Comment by feoren

> the poor person in question should

So you are telling poor people how they should live their lives after all. The core point I made that set this whole thing off. It turns out this whole thing actually is an excuse to decide how poor people should live. Thank you for proving my point for me.

> So one guy (who wasn't an economist BTW) who died over 20 years ago and whose ideas have been long abandoned is your big example?

Are you kidding about being abandoned? Reaganomics has not been abandoned, it has been enshrined as the idol of American capitalism. Almost every element of the ongoing and ever-accelerating enrichening of the rich and the disenfranchisement of the disenfranchised can be traced to ideas put in place during the Reagan administration. And the guy who invents "supply side economics" and the economic policy of the United States for the next 50 decades is an economist, regardless of what his piece of paper says. There are plenty of Chairmen of the Fed that you could look at under a similar light, and they are mostly "official" economists.