as a direct result of their own actions, it would be wrong to try to remove that person from that condition. Fine, good for you! But for my part, I often simply don't care. If I am getting mugged by a poor person, I quite frankly do not give a rodent's gluteal region whether that person is poor because he made bad life choices or because the circumstances of his birth made his poverty inevitable; I want him to stop mugging me, and if making him less poor will make him stop mugging me, then maybe this would be a good thing to do, regardless of whether he "deserves" it. When I witness the urban blight, violence, drug abuse, and other social ills that poverty may be causing, as a non-poor person I have an interest in preventing these things from affecting me, regardless of whether they are "deserved."

Also, whether people are poor because of their own actions doesn't really tell us how to get them out of poverty. Scolding and finger-wagging does not work. Just because a person's actions got him into a situation doesn't mean that his actions can get him out of it. And even if poor people could raise themselves up out of poverty at any time, scolding and finger-wagging is not likely to induce them to suddenly do so. The conservative solution to poverty - make it really, really unpleasant to be poor, and then hope people will do the smart thing and avoid it - has failed and failed and failed again.

So from my point of view, asking whether or not poor people "deserve" their poverty is asking the wrong question.

That said, I think the Caplan definition of "deserve" is not as "uncontroversial" a moral premise as Caplan declares. The reason is that it is a partial-equilibrium definition, not a general-equilibrium one. If we live in a society in which X percent of the populace must be poor, then no matter what set of actions is taken by the population, some people will wind up in poverty. To see this, imagine that we lived in a society in which the hardest-working 50% of people get to be spectacularly rich, and the other 50% are forced to live in squalid poverty. In this society, if everyone raises their effort by 1000%, the number of people in poverty stays exactly the same. I doubt that most people would say that the lower half of the population "deserved" to stay in poverty after raising their effort by 1000%! But that is exactly what Caplan's definition implies.

But anyway, that is a bit beside the point, because in my opinion the whole question is a bit of a pointless one.

All fairly accurate.  I think he misses one point though - I don't think most conservatives actually believe the 'make it really really unpleasant to be poor' option, its just something that keeps the buzz going, a-la Fannie, Freddie, and Chewbacca. To quote

The rest are just Bullshitting. That is, they don’t really care what the truth is one way or the other. This is just a way to gesture in the general direction of the federal government and say Urrhh!!!