Imagine if 1% of all the people on earth owned 90% of the food?
Then, basically everybody would be starving, except for a very small few, who had far more than they needed.
Imagine if 1% of all the people on earth owned 90% of the money?
Then, basically everybody would be poor, owning nothing, expect for a very small few, who owned almost everything.
Why don’t I like economic monarchy?
Think for maybe, 1 minute, using your brain, and figure it out…
worldsocialism.org/spgb/sep06/page10.html
But remeber that those 200 people having a few billion dollars worked 16 hours a day for that money, not just 8 hours a day like those who remain poor.
Why are people poor?
I’d say it’s because they have very little money.
But that’s just a guess.
There is enough wealth today to provide everyone on the planet with decent food, housing, education and meaningful work.
We have poor people simply because without them people would have no incentive to keep their noses to the grindstone. Imagine that, people would not have to work so hard. Zillionaires would be forced to downsize their yachts because of decreased productivity.
Poor people are the key to the entire existing social construct, far more important than rich people or celebrities. They are so important that “the problem of the poor” means exactly the opposite of what most people think.
I guess 8 hours just doesn’t cut it anymore. But if you work 8 hours and make 1,000 dollars a month, then if you work 16 hours a day you could get 3,000 dollars a month (if the company gives you time and a half for overtime; but most US companies kind of say “you are even lucky I pay you at all since most of you workers are useless crap”), then how does that 3,000 dollars a month become a million dollars ? What is the trick ?
just like Paris Hilton?
Some people that are very wealthy worked very hard to get there, some people do not. Some people figure out how to manipulate the way economic systems are set up, and use it to get rich. Some people work very hard their entire lives and never really have much to their name.
The trick is to work 16 hours a day saturday and sunday too. Then you will be able to pull it off. Anyways why would you need more than a thousand dollars month ? That is more than enough to live well.
As for Paris Hilton, well she is pretty so that is reason enough to deserve money.
This statement exemplifies our culture at the moment. We need a pendulum here. 
Why are people poor?
I don’t know…. 
Why are people dumb?
If you live in a capitalist society then the reason you are are poor is because you have chosen to be poor, as no poor man is stopped from creating wealth.
"Imagine if 1% of all the people on earth owned 90% of the money? "
Just because on man has riches and another not, this doesn’t justify the latter to rob the former. Therefore why would that statement be relevent?
Most people are poor, or at least prevented from creating the wealth that would allow them to be independent, because a capitalist system is designed to reduce most people to a state of servitude willing to do the bidding of the privileged few.
It’s just like rats in a psychology experiment. Keep them hungry, and you can get them to do what you want in exchange for a reward of food pellets. With humans, it’s slightly more complicated, but the principle is the same.
In a world of shard needs, and a shared temporal/spatial environment, interests conflict.
Conflict establishes hierarchy.
Hierarchy establishes inequality.
Inequality establishes rights.
Rights establish morals.
Morals establish virtues.
Virtues establish character.
Character establishes identity.
Identity establishes unity.
Unity establishes lack.
Lack establishes need………
"Most people are poor, or at least prevented from creating the wealth that would allow them to be independent, because a capitalist system is designed to reduce most people to a state of servitude willing to do the bidding of the privileged few. "
This is what I don’t understand. Many poor people open businesses everyday. Most fail and some become rich. This high risk of starting a business is what justifys the reward. Also without people starting a business there is on wealth, therefore the workers didn’t create the wealth as it only came into being with the capitalist.
I think you need to explain your concept of “many.” I doubt it would match what other people understand when they read the word.
To start a new business, you need, in addition to starting and operating capital, enough money to support yourself without working for about a year, in order to give your business time to become established and show a profit. I am quite skeptical that “many” poor people can lay their hands on that kind of scratch.
Starting and operating capital is higher in some industries than others, of course, but in all cases it is made artificially higher than it needs to be by tax structures, licencing requirements, and real-estate economic realities, all of which serve (and in some cases are deliberately designed) to make starting a successful small business difficult. There are two reasons why this is done. One, big businesses don’t really want the extra competition, and two, every employee who becomes an independent business owner is one person who has escaped the control of the wealthy. Small farmers, small businesspeople, and independent professionals are people that big capital can’t control effectively, and policies are put into place to keep their numbers as small as possible.
You could turn that around and say: Without people doing work there is no wealth, therefore the capitalists didn’t create the wealth as it only came into being with the worker. Just as true.
What’s more, the “essential” ingredient of capital in the mix is essential only because our system divides all the means of production up into private ownership, and ensures that those who already own the lion’s share will get their cut of any wealth produced. In other words, the fact that wealth can’t be created without labor is natural, while the fact that it can’t be created without capital investment is artificial.
Capital is simply a means of control. It allows those with money to coerce those without to do the work that produces wealth. Capitalists don’t create jobs, they simply own them.
The only reason people are poor is because some are rich. In a communistic world, for example, where no one has anything, no one is poor because there’s no contrast. That is to say everyone is poor but no one realizes it.
Essentially correct, except that I would make it clearer that the causation goes the other direction. People are kept poor because that is a prerequisite of some being rich. People being rich doesn’t (directly) make other people poor; rather, people being poor makes other people rich, by putting the poor in a position where they have to serve the rich in order to survive.
People being rich does make other people poor but only indirectly, by giving the rich political power and influence over government policy, which in turn keeps people poor. It’s theoretically possible for some to be rich and everyone else to be neither rich nor poor, i.e. there’s enough wealth around to do that, it just doesn’t work out that way in practice.
The only communistic societies that have actually existed were precivilized forager-hunter bands. It was not true in those societies that no one had anything. People owned their own clothing, tools, weapons, and other personal possessions, it’s just that nobody owned the means of production (the hunting, fishing, and foraging grounds, the plants and animals, the flint quarries, etc.).
The implication of your post is that poverty is only relative. I don’t think that’s true. A person who is hungry, ill-clothed, lacking basic medical care, unable to educate his children – this is a poor person. A person who lives a comfortable life is not a poor person, even if everyone else in his society is richer. Poverty isn’t just relative, there is an absolute line above which it is meaningless to call someone poor, and below which it is imperative to do so. An entire society can be poor.
I think that’s fundamentally incorrect, Navigator. Rich or poor are only meaningful definitions insofar as the contrast exists. In a zero sum game, one can only be rich by depriving someone else. But existance isn’t a zero sum game. If we as a species tax the planet much further it might become one, though.
As far as “poor” is used here, many poor keep themselves poor. The bulk of the rest are complicite in their poverty. That’s how I see it, at any rate.
Note: your definition of poor is a good practical one. I would agree that you could be considered poor if you can’t afford the basics of life.
To say that, is to imply that the only painful consequence of poverty is envy or a sense of unfairness that comes from comparing one’s circumstances to those of another. But in fact, there are many painful consequences of poverty: hunger, disease, ignorance, powerlessness. These do not deserve to be ignored or trivialized.
Poverty has an absolute quality as well as a relative one; in fact, I’m not prepared to concede that someone is “poor” merely because someone else is richer.
Depriving someone else of wealth is not (necessarily) a prerequisite of being rich. But depriving someone else of freedom is. Just as there are absolute characteristics of poverty, so there is one absolute characteristic of wealth: the ability to command the service of others. In order for that to happen, the others must be reduced to circumstances that leave them no other choice but to serve you.
In practice, depriving someone else of wealth IS a prerequisite of being rich, because that is how people are placed in a situation where they must serve: the poor have no choice. It could conceivably be done in other ways, though. It is the deprivation of freedom that is prerequisite; the deprivation of wealth is only the currently-used means to that end.
Well, you’re right, on an individual level. But the question being asked in this thread is not “Why is that particular individual poor?” It’s “Why do the poor exist?”
The game is set up so that some people, some percentage of the population (a fairly low one in today’s America) will be poor. There are X number of poverty slots in our social hierarchy. Who occupies those slots, though, is not predetermined. And that’s where individual complicity comes in.
The thing is, if someone who is currently complicit in keeping himself poor changes his ways and rises into the only relatively poor, the only thing that will change is his own circumstances. The number of poor people will not change, because he will displace someone else who will sink into poverty.
I think you’re starting to spiral into rhetoric, Navigator. You’re complicating the definition by adding a lot of emotional baggage to it that probably only applies to you. I reject the notion that denying you freedoms will somehow make me rich, especially if I accept your defintion of “poor” as lacking the money to meet my basic needs. Oppressing you might make a sadist happy, but it won’t make him richer. Nor will your freedom make him any poorer.
Likewise, I think it’s a fallacy that by clawing your way up from poverty you will by necessity only do so by pushing another down. Again, this would be true in a zero sum game but that’s not the game we’re really playing. I don’t deny there’s institutionalized poverty to a degree, but I do deny that those suffering under it are in no part responsible for their own plight.
Furthermore, I don’t trivialize anyones suffering simply by insisting upon a definition of rich or poor that we can both agree on. This feels like you’re searching for an arguement, but I don’t really have one, just a statement.
I think poverty exists in part because no workable solution has ever been found to “cure” it. Perhaps none ever will be found. It would be great (no, more than great) if we could do so, but is it realistic? Is there any other species on this planet where all the organisms survive to live their entire potential lifespan in prosperity and peace? Hardly- and the idea of Darwinian Evolution thru natural selection would seem to suggest it’s not possible.
So am I a social Darwinist? Hardly. I subscribe to a social contract theory, under which people submit to being governed, contigent upon that government serving the People. Sadly, in no case on Earth does that really seem to happen. Power over other men does seem to corrupt.
Solutions proposed here (mostly by well fed young idealist types) involve overthrowing the existing social order, creating socialist states, etc etc. As well meaning as those people (hopefully) are, I think they’re niave at best. Any system we create will probably have the same fatal flaw; it will run by humans.
We are in disagreement about what the definition of “poor” is, and if you are asserting that there is a definition which is universally agreed upon, and which only I am disputing, that is an assertion that requires some proof.
Let me put it this way. Poverty, in an absolute sense not a relative one, DOES make people hungry, ill-clothed, diseased, and powerless. And that is far, far more important than the fact that poverty, in a relative sense not an absolute one, makes some people envious and resentful.
Oh, yes, it will. Because the idea is not to make people poor and keep them that way – it’s to make it so that they can only cease to be poor by providing service to the rich. Most everyone who works for a living, serving the owners of the company they work for, does that only because if they didn’t serve they would be poor. It is that baseline of poverty, and the denial to almost everyone of a chance to produce wealth on their own, through small farming or small business ownership or independent professional practice, that reduces most of the population to servitude.
And it is that servitude that produces the wealth of the rich, just as slavery once produced the wealth of the great planters. Without it, the rich wouldn’t be rich.
The idea behind starving a lab rat isn’t to keep them hungry. It’s to make it so they will do what you want in exchange for being fed.
The poor in this country are those who are unable, for one reason or another, to serve the rich and so become non-poor. Or those whose employment is so meagre that they are poor even though employed. The number of jobs available at any time which are paid well enough to lift one above poverty is not small, but it is finite. If a poor person were to, say, correct a substance-abuse habit, or develop better work habits, or take better pains with his/her appearance, or learn some employable skills, and get such a job, he would be occupying one of those finite slots. Someone else would therefore be excluded. It’s all competitive – an easy competititon at that level (except in recessions) and you really have to be a loser to fall through the cracks, but still a competition.
On this, I agree. However, what’s institutionalized is the existence of poverty, not any particular person’s being poor. People are indeed at least partially responsible for the fact that they, rather than other people, are poor.
Before answering this, I must ask what your objection is to a definition of poverty that includes absolutes. Why is it that we can’t agree on that one?
On this, we disagree. It would be quite easy to cure poverty (in the absolute sense I mean). (Curing relative poverty is another matter and IMO not worth the bother. Probably not even desirable.) All we would have to do, is provide everyone with a guaranteed income that covers food, shelter, clothing, and medical care. This would require higher taxes on the rich, but ones they could easily afford and in most cases wouldn’t even mind paying, if it were just the money (tax them for some other purpose and they’d barely grumble).
Why isn’t it done, then? Because without the constant threat of sinking into poverty, with the dire consequences poverty brings, people would be less tractable, less servile, more aggressive in their bargaining demands, and more willing to take the risks involved in seeking financial independence through owning their own businesses.
It’s not the money, really. It’s the power.
However, that fatal flaw has historically been expressed in many different ways. We no longer have hereditary monarchy. We no longer have hereditary social classes or caste systems. We no longer have chattel slavery or serfdom. And there was a time when all of these social institutions were regarded as unalterable, consequences of human original sin. Yet all are gone.
Utopia is impossible, but progress is not. The end of poverty will not bring utopia, or a society without flaws. It will just mean the end of poverty.