The conservative moral inversion

The conservative moral inversion can be summed up very simply:

1. Helping people is bad.
2. Making people suffer is good.

The roots of the conservative moral inversion go back to the 1960s, when white racists found their tax dollars being spent helping to lift black people out of poverty.  In order to prevent this from continuing, conservatives invented the "culture of dependency", the idea that helping people was actually bad for them.  It stood to reason, then, that if helping people was bad, then making people suffer, for instance by cutting social programs, was good.  And if cutting social programs was a good thing, then there was no need to pay taxes to support them, which was the whole point of the exercise.

The conservative moral inversion is no longer an excuse for white people to allow black people to remain poor.  It has expanded from its racist origins, and is now the conventional wisdom among political and media elites pretty much throughout the entire industrialized world, where its proponents are known as the Pain Caucus, or the austerians.  Reducing help for the needy (or, as Saint Ronald of Santa Barbara memorably put it, the "truly needy") has become an end in itself.  That's why the Europeans are determined to reduce countries like Greece and Spain to economic basket cases, and why President Obama has been determined to cut Social Security benefits pretty much from the day he entered office.