Paleocon Patrick Buchanan believes he knows why America’s economy is circling the drain:

Poverty in 21st century America is not poverty in the Paris of “Les Miserables” or the London of Oliver Twist or the Dust Bowl of Tom Joad.

The so-called “poor” are heavily dependent on the kindness — and the industry — of a gradually dwindling middle class:

[A] family can be classified as poor and own a car, a flat-screen TV and a computer, and have a washer-dryer and a garbage disposal.

Folks below the poverty line have their kids educated free in Head Start, for 13 years in public schools, then get Pell grants for college. They get free food stamps and health care through Medicaid. They get subsidized housing and earned income tax credits, are eligible for all other safety-net programs, and can earn $23,300 in pretax income and pay no income taxes.

Compounding the situation are so-called “immigration” policies, which

[a]ccording to analyst Ed Rubenstein of VDARE.com, the United States, despite an unemployment rate above 9 percent, import 100,000 immigrant workers every single month. Numbers USA contends that 125,000 foreign workers are brought in every month.

Thus, well over a million workers are added annually to our labor force when 14 million Americans are looking for work.

… and “globalization”, or

… the immersion of the U.S. economy in a global economy. This plunged U.S. workers into direct competition with workers in Asia and Latin America willing to do the same jobs for far less, in factories where regulations are far lighter.

U.S. corporate executives leapt at the opportunity to close plants here and relocate abroad. This explains the 50,000 factories that disappeared in the Bush decade and the 5.5 million manufacturing jobs that vanished.

You cannot have a rising standard of living when your highest-paid production jobs are being exported overseas.

And there’s no reason to think these “immigration” and “globalization” policies will decrease any time soon.

The bitter irony of both policies is that some groups and corporations do flourish — while the nation as a whole flounders.

What many mindlessly call “free trade” is actually a misguided patchwork contraption, a gross distortion of the free market brought about by collusion between tax-averse corporations and tax-hungry big government, resulting in an uneasy modus vivendi that works tolerably well enough to their mutual advantage — but to the disadvantage of those American citizens, the shrinking middle class, who foolishly choose to try to remain productive.

Corporations, of whatever size, should never succumb to the seductive appeal of enlisting government assistance in their private endeavors, and government should never unconstitutionally interfere with the operations of any corporate activities. We’d all benefit if they just left each other alone.

But they won’t.

See Buchanan’s WND article here.