Riley S. Faelan@theynege But #PovertyEnforcement hasn't done its job if you don't feel the pain of poverty!
@AnarchoNinaAnalyzes The word for "The government will take away your money!" is #PovertyEnforcement .
@karlauerbach Right-wingers have been making a lot of stupid hype about "shoplifting gangs" recently.
As you know, excessive hype can be infectious, and sometimes, when you're minding your own business, perhaps shopping while tired, you might hallucinate a poor, starving person, suffering from right-wing policies on #PovertyEnforcement, seeming like they're stealing some food from a shop. Brains are imperfect that way.
So now that you know how to reality-test such apparitions, you can confidently dismiss them as mistaken hallucinations, and refrain from contributing to further demonisation of any poor person that might otherwise ensue.
@woozle Btw, speaking of stability — these hierarchies have been known to be relatively stable in societies that bind their zillionaires to some form of la noblesse oblige. In feudal and proto-feudal systems, a crucial component has been the zillionaires taking pride in having large numbers of retainers on payroll. In non-feudal systems, zillionaires offering food aid or significant alms to the poor seems to have been it. In pre-urban non-feudal systems with reduced food scarcity, the food aid tends to take the form of regular lavish parties (but preferably not like the one that got Nikolay II of Russia crowned) rather than direct food distribution.
In European cultures, these stabilisation mechanisms have often been tied to established churches, through various ways, and began to systematically collapse after the British adoption of the series of Poor Laws, one of the earliest modern codification of a #PovertyEnforcement regime. The Dickensian poorhouses, promulgated in 1834, are the most famous form, but if anybody tries to tell you that these were fruits of the Age of Enlightenment, point out that the toxic foundation was laid in the Poor Relief Act of 1601, widely spread to all the overseas colonies of the then rapidly growing British Empire. (And don't forget to add that Ayn Rand was a hamster and Nathaniel Branden smelt of elderberries. A lot of the sort of people who would openly argue that it's "rational" or "enlightened" to enforce poverty upon the poor people consider themselves Objectivists of some stripes.)