Creating Poverty

Most people want to (force the rich to) help the poor. Others want to abolish billionaires. Still others, think that poverty can be alleviated by raising the minimum wage by legislation. Since we are so concerned about poverty, let us discuss how poverty is created in the first place.

Broadly speaking, creating poverty in a society is a two step exercise. Step one is to destroy the wealth of the society that may exist when you start this exercise. Let us see how this may be done, in more detail:

I) Destruction of the wealth of a Society

Declaring a war on a society and bombing the assets there is an obvious means by which it's wealth can be destroyed. A slightly less obvious method is for the society to itself engage in an unnecessary foreign war and send its assets to burn and crash in the foreign land. But the insidious termites that really annihilate the wealth of a society are government operated enterprises.  These enterprises utilize more and more man-power and assets of a society to churn out goods or services that are less valuable than the resources consumed in making them. Note that we are not complaining about these good and services being given away for free, or about the fact that the enterprises operate at a loss. The complaint here is that people who receive these products appraise them at less than the value of resources consumed to make them. You may as well just have burned a fraction of the resources that went into making these products/services (instead of running the whole enterprise). Just as we would not look at a lush green forest and claim that the termites there are not destroying it's wood, we should not look at a prosperous society and infer that government enterprises are not destroying it's wealth.

Step two of our exercise to create poverty in a society entails stifling the ability of people in that society to generate more wealth (while step one above is destroying it):

II) Stifling wealth creation

People have a natural tendency to utilize their environment to improve the quality of their lives, creating wealth. People can actually create far more wealth than they can personally consume. This surplus is traded/lent/donated/lost/stolen and generates prosperity all around. An obvious way to stifle these activities is to simply imprison people. This can be done by inventing crimes such as possession of marijuana or prostitution and imprisoning people for them. Another ingenious way is to ban the low income earners from working by prosecuting employers who are willing to pay the low wages that the poor generate. But the prize in this category should go to the policy that prohibits people from practicing numerous professions unless they have spent several years in specially designated super-expensive trade schools - which exactly what the licensing requirements in most states are for numerous professions (this, without testing a person's ability to actually practice said profession).

Notice how little we talked about money in this post? Economics is best understood by ignoring money, so that we may focus on the actual production and distribution of goods and services (which is what actually alleviates poverty). Alright! We have now surmised for you the principal tools for you to unleash poverty in your respective societies. Go forth and spread it if you like - it is easy to look caring and kind as you do so!