Posted by
Keith Arnold on Wednesday, October 15, 2008 7:17:54 PM
Today, October 15, has been declared Blog Action Day 2008, and this year's theme is poverty.
We're blessed to live in America, one of the most prosperous nations in the world. By comparison to places like Zimbabwe, Myanmar, and Uruguay, it's amazing how much prosperity we enjoy.
Much has been said about how America has only 6% of the world's population but possesses 30% of the world's wealth, or somesuch figures; consumes 30% or so of the world's energy; and a raft of other statistics meant to make me feel guilty. We're all overweight while half the world goes to bed hungry at night.
Heck, we have a Presidential candidate who spends fifteen times on a pair of shoes what is half-brother living in a hut in Africa makes in a whole year.
The guilt trip doesn't work on me. I'll tell you why, and as I'm doing it, I will also tell you the greatest key to prosperity and wealth that the world has ever known. You don't have to subscribe to my newsletter to get the secret; you don't have to send me $49.99 plus shipping and handling for the CD. All you have to do to become wealthy is read carefully what I'm about to tell you and act accordingly.
The secret to wealth is this: freedom.
The truth of the matter is that most of the famine in this world is not caused by climate change or natural catastrophe - it's caused by mankind and oppressive governments, and it's deliberate. Visit Sudan if you don't believe me, where tribal strife and intentional relocation policies have resulted in mass starvation. Oppressive government raining its wrath down on its internal enemies have a history going back long before the Soviet purges.
Here is an undeniable truth: no one ever got to the top of a mountain by falling onto it out of the sky (snowboarders with rented helicopters notwithstanding). Someone made the long, arduous climb to get there. America did not magically appear in the world as a wealthy nation; we earned out way through productivity, trade, and investment.
Yes, we are blessed with amazing supplies of natural resources - most of which our Federal legislature refuses to allow its own citizens to drill for or saw down. Russia has an even larger abundance of natural resources, and is poor. Japan, with almost no natural resources, is prosperous.
The true key to wealth is freedom - freedom from government interference, freedom from oppressive taxation, freedom from seizure of property, freedom to keep the profit from one's own work. Until the Great Depression, America enjoyed the benefits of a free-market economy; that Depression, of course, was caused not by capitalism, but by manipulation of capitalism. FDR's economic policies and taxation for the redistribution of wealth actually prolonged the Great Depression. Increasing taxation and government regulation, starting with Truman and increasing with Johnson and thereafter, only served to further imbalance the motor of the American free market economy, leading to the recent descent into socialism with the government intervention in the unstable financial market - which were primarily caused by the government's own actions.
Imagine the powerhouse of the American economy and what it could accomplish if it were not for government meddling.
Imagine the improvement in the economies of other nations in the world, and the benefit that would accrue to their citizens, if only those citizens were given the freedom to create wealth, to keep the profit they earn, to produce, to not be the victims of their own governments. Poverty could be ended, not by redistributing wealth from producer nations to non-producer nations, but by loosing the citizens of those nations to become producers.
Despots and autocrats, of course, will not easily relax the iron reins of rule. Don't expect North Korea, one of the hardest-hit nations in terms of poverty, to suddenly become less of a police state just because their puny dictator wants to give his serfs the freedom to grow their economy and become less poor. Absolute power not only corrupts absolutely, but it is also absolutely addictive. And so, we will always have the poor.
America also has its poor, but even our poor are wealthy in the grand scheme of things. Ours is one of the few nations of the world where even our poor possess automobiles, color televisions, and cellular telephones. Sadly, they also have a welfare system that, instead of freeing them to become productive and prosperous, perpetuates their poverty, and passes it on to their children and grandchildren - in return for making them permanent clients of the state, and brainwashing them for their votes.
The greatest key for widespread wealth to combat poverty is an honest free-market economy and political freedom for the world's citizens.
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