“Progressives” have a terrible track record of choosing policies to help the poor.
One of them is to hound out retailers who serve poorer areas as — and this is best said in high, screeching tones while adopting the most self-righteous expression one can muster — “exploiting the poor!” (You get bonus sanctity points if you can work in a Jim Crow reference.)
When successful, what’s left is a “food desert,” and the “only” solution to that is government money.
Which also has a terrible track record, and which — as Carolina Journal reported earlier this week — isn’t likely to help matters.
In short, the issue bears all the hallmarks of things progressives love:
- stopping enterprising individuals from creatively solving problems while earning money doing so (this is also known as free enterprise, the most potent poverty-fighter in history)
- making taxpayers fund the noncreative government “solution” to the problem, misdiagnosed
- putting on an expensive show of social compassion and all the implied virtue it brings (they have a “revealed preference for policies that outwardly seem beneficial but aren’t,” consistently choosing to seem rather than to be)
- leaving everyone worse off than before
