🠈 Poverty 🠊
An Examination of Poverty
The poverty refers to situations where people have little in the way of material possessions. In extreme cases, poor people lack food, shelter and clothing.
Radicals on the left claim that the way to reduce poverty is to raise taxes. The Democratic Party, in particular, seems to hold that if we just took enough money away from the people that poverty would magically end.
I hate naive ideologies that depend on magic.
Rather than chanting political slogans, as if such slogans were magical incantations, I think we need to look at how our social structures to figure out what is causing the increased poverty.
We cannot start examining poverty until we define the term. I will write a simple definition.
Poverty is a state in which people do not own things.
Please note: poverty is defined in the negative. It is the lack of material goods.
The solution to poverty will not come by looking at poverty in and of itself. The solution to poverty is to look at the thing that is lacking.
The thing that is lacking is ownership. Poor people do not own things. It is the lack of ownership that makes poor people poor.
I contend that the first step to reducing poverty is to look at our terminology. The word "poverty" implies lack of ownership. Poor people don't own anything.
To get rid of poverty, we need to look at ownership. I believe that, by examining how ownership plays out in our society, we can figure out ways to reduce poverty.
I contend that there are different structures for organizing businesses. I want to examine different businesses models, tax structures and social structures to see how they affect ownership. My goal in examining these structures is to figure out which structures lead to a society with broad based ownership and which business models appear to leave people out in the cold.