Letter to the Editor: Reasons for poverty are structural, but aren’t one’s personal decisions sometimes responsible?

First, let me say Brother Zimmerman, you are courteous and conciliatory.

You should have called me out. I quoted G.K. Chesterton, and Chesterton certainly was not a capitalist but a distributist. Wasn’t his description of distributism “40 acres and a cow for everyone?” Certainly a different time. But the point was to favor small businesses and keep authority local? So perhaps there is a third way? 

Regarding Ayn Rand … wasn’t she an atheist? Perhaps that explains her “ethical egoism.” Didn’t she despise C.S. Lewis’s “Abolition of Man?”

Certainly some of the reasons for poverty are structural, but aren’t one’s personal decisions sometimes responsible, as J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” shows? It has been almost 60 years since Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was sounding the alarm on the demise of the black family. Now we can say the demise knows no demographic boundaries. 

I guess I can say I have forgotten God, and society has forgotten God — to borrow from Solzhenitsyn.

Mark Felsman
Quincy, Illinois