(This line is a quote quoted in a blog post over at the Origins website yesterday called Abolishing Poverty. Here is the comment I offered in response.)
“You cannot abolish poverty unless you also abolish affluence.”
This statement is part of the zero-sum game fallacy of economics. A zero-sum game envisions a fixed quantity of something to be distributed, say, a pie. If my piece is bigger, everyone else's must be to some degree smaller. This is not how economies work!
Every year, expect with an occasional recession year, the worldwide Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grows, the GDP in almost every nation grows. If economics is a zero-sum game, then it would not be possible for global growth to happen.
Every day people invest themselves in transforming matter, energy, and data from less useful states into more useful states, and then exchange the fruits of their labor with each other. That is what generates wealth. Affluence is not a static set of possessions. Affluence is a dynamic and organic system of coordinated human interaction.
The most poverty stricken places on the planet lack the fertile soil in which affluence can grow. There is insufficient human capital (spiritual resources, mental resources, health, etc.), social capital (just and effective societal institutions), material capital (infrastructure for transportation and communication) and financial capita (money to be put to use in production and investment.) Simple redistribution is pointless.
A gardening metaphor. Taking resources like water and fertilizer away from healthy plants in good soil in order to aid struggling plants that are growing in gravel may lessen the flourishing of the plants in good soil but it will not substantially change the plight of the plants in gravel. The plants in gravel must be given better soil.
Aid to the poor is critical but our aim should be for everyone to live in expanding affluence, rooted in good soil, always with an eye to care for natural order God has entrusted to us.
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