. 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
