[T]he rise of the welfare state has allowed us to forget that in many societies there is no solid line between “beggars” and “workers.” In Ecuador, for instance, children beg as a supplementary income for the rest of the family. In other words, the original postulate, i.e., that “we aren’t going to fix society by giving money away,” is absolutely true, but with this caveat: we should begin to look at begging as a trade; it is thus not about fixing society, at all. If we want to fix society we need to look elsewhere, at larger forces and institutions around us. Begging is simply a means by which one group gains some of the surplus that large civil societies almost inevitably produce.
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