Laissez-faire economics show disdain for poor

I read with interest two recent letters to the Herald by Mike Hopkins (June 6) and Gene Maril (June 8). Better examples of the smug superciliousness some rich people exhibit when they discuss problems experienced by poor people couldn't have been written more scathingly by an Upton Sinclair or a Charles Dickens.

Can't those who agree with these writers see the blistering contempt for vast numbers of their less-fortunate fellow Americans that these sentiments ooze? We don't often see such open worship of the laissez-faire economist's cruel mantra, "labor must be market driven." It was painful to read these self-satisfied admonitions to the desperate minimum-wage poor: - "Live within your economic means."

- "Become a doctor or lawyer or CEO of a giant corporation."

- "Get an additional part-time job [or two]."

- "They have no bread? Let them eat cake. Ha ha." (No, that's a quote from their companion in haughty disdain, Marie Antoinette.)

These are callous instructions to the poor, by the economically comfortable, to millions of single mothers and their children who are struggling to survive day to day.

Such admonitions not only are devoid of humanity, they ridicule humanity.

As they were being carted in the tumbrels toward the guillotine, the haughty French aristocrats who brought about their own Revolution were no doubt still asking themselves, "Why can't our poor just learn to live within their means?"

Norm Haughness

Tehachapi, California