Alan Winslow
The most effective means for ending poverty in recorded history has been free-market capitalism.
This is as true today as it was in capitalism’s formative years in the last millennium.
Unaware of, or rejecting, this fact, social justice propagandists blame capitalism as a primary cause of poverty. Because of capitalist greed, it is claimed, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. It is claimed the capitalist American system (sometimes referred to as “a white supremacist system”) today purposefully excludes, especially minorities, and keeps those and the poor and vulnerable down and disenfranchised.
Thus, to heal capitalism’s harms, the social justice advocate aims to “fundamentally transform” the American system and agitates for redistribution of wealth, opportunity and privilege as the necessary way of ending poverty and exclusion in America.
And yet, it was the ordinary and impoverished who originated capitalist practices when the freedom of ownership of the means of production arose. And when free people had the liberty to produce for a market and others were free to buy, the true engine of human uplift, not more poverty, began.
We in America are blessed free-enterprise coupled with capitalist ideas came with the colonizing and conquest of North America. But did you know it almost didn’t happen?
The Pilgrims shortsightedly began their colony with a form of socialism. All the goods produced belonged to the whole community, not the producer. And the result was the common good suffered deprivation. It seems a common goods economy did not work for the common good. And these were devout Christians.
Governor Bradford soon returned to the more natural producer-owner economy. And the result?
The colony thrived.
So today, a little-known law professor, Glenn Harlan Reynolds, correctly observes capitalism didn’t (and doesn’t) create poverty. On the contrary, poverty gave birth to capitalism. And poverty has been in decline ever since.
Thus, you can strengthen capitalist principles and further reduce poverty or you can expand redistribution, the standard socializing answer, and enhance poverty. As such, social justice becomes the disease for which it is supposed to be the cure.
But let’s go further. There is a benevolence and charity embedded in capitalism, clearly on display for those who have eyes and want to see. Notably, a revolution in adopting capitalism has lately developed in our world and has elevated the poor in China (China, where a totalitarian state has promoted capitalist economic practices) and India.
And here is the result: In the past 25 years, the rate of world poverty has dropped from four in 10 people to one in 10, these astounding results directly related to expanding capitalist economic practices in China and India, not social justice policies.
But it appears the social justice mind is impervious to such real-world evidence and remains devoted to Marxist-Socialist disinformation that asserts the poor and minorities are victims of and oppressed by the rich and “their” noninclusive American capitalist system.
With this conceit in mind, let’s dive into some facts about poor folks, minorities and capitalist America:
-Poverty has been the historical human norm. Poverty precedes capitalism by millennia. What caused human poverty before capitalism began its uplift?
-In America, the greatest percentage of the poor don’t stay poor. Only 2 to 3% of Americans do remain chronically poor. That means 97% to 98% of Americans work their way up the wealth scale as they age and mature in the workforce. This is called social mobility, a hallmark of capitalist America.
-As the rich get richer, so do the poor in capitalist America. Prosperity in the upper income group leads to financial benefit in all other income groups rather than financial losses. Freedom and capitalism result in an expanding pool of productivity, benefit and wealth for all.
-Capitalist America is far and away the most charitable nation on Earth, both for its own citizens suffering deprivation and for the world.
-80% of those considered quite rich got rich by their own work efforts, not by inheritance.
-Fatherless families are the biggest contributor to American poverty and female-run single-parent families have the highest poverty rates in America.
-There are thousands of Black millionaires in America and growing. (If only urban America would “fundamentally transform” the mal-education of minority youth, Black millionaires would multiply.)
-Black two-parent families are rarely poor and have incomes on average above the national median.
-If you complete high school with grade-appropriate reading and math skills, don’t have children until married and maintain a job, your chance of remaining poor throughout life is in the low single-digit percentage range.
-The poorest counties in America are 90 to 95% white.
-The poor in America have more living space than the average European.
-The poverty rate for Black Americans fell from 87% to 47% from 1940 to 1960. From 1960 to 1970, it fell to 30%. And in the 1970s, the decade when federal anti-poverty programs began in earnest, the rate of Black poverty dropped only 1% to 29%.
-In capitalist America, a free individual builds wealth by offering goods and/or services that other people voluntarily want to purchase. Wealth is never built by extracting money from others but by offering to freely trade something (a product or a service) for something of value (typically earned or loaned money).
-And if the seller is very successful, he can begin to save money for the future. Saved money, among other things, is called capital, that evil word that Socialists love to hate.
Accordingly, social justice champions should understand the destructive and concealed role that Marxism-Socialism, the greatest man-made method to expand human poverty and misery, seeks to play in contemporary social justice propaganda.
And when understood, they should run like hell toward the pro-America, pro-capitalist system that history reveals as the greatest structure of human uplift ever devised.
(Significant credit for ideas and data for this column goes to Thomas Sowell and Milton Friedman.)
Alan Winslow, a resident of Seymour, occasionally writes a column for The Tribune. Send comments to [email protected].