Variations on the theme of poverty

Who are the poor, and what should society do about poverty? This has been a controversial topic for centuries, but it shows no signs of going away. If we are to believe Károly Polányi, the "poor laws" in England, which date back to the 14th century, treated the poor in the same way as criminals and the mentally ill, locking them up in prison-like poorhouses until the middle to end of the 19th century, where they were forced to perform hard labor. The underlying philosophy behind poorhouses was that the poor were lazy scoundrels who needed to be punished and put to work by society. Even today's political and public thinking is not entirely free from this view of poverty. Following the American conservative thinker Charles Murray, who is otherwise very intelligent and raises many important questions, it is still fashionable today to distinguish between the poor who are "worthy of support" and those who are "unworthy of support." Some people quote the biblical verdict: "If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat" (2 Thessalonians 3:10). The main message of my study is that poverty is a large extended family, a cancerous disease, each type of which requires a different treatment. The developers of the so-called unconditional basic income (UBI) in Hungary deserve praise for finally formulating a consistently left-wing program to address this problem. Perhaps everyone, from neoconservatives to neoliberals, agrees that poverty stems from a lack of resources (insufficient income).