The Discerning Texan

A number of blogs have made note of the Pew Research Center global opinion study showing that the number of people who believe that suicide bombings are justified is dropping across the Muslim world.

Here’s another stat from the same study. The number of people in Venezuela who believe that “most people are better off in a free market economy, even though some people are rich and some people are poor” stands at 72% -- higher than any other Latin American country listed! That’s a very noteworthy stat in a country whose President’s motto is “Fatherland, Socialism, or Death”.

There’s nothing like living under actual socialism to drive up support for capitalism.

Labels: Capitalism, Socialism, Venezuela

Now people on the left have, in their guts, a revulsion towards the rich and the wealthy, because whenever they see wealth they naturally assume that it was stolen from people without any – the poor. That rich man in the private jet has taken the wealth from all the poor people and is therefore a criminal.

If you think about all of the protestors you see on TV, whether they be against US “imperialism”, or globalization, or corporations, or claim to be champions of the Poor, both here at home and for poor nations in the world – all of this anger and seething resentment, all of this bitterness and invective, can be attributed, when all is said and done, to having chosen to believe that there is only so much wealth in the world, and that rich people and rich nations gain and maintain wealth by stealing prosperity from the weak.

This is so idiotic, so demonstrably false, that you really have to wonder why we are having this discussion. All of the money owed to rich nations by the poor – money that was lent to them to lift them from poverty, and then squandered on palaces for dictators and Socialist prestige projects like International Airports in the middle of nowhere -- all this money totaled together, is a small percentage of the wealth generated by rich countries in a single year. The idea that the United States can steal 10 trillion dollars a year from dirt-poor nations that don’t produce anything of value is absolutely insane, and yet, and yet, we hear it again and again and again from the professionally outraged who must be obtuse beyond human understanding to keep making such an absurd lie the basis of their entire philosophy.

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Now in order to fully appreciate why Capitalism is such a blessing – including being a blessing for the poor – we have to understand what poverty is. We have to have a definition of poverty. And we have to understand what it really means to be poor in a rich country, and to be rich in a poor one.

We keep hearing certain professional (as in paid) complainers bleating about how the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. That’s just wrong. That’s demonstrably, provably false. It’s a lie.

The rich get richer, and the poor get richer too. At least here they do.

American poverty is defined by a certain income. These people are poor by definition. I’m not trying to be sarcastic, and I’m not trying to minimize the pain of it – I’m just stating a fact.

Now, what does it mean when we learn that the poorest Americans have incomes higher than 90-some percent of the rest of the world? What does that mean?

Poor people in America have electrically powered homes. They have the same clean running water the rest of the city residents have. Almost all have telephones and television. Many have a third-hand piece of crap automobile like my last three cars. (My current ride has had one previous owner and 12,000 miles and it feels new. I’ve never owned a new car.)

Does it suck to be poor in America? It depends on who you talk to. If you spend your life calculating what Bill Gates makes while you were sleeping, chances are you’ll be pretty ornery. But if you look out into the rest of the world, and even a few decades back into history – American history, a rich country’s history -- then you just might begin to realize that you, a poor American, are living better than just about any other humans in history, and I am including the richest people of just sixty or seventy years ago – a single human lifespan for a poor American. A hundred years ago, if the Crown Prince caught the flu, that richest, most powerful person on the earth, likely as not, died. At this hour, at this instant, people of all incomes are being saved from certain death in clinics and hospitals by treatments unimaginable a few short decades ago.

Some facts are undeniable – that’s why we call them “facts.” Lifespan and infant mortality are scientific data sets that pay no attention to ideology. The first has been rising, the other dropping, all across the globe, and doing so spectacularly where capitalism has taken hold. Rich capitalist countries -– the ones with those evil kkkorporations -- are also far cleaner – Greener, you might say – than poor, socialist ones. That’s got to stick a little, thinking about that up there in that tree night after night, for years.

Where monumentally thick governments, like that of China, are finally forced to get out of the way and let people work to improve their own lives –- we call this process ”making money” -- the results are simply dumbfounding, given the amount of poverty that has been foisted on that industrious nation for a few millennia of raw tyranny. Ask your solid, upper-middle-class in Egypt, or Vietnam, or Belarus, if they’d like to get a chance to start a new life as a poor American. Then get the hell out of their way, if you don’t feel like tasting the sidewalk.

One of the few places where longevity is falling drastically is in the ruin of Russia and her poor, literate, long-suffering people. Communism is still killing those poor bastards. It’s like a disease that stalks you even after it’s been eradicated.

What a filthy legacy.

Now I told you this one would be tough, but we’re almost done with it. In order to show how Capitalism helps the rich, the poor, and the middle, we have to look at income. Unfortunately for the grey-ponytail crowd, this will require just a smidgeon of math and a little tiny bit of other stuff they didn’t study for when they were out getting high behind the dumpsters.

It involves a graph. If you are one of those people who are now reaching for a pencil and paper, then you already pass and spend the rest of study period at the library. The rest of you pay attention, especially you kids way in the back whose every other word is Nazi! The rest of us are getting a little tired of having to keep explaining this to you. So pay attention!

In your mind, draw a vertical line down the left side of a piece of paper, and a horizontal one across the bottom. Yes, it makes an “L” Moonflower…

The left-hand, vertical line represents the number of people. The higher we go, the more people there are. The horizontal line is income: the further to the right, the more silk you get to wear.

Now place a bell-curve along the bottom line. Okay? A Bell Curve. Simple.

Now, down on the bottom left are the poorest Americans. There are relatively few really desperately poor people. As we move to the right, into higher incomes, we see more and more people -– the line goes higher. We’re still on the left side of the curve -– the cheap seats. Most of the people -– the bulge in the bell -- make an average salary: that’s why we call it “average” (You statisticians leave means and medians and that stuff out of it. Just play along.)

Okay, now as we move to ever higher incomes, we see fewer and fewer people making the big bucks. Numbers go down. And then all the way at the end sit Bill Gates and Sam Walton all by their stinking rich selves. Okay?

Let’s call that a snapshot of America today.

Now, if we rob from the rich, and give to the poor, then what happens?

The rich people get poorer, the poor people get richer…the ends contract…the bell curve gets narrower. The right side, the rich side, moves left – poorer. The left side, the poor half of the curve, moves right – richer. In a socialist utopia, there is no curve; there’s just a single vertical line in the middle called The Salary. Collect all the revenues, add ‘em up, divide by the total number of people, and pay them all the same exact amount.

Everybody makes the same: the Salary. Let’s say it’s fifty grand a year. Brain surgeons, the guy who cleans the toilet at the 7-11 –- everyone makes fifty grand.

Fifty grand! Woo-hoo!

Now let’s set aside for a moment the non-trivial issue of whether or not such a society -- which rewards 12 years of intense medical study and endless hours doing breathtakingly difficult and essential work exactly the same as the guy who spent his teen years stealing stereos, getting high and listening to White Snake -- is more “just” and “compassionate.” Look at the bell curve -- or what’s left of it.

There it sits. It will start to slide left as motivation and industry and ambition and just plain dreaming of a better life goes out the window. What’s the point? Fall asleep behind the glass at a service station, you make The Salary. Put in overtime, start a business, get an extra degree, invent the telephone –- you get The Salary. Only we’re not producing as much. The Brain Surgeon decides it pays just as well to take tickets at the movieplex, and he’s got a lot more free time, plus the movie. Productivity goes down. We produce less, so now the average of what we make goes from fifty grand to forty-three nine. Then thirty-six grand. Then Twenty-One. Then eleven. But everybody’s equal! Equally destitute and equally hopeless.

But I’ll even throw this essential argument away for a minute.

Let’s just agree that everybody makes fifty grand. Forever.

If we went perfectly communist a hundred years ago, when the Big Idea started, that “average salary” would have been closer to five grand a year.

Doh!

What the hell can you buy today with five grand? Well, quite a lot of hay, some dry goods, perhaps a corset for the missus. But it doesn’t buy anything of value today. What will fifty grand buy in a century? Some crappy new Volvo, perhaps a PlayStation? What about a personal transporter, or a NeuralBoy? You’ll need to make 500 grand to afford those puppies.

Now if you’d just been smart and listened to Adam Smith, he’d tell you: you don’t improve people's lives by narrowing the bell curve. You improve people’s lives by moving it to the right.

Is this so hard to figure out?

I guess so. For some people this is like learning calculus –- in Greek.

If your goal is to pull the money from those goddam rich people, then realize all you can do is raise the poor to the middle. On the other hand, if you don’t give a damn about people richer than you, and everyone does the best they can, then there is no limit to how far right a wealth-creating engine can move the curve. Poor people today make more money than average people did a hundred years ago, and they can buy much cooler stuff with what they make –- like televisions.

So write this on your palm, because there will be a test in the afterlife: if you want to help the poor by taking from the rich, all you can do is take all that they have. Take from the industrious, the ambitious, the clever and the hardworking long enough, and they will go somewhere else and get rich -- again.

And then where are you? Your bell curve gets narrower, and as the gap between rich and poor shrinks, you have a few years, maybe a few decades of smug satisfaction as the whole edifice topples slowly to the left and collapses. The rich get poorer -- good for you – and the poor? Well, simple. They starve to death.

Behold Africa. What an egalitarian paradise! All starve equally.

On the other hand, there is no limit –- again -– no limit, to how far to the right, how rich, capitalism can make even the poor. Some people will do better than others, because some people work harder, or smarter, or longer than others, and some are just plain luckier. That’s life. And if that’s the case, then some people, by definition, will be the rich half, and some will be the poor half. And at the far end of the poor half will be the people we call The Poor. It doesn’t matter how much money they make, or don’t make. The bottom ten or fifteen percent we will define as The Poor. Seventy-five years ago, these poor Americans lived in shacks with dirt floors. Today they live better. Not as well as the rest of us. But better. The rich get richer, and the poor get richer, too.

Labels: America, Capitalism, Fourth of July

Labels: Capitalism, Europe, France, Islamic Fascism, Socialism

Labels: Capitalism, Hugo Chavez, Latin America

Let’s allow our unions and their organizers to lift up this country’s middle class again.

Labels: Capitalism, Democrat, Economics, Socialism, US Politics