“Perhaps I can find new ways to motivate them.” -Darth Vader, on helping others help themselves.

When normal people make charitable donations, they usually intend to relieve suffering for people who desperately need aide and mercy.

Not Mike Bloomberg.

Bloomberg believes that human suffering is the best thing about poverty. Without misery and suffering, in his telling, the poor would have no motivation to work hard like he does.

Through his political career, he complained that poor people are coddled by overly generous government programs which prevent them from learning the value of hard work. This has been the basis of his opposition to minimum wages, food stamps, public schools, paid sick leave, medicaid and medicare, the post office, and virtually all forms of social welfare.

This was vividly illustrated after Bloomberg toured a homeless shelter in 2011. With unemployment close to 10% in New York City, Bloomberg tried and failed to impose stricter eligibility requirements on people seeking shelter.

Since he could not stop people from entering shelters, he instead suggested reducing the quality of living conditions in the facilities.

“We have made our shelter system so much better that, unfortunately, when people are in it, it is a much more pleasurable experience than they ever had before. So there’s less pressure on people to move out today.” Bloomberg feared that once New Yorkers got a taste of the homeless lifestyle, they would be reluctant to give it up.

A Bloomberg Pleasure Palace. Note the chauffeur and satin drapes.

Believing in the healing virtue of humiliation and discomfort presents a dilemma for Bloomberg. How do you give money to the poor without blunting the pain of poverty?

The solution is to focus on philanthropic endeavors that motivate the poor to help themselves. For Bloomberg, this is a two sided coin. On one side, as a public official, Bloomberg’s most visible efforts focused on removing the temptation to commit ‘bad behavior’, for example by regulating soda portions and the fat content of fast food.

‘Bad behavior’ is something of a theme in Bloomberg’s rhetoric, from an appearance in which he dressed as Marry Poppins and threatened to ‘get the whole country to behave’ to a common refrain in friendly interviews and panels: “So much of the tragedy in this world is self-inflicted… Most people who die before they should do so because of their own behavior.”

“I’m going to Iowa, then New Hampshire, maybe I can get the whole country to behave”.

Bloomberg’s regulation of behavior through bans and taxes won him a reputation in the national media as a ‘Nanny State liberal’, which would suggest that he supported social welfare programs. In fact he is much closer in ideology to an Ayn Rand style libertarian, and is opposed to virtually all functions of government outside of fighting wars, enabling the financial industry, and removing temptation from the feeble minded.

The other side of the coin is to remove people from welfare in order to induce suffering. Bloomberg’s administration frequently bragged about the declining utilization of welfare programs in New York, especially in times of high unemployment and recession.

One of the ‘achievements’ of Bloomberg’s first term was continuing efforts to slash welfare initiated by his mayoral predecessor. Bloomberg sustained Guliani’s cuts even through the prolonged period of unemployment following 9/11, earning him high praise from the New York Post. Bloomberg’s coup de grâce did not come until 2009, when he successfully cut welfare benefit recipients in the face of a world historical financial meltdown, which many believed would cause a depression to rival the 1930s.

In the face of record unemployment and exploding, desperate, crushing need, Bloomberg worked tirelessly to ensure New Yorkers would not benefit from federal efforts to expand social welfare programs to meet new demands. For example, he refused to accept a federal waiver that would have lifted work requirements on food-stamps, despite the advice of his top advisors. In the words of his spokesperson, these policies were “consistent with our work-focused welfare program”, recession be damned.