Concept of Poverty

A different concept of Poverty

I think it is interesting to point out what poverty is. When, I think about poverty, I think about people who have absolute nothing. People, who cannot find food, cannot find a job or even having the skills of maintaining a job; people who don’t have a decent place to sleep or take shelter, and most important from what I got from Pogge, don’t even have any human rights. Yet, to combine the concept of poverty and having no human right, never occur to me before.
On chapter 2, Pogge talks about how the government has the power to enforce laws, but at the same time, may have little enforcement in making the lower authorities to enforce the law or prevent any moral wrongs. (60). Pogge calls this “official disrespect” where the government may enforce the legal right of citizens, however disregard the humans’ right. There some instances that the government may not even enforce the laws that its creates; thus letting criminal and human rights violations act occur. “The government needs not organized or encouraged such activities – it merely stands idly by: fails to enact law that proscribe such conduct or, if such laws are on the books, fails to enforce them effectively” (61). Thus, the concept of human rights in such a government lets a person to become poor, since there are acts being committed to violate human rights through fear, economical, and force.
The other idea that Pogge brings up is the concept of the servant or the slave. “In some of these societies, inhuman or degrading treatment of domestic servants by their employers is perfectly legal…most of the servants are ignorant of their legal rights, conviction for mistreatment are difficult if not impossible to obtain, punishments are negligible” (63). It is interesting to see that when the word poverty is mention, it is usually attach to poor people and their situation. It never seems to be about their legal or human rights. In this case with the servant, not only is the servant poor and has to work as a servant and be treated badly, but s/he cannot exercise their demand for rights for anything, with the consist fear of being jobless and worse off than s/he is now as a servant. So poverty, to me, is not only about having no food, money, job, and/or shelter, but it is also about not have the right to exercise or claim any rights; which, then, traps a person within poverty.