Dollars and Sense: Two Thoughts on Wealth and Poverty

Read this and look for a great quote: "The only way to fight poverty is with employment."  Well, duh.  Handouts accomplish little in the long run.  Do I really have to give you the fortune-cookie-worthy quote about how to feed a man for a day versus how to feed him for a lifetime?  (Hint: the first involves a handout.  The second involves skills.) I would add that the corollary to employment is really trade and wealth creation (and add t0o the protection of private property).  There really is a vital nexus among the ideas of free markets, free people, and property rights.  Then watch this:

Of course you know that I am firmly in the camp of the "let's make more wealth and then everybody wins."  Consider, perhaps, the experience of standards of living in Taiwan just from WWII to the present day.  Frankly, a lot of leftists seem to look at people whom they define as "wealthy" (and you better hang onto your wallets, because pretty soon that means you, as their rapacious appetite for both spending and confiscatory taxes continues) and consider them as the barbarian hordes considered the cities of medieval Europe -- as things to be plundered and pillaged.  Rant below the fold.


The really horrible thing, though, with the extreme left idea of wealth (and redistributionism) is that it now becomes fine to consider the "wealthy" as the enemy and therefore envy and rapine become not only acceptable but even ... moral.  (This also feeds into the left fringe's narcissistic need to don the mantle of "virtuous messiah-figure with condescending paternalistic overtones obvious to everyone except the left fringe," but that's another rant.)  The barbarian hordes were at least honest in their designs, blatantly coming to club you over the head and take off with your possessions, not cloaking their ultimate grabby-handed plans in euphemisms about "fairness" and whatnot. As for me, I'll say there's nothing wrong with being rich and successful.  Heck, I want to be like that, and indeed I want everybody to be rich and successful.  There's no need to apologize for THAT either.  When was the last time a poor man offered you a job?  And need I remind you that every single massive effort at redistributionism has resulted in horrifying amounts of poverty, famine, oppression, and human suffering?