Quite amazingly our one person social justice think tank, Polly Toynbee, manages to connect Labour’s prospects in the next election with the tsunami in Asia. Apparently we’re all completely devoid of altruism and this is what connects our ignorance of those who have died and those who are suffering around the Indian Ocean with the necessity of electing Nu Labour once again so that they can bring social justice to this benighted land.
Yes, well, 30 million quid pledged by the general populace is of course proof that we do not care for our fellow humans, planes already landed with equipment, supplies, support, in the affected areas, paid for by said private efforts, show that we are indifferent to the sufferings of our fellow humans. Well, of course they do, don’t they?

All previous experience
suggests too little help will be promised and even less given. A year
ago response to the Bam earthquake offered a new openness with Iran:
but the non-arrival of pledged cash only added to suspicion of the
wicked west.

Err, which money was it that didn’t arrive? That given by individuals? That collected by charities? Where’s the investigation into this then eh? Where’s Baroness Nicholson accusing bumptious novelists of stealing it? Ah, didn’t quite happen that way did it. What didn’t turn up was the money promised by Governments, co-ordinated by the UN perhaps? Yes, quite, and argument in favour of the State doing things is it not?

On debt and trade Labour
has done well, but it is difficult to believe great strides will be
taken in redistributing power and wealth in a world in which economic
and intellectual forces are pushing in the wrong direction and the
wealth gap widens.

For the Lord’s sake Polly, get a grip will you? Wealth is not something to redistribute. It’s something to create. A few basic baby steps in economics for you. We are not rich because they are poor. They are not poor because we are rich. It is possible for entire nations to rise out of poverty. We did it a few hundred years ago, in relative terms, and have been doing so in absolute terms ever since. S. Korea and Hong Kong have done it in the past 50 years. China and India appear to be doing it right now. Please note, taking the Chinese example, that they becoming wealthy (which they are on any historical comparison) has not meant that we have become less so. Far from it, the industrialisation which is enriching them is enriching us as well.

Please, get it into your head. Wealth is not something to redistribute, it is something to create. Fortunately we know how to do that……and those of us who refuse to follow the policy prescriptions that do that are guilty of enforcing and maintaining poverty. Yes, that means you. Wittering on about social justice when there are starving people in the world is morally obtuse. Let’s get everyone rich first shall we? Property rights, sanctity of contract, free speech, freedom of association, capitalism, globalisation, free trade….yes, those very matters that you consider beneath you, less important than whether children get State funded child-care, these are the things that will bring our fellow humans out of their destitution.

A number of people have written on such subjects, Milton Friedman, Peter Bauer, Hernando de Soto….I’m sure the London Library has a few copies tucked away on the dusty back shelves. Do yourself (and the poor) a favour and try and read some. Yes, the level of absolute poverty in the world is shameful, a reproof to us comfortable westerners and a fact that we should be striving mightily to correct. It would help though if we actually strove to correct poverty by stopping people from being poor rather than make ourselves poorer so as to reduce the gap.

"Charity begins at home"
is the mean-minded dictum of the right, unwilling to spend on
foreigners, unwilling to spend on those outside the family fortress at
home, either.

Y’know, I’d never really thought of it that way. I as a rightist am unwilling to spend on foreigners. Must be why I used to employ 25 Russian students, essentially paying their way through University in Moscow, in return for two hours a day of their time. Must be why there are currently four Kazakhs, five Muscovites  and one Englishman gainfully employed in bringing bright light bulbs to the world. Must be why I’m angling for $4 million in capital to employ a further 20 odd Kazakhs to bring cheaper jet engines to the world (by, I would note, recycling some toxic sludge).
Sheesh. Us foul capitalists are, contrary to your perverted worldview, the most international people on the planet. It is precisely us (although on a very small scale for myself of course) who do more for those in poor lands than anyone else.

Can America be anything
but unjust in dealing with foreigners when it cares so little about the
third world poverty within its own borders?

Honeybun….America does not have Third World poverty within its borders. Let’s take an oft quoted number, that of $2 a day, as the definition of real, gross, absolute poverty. Are you seriously trying to suggest that there is anyone, anyone at all, the most screwed up, mentally ill, drug addicted homeless person, anywhere in the US, living on $2 a day?

No?
Care to rephrase yourself then?

What I think you mean is that the gap between the rich and the poor in the US is similar in range to that in certain Third World countries. It may well be but the Federal poverty line is $18,000 a year for a family of four. Such a family (that income is around 60 hours a week at minimum wage…or a job and a half in the family) is, I agree, a low sum. That’s why it gets topped up with some $11/$12 k in tax credits, aid and other benefits.
A nice example of the perils of relying upon statistics about relative poverty rather than absolute.

But what does Labour mean
by "ordinary" people when only 5% of estates reach the £263,000
threshold? Virtually all inheritance tax is levied on those with
shares: it is a rich man’s tax.

Gosh, really? You must have missed the fact that the rich don’t pay inheritance tax. Shares on AIM do not. Farms do not. Family owned businesses do not. Business assets do not. Houses do. Hey, what’s the value of a house in London these days? What’s the value of your house? Put it in a trust yet? Or leaving your kids to pay the 40% when you pop your clogs?

Optimism is the great
progressive virtue: things can and must get better; hope is the great
political energiser. Pessimism is the conservative state of mind: fear
all change, self-interest is the only reliable human motivator.

I’ll agree that optimism is a progressive virtue, and am happy to call myself a progressive, for I both hope that things can get better and know how this could be done. Self-interest as the only reliable human motivator is precisely right. That economic system that we stumbled upon a couple of centuries back, after however many hundreds of thousands of years of  our species’ existence, that capitalism, that very thing that made us rich. Hey, it’s the only thing we’ve ever found that does make people rich so why not, if you truly are motivated by a concern for the poor, advocate more of it?

Suppose social justice is much more important eh?

Update. Now that’s interesting. Emailed the link to Polly, can see from the logs that she’s read it. Will she respond?