The Deserving Poor

 Matt Yglesias has a blog post here that interested me.  It says in part:

If you arrange your society such that 5% of the population is going to occupy some extremely unpleasant social roles, it may well be the case that the specific people who come to occupy those roles do so for specific behavioral reasons that are outside the scope of what we'd commonly call "bad luck."

...[But] Someone or other is destined to be the "marginal worker" in any labor pool, and if the central bank conducts this kind of asymmetrical stabilzation policy then marginal workers are going to be screwed. If everyone had more human capital or a better work ethic then average living standards might be higher, but someone would still be victimized by a bad arrangement of social institutions

 I would take that a step further; in a capitalist society, even one in which the central bank is acting optimally, there will still be jobs that pay poorly.  Someone has to flip the burgers and clean the toilets and pick the tomatoes, and since those jobs don't require much skill there are plenty of people to do them, and consequently those jobs aren't going to pay much.  And that's fine- there are relative winners and relative losers in life.

But the Right's demonization of the Poor just doesn't make sense.  We have these low-paying jobs, and we need them to be accomplished by someone.  Blaming the working poor for their plight is just stupid- if the janitor starts his own business and becomes rich, someone else is going to have to clean the floors!  And that guy is going to be poor.