Quote: Poverty and the State

The state's role in keeping the poor in a state of poverty is a consistent theme of poverty groups... [They] place an emphasis in their analysis of poverty on how the state and its institutions not only keep people poor, but actually make them poor. The state makes people poor when it institutes policies that accept high levels of unemployment as inevitable: if some people are not allowed to work, they certainly cannot provide for themselves. The state makes people poor when it permits employers to pay some workers less than a living wage. The state makes people poor when it perpetuates an under-valuation of some forms of labour, particularly the labour involved in caring for and raising children.

-- Marjorie Griffin Cohen