Poor People Can Bring Down the Rich

Trump and his circle in DC are following an unsustainable path. During the Great Depression there were plenty of "Trump-like" people who were against benefits to the poor. The thinking was the same, "If we give the poor help, like those terrible soup lines, they will not want to work and our whole country will fail." How, then, did Roosevelt and Congress get help programs like the Conservation Corp, food assistance and help for farmers funded?

Political support came about due to self-interest. Even though a significant part of the population was doing well when things were really bad, a political light came on in the heads of the prosperous. A voice in their heads said something like, "Look at all those people in the soup lines. Others are forming groups shaking their fists. There are so many of them it's scary. What if they come for us?" 

My field of economics is a part of the group of academic disciplines called the "behavioral sciences." These disciplines try to understand the shifting and surprising behaviors of we humans. Economics is kind of an outlier among them holding to a specific theory of human behavior. It is that humans survive by focusing on self-interest. The Bible authors mostly saw this self-interest as bad. It is said the Bible discusses money ten times more often than sex. We skeptics see the authors as very wealthy men themselves who were preoccupied with using their writing to profit. 

In my view, big limits of trade like Trump is doing is not in the public's interest. Now, some of his fans are realizing its not in their selfish interests either. If lower income people turn out to vote in large numbers for a better deal for themselves the wealthy may not think stiffing the poor is so smart. Maybe it's being too optimistic, but self-interest has helped, at least some in the past and maybe will help now.