The “teach a man to fish” thing has been claimed more often by a conservative “helping people is actually bad for them” ideology than by any other. The irony is that “teaching a man to fish,” in any form, is incredibly expensive. Conservatives are almost always the least willing to pay for it.

Let’s first remove any condescension from “teach a man to fish,” because this is very important to understand: Literal fishing is actually pretty tricky business. If you were trying to learn to fish from scratch, with no resources, you very well might die before eating any fish.

Fun fact interlude: Fishing is arguably the most popular “complicated thing” besides cooking that Americans do.

And “teaching a man to fish” is far more profitable if you teach him to fish for you so that you can sell the fish to everyone else. Fish interests within our economic system (Big Fish, as opposed to Big Fishing) actually benefit from fewer people knowing how to fish.

Let’s extrapolate “teaching a man to fish” out to something far more complicated than fishing: Navigating our economic system without familial wealth, class status, or education opportunities.

This requires serious investment of time (which we’ll need to pay someone for).

Faced with the reality of the investment required, the first people who opt to throw fish at the masses are conservative-minded “government is bad” folks. It’s far less expensive in the short term to just give people fish, especially when there’s so much fish lying around.

Again, I want to be really sensitive to precise flavor of condescension here. In fact, the true condescension contained in the usual presentation of “teach a man to fish” is the baked-in assumption that teaching fishing is easy, not that fishing itself is easy.

When you’re born with a resource, you certainly devalue it, but you devalue the work necessary to acquire it even more:

“How hard could it be to teach someone to fish? I was fishing when I was 7.”

Better question: “How many hours of focused attention did my grandfather spend teaching me to fish? How much was the pole? The ride to the lake?”

How much harder is it to teach a man to fish than to give him a fish? Depends on the price of a fish. Potentially a million % harder.

Until we’re willing to spend the time (money) to teach people, really teach them, how to navigate the incredibly complicated challenges that our powerful classes assume are no big deal, we’ll just keep fighting until the endtimes over how much fish to hand out.