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Poverty: How to cure?

Inicio > Política Internacional
03/01/2021

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People need money to survive and progress in life. Throughout history, we had seen different social and economic systems that try to allow money to progress to everybody, but there’s only one that can achieve that. We need liberty, and liberty also means economic freedom to everybody. No one deserves to be a slavery of the government. Any adult has the responsibility to follow the decisions they made and to respond to their actions. The government can’t take responsibility for it, just have to protect the rights and the liberty of the people. We’re going to see how Economic Freedom helps the poorest people, what kind of alternative social assistance could be given by private hands, what is poverty, how much the US government spends on Health, and what would be the cure for poverty.In Venezuela, the government tried to protect everyone from the "rich people", who were supposedly the enemy of "the people". Always we were the victims, successful people were the villains and, of course, the Government was the “god” or the “superhero” that will save us. That followed a stupid fallacy that curiously sees the rich people as bad people, but if we are poor because of them, then, if I have success in a business, automatically I’m an enemy of the people, just because I’m a successful man. That’s awful. The rich people do businesses that produce goods and services. And to produce it, investors need people to run the business, so they create Jobs in that process.

As labor law is more flexible, there will be higher salaries and more jobs. When people are hired, the production grows and it means less unemployment. And anyone who has started to gain money may start a business to increase their earnings (increasing employment in turn), but to get the success they have to provide the solution of the people’s problems or interests. So, there’s no “an enemy” because of their amount of money, and poor people don’t need a “big welfare state” nor a “State Financial Aid Program”. We, the people, need Jobs and freedom. We need a limited Government that may protect our private property and our liberty. We just need our family, our friends, and ourselves.

Of course, there could be “social assistance” for the poorest, but it could be private and voluntary. I would be the first to attend to the needs of my fellow men. The idea is not to let the state take care of it, since this represents a kind of abandonment by society, based on the erroneous idea that the state takes care of everything. I think it is a vague and unsupportive belief. Therefore, I think the best way to help the poor is by allowing them to work and earn money through their efforts.

There's a lot of millionaire people who want the government to gives free things to the people. But these "free things" are really expensive and often are deficient. Why they don’t give their money? Why they do not create a non-profit hospital that cares for the poorest? I mean, if we're worried about the poorest people, then we must take care of it. It does not mean wanting the government to tax more, but rather that those people who want and care (which are many), for the poor, can use their money to help them voluntarily and without violence. We need freedom, justice, and work. That’s it. Nobody dies from inequality, but poverty.

While there are people who say that the Government may end poverty by redistributing wealth with central planning, Poverty is mostly a consequence of Government intervention. When the government tries to protect people, it seems that it harms them rather than make their lives better, because the freest countries in the world have a limited Government which let the people work and negotiate free not a big size one.

The market could provide mostly always a better service than the Governmental one so the Government has to provide the rule of law to let the people progress with their effort. Finally, to redistribute wealth, it must first be produced. Therefore, the richest economies have greater economic freedom than the most repressed and regulated economies, because there are more production, more investment, and more employment. (Sanchez de la Cruz, 2017)

The government that promotes economic freedom has a role in politics, “however, economic freedom also requires governments to refrain from many activities. They must refrain from actions that interfere with personal choice, voluntary exchange, and the freedom to enter and compete in labor and product markets” (Gwartney et al., 2002, p. 574). Therefore, economic freedom decreases when taxes, government expenditures, and regulations are substituted for the free market (Op. Cit. p. 574).

Is the government expenditures the cure for poverty? Well, in Cato’s Letter from spring 2019, volume 17 and number 2, Tanner (2019) writes:

The federal government alone has more than 100 different anti-poverty programs—about 70 which provide benefits directly to individuals and the remainder which provide benefits to poor communities. The federal government spent roughly $700 billion last year on these programs. State and local governments kick in another $300 billion, meaning we spent about a trillion dollars fighting poverty last year. Since 1965 when Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty, we’ve spent about $26 trillion in constant 2018 dollars fighting poverty. And the question is: what have we gotten for this money? (p. 1)

Here we know that more public expenditure doesn’t mean less poverty. The United States, on a per capita basis, spends much more on health care than other developed countries (Aspril et al., 2019). And it’s interesting because the American health service is known as an expensive health service and one of the most expensive in the world.

Henry Hazlitt defined poverty as: “Individual or family poverty results when the "breadwinner" cannot in fact, win bread; when he cannot or does not produce enough to support his family or even himself” (Hazlitt, 2018, para. 2). So with that concept, we can develop the topic with more clarity. The poverty ends, then, when you can produce enough to support your family and yourself.

Hazlitt (2018) said human has been finding the cure for poverty throughout history and the cure has been before his eyes all the time. Fortunately, most of the men were able to discover it and survived, at least as long as it extended to their behavior as individuals. Work and perseverance was the personal remedy. In terms of social organization, a system of division of labor, freedom of trade and economic collaboration emerged naturally from this as a spontaneous result, the details of which scarcely became visible to our forebears until two centuries ago. The system is today regarded either as Free Market or as Capitalism, as men like it to be respected or disdained.

In conclusion, thanks to the sources cited, we can be more clear restatement that liberty is the best friend of the human being for progress, that more governmental expending doesn’t help to poorest people, that we should start to take care of the others and, a limited state is better for everyone because we need liberty. It let us feel more self-sufficient and free to pursue what we want to. Also, we may say that the “redistribution of wealth” is an unfair principle that affects negatively to poorest people, because it means to punish the people who will create jobs that let people escape from poverty.

References:

Aspril, J., & JH Bloomberg School of Public Health. (2019). U.S. Health Care Spending Highest Among Developed Countries. Retrieved from https://www.jhsph.edu/news/news-releases/2019/us-health-care-spending-highest-among-developed-countries.html

De la Cruz, D. S. (2017). Las economías libres tienen más esperanza de vida, menos pobreza y mejor democracia. Libertad Digital. Retrieved 28 November 2020, from https://www.libremercado.com/2017-08-22/las-economias-libres-tienen-mas-esperanza-de-vida-menos-pobreza-y-mejor-democracia-1276604638/

Gwartney, J., Lawson, R., & Clark, J. (2005). Economic Freedom of the World, 2002. The Independent Review, 9(4), 573-593. Retrieved December 20, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/24562088

Hazlitt, H. (2015). “The Cure for Poverty” in The Conquest of Poverty (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Foundation for Economic Education, 1996), chap. 20. Originally published by Arlington House, New Rochelle, N.Y., 1973. Reprinted and made available online by the Mises Institute, 2015.

Tanner, M. (2019). How Government Causes Poverty. Washington. Cato Institute. artículo

Etiquetas: Pobreza · Capitalismo

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