What if There Were No Poor Among Us?

[_emilysmith]

Very true, but it would be an acre more than most people had now. I wonder if people would care for their land, or if they would just treat it like so many hopeless people treat handouts today.

[_Droopy]

Droopy, it's an excellent analogy, as you yourself have helped to further it. The top predators contribute scraps of rotted flesh to the underclass, after having reaped the benefits of having a majority underclass their entire lives.

Capitalism created the vast majority middle class, Buffalo. The Great Society created the underclass.

I didn't say anything about government, though. I'm simply saying that if there were no poor, there could also be no rich.
Poor and rich are relative measures, and there is simply a limit to the amount of wealth in the world at any given time, given a finite amount of people and resources.

How is wealth created, Buffalo, and why has middle class affluence long been the norm in America and, to a lesser extent, in all western democracies?

[_Melchett]

Droopy, it's an excellent analogy, as you yourself have helped to further it. The top predators contribute scraps of rotted flesh to the underclass, after having reaped the benefits of having a majority underclass their entire lives.

Capitalism created the vast majority middle class, Buffalo. The Great Society created the underclass.

You actually buy into this?

I didn't say anything about government, though. I'm simply saying that if there were no poor, there could also be no rich.
Poor and rich are relative measures, and there is simply a limit to the amount of wealth in the world at any given time, given a finite amount of people and resources.

How is wealth created, Buffalo, and why has middle class affluence long been the norm in America and, to a lesser extent, in all western democracies?

Please, put down the pamphlets. "A lesser extent, in all Western democracies?"

Next you'll be telling me that Edison invented the lightbulb.

[_Buffalo]

Droopy, it's an excellent analogy, as you yourself have helped to further it. The top predators contribute scraps of rotted flesh to the underclass, after having reaped the benefits of having a majority underclass their entire lives.

Capitalism created the vast majority middle class, Buffalo. The Great Society created the underclass.

I didn't say anything about government, though. I'm simply saying that if there were no poor, there could also be no rich.
Poor and rich are relative measures, and there is simply a limit to the amount of wealth in the world at any given time, given a finite amount of people and resources.

How is wealth created, Buffalo, and why has middle class affluence long been the norm in America and, to a lesser extent, in all western democracies?

Actually, we didn't have a middle class until after the great society. Before that it was like third world nations - a few very wealthy elite and masses of poor people.

People create wealth, but wealth in not infinite. It's always a finite number, and without a base of poor people supporting them, there can be no wealthy.

[_Droopy]

Actually, we didn't have a middle class until after the great society. Before that it was like third world nations - a few very wealthy elite and masses of poor people.

Let me see if I'm getting this straight, before 1964-1970 and beyond, there was no middle class in America, and the American population was characterized by a gigantic mass of poor and dispossessed toiling serfs, living in Third World conditions, ruled by a tiny oligarchy of rich industrialists in stove pipe hats and black suits with tails, chomping on expensive cigars and throwing pennies from their limousines to the ragged children of the empoverished, toiling masses as they drive to work each morning, and it was then the Great Society welfare programs that were the engine and source of economic growth and prosperity only beginning in the mid-1960s.

Government, and government welfare spending then, is the source and engine of economic growth?

People create wealth,

A wild dodge like this isn't going to cut it, Buff. How is wealth created? I'd like to see your understanding of that phenomena, not a nebulous evasion.

but wealth in not infinite. It's always a finite number, and without a base of poor people supporting them, there can be no wealthy.

I'm not at all sure I understand this, Buff. How can a vast mass of poor people support general affluence (I assume here when you say "wealthy" you mean not just the top 3% or so, but the entire middle and upper middle classes)?

If the wealth of the affluent is based upon the poverty of the poor, we would appear to have a severe problem in envisioning just how that state of affairs could come about in a free market system. Its quite obvious how this state of affairs could come about in a socialist system (which, in point of fact, is just how all socialist societies are actually structured in the end), but its not at all clear just how masses of poor people could ever generate the wealth of the rich since those masses of poor would not have the resources to actually consume any but a tiny fraction of the wealth they created. Vast warehouses of unsold goods are of no use to "the rich" if they cannot be sold to consumers who themselves have the resources to purchase them.

The capitalist's real incentive and hope, it would seem, would be for a generally prosperous and economically upwardly mobile general population capable of consuming ever larger quantities of goods and services in ever widening circles.

With a vast pool of poor, destitute workers as the base of society, the rich could really only become and stay rich by hoarding gold and silver and other real property (like works of art) and holding onto them while the toiling masses try to subsist. If the masses cannot buy and consume the products of their own labor to a sufficient degree, the rich cannot either become or maintain their wealth. There factories would be producing goods and commodities with only the most minimal of markets for them, and if they cannot cover the costs of production in the sale of goods to the masses, there is little point in producing much of anything at all.

Actual economic history shows, after all, the exact opposite of what you are claiming. The people that invented aluminum foil became rich, and their employees moved en masse into the middle classes by producing something, in large quantities, that large numbers of people wanted to buy and use. This vast mass of buyers could afford to purchase, on a continual basis -and long before the seventies - large quantities of aluminum foil (and wash machines, stoves, vacuum cleaners, clothing, toasters, TVs, cars, radios, superballs, silly putty, Barbie dolls, surfboards etc.) because their own ever increasing wages and living standards embedded within an environment of ever expanding economic growth throughout the economy, made possible by ever increasing rates of production (through competitive innovation, technological advance, better management, modest taxation and regulation etc.), made their demand for goods and their ability to pay for them sufficient to keep the rich, job producing classes rich and to keep them continually investing in new lines of production and in expanding existing lines, providing more jobs and ever rising wages.

Its not that the poor are the foundation of the rich. In a free market society (if it really is), the rich and the poor are in an inextricably linked symbiotic relationship in which the wealth of the wealthy is dependent upon the rising affluence (rising wages, consumption, demand) of those in lower economic strata.

Wealth creation does not generate poverty. This is counter intuitive on its face, and historically untenable. This is tantamount to claiming that work - productive labor itself - leads inherently to impoverishment.

[_Buffalo]

Actually, we didn't have a middle class until after the great society. Before that it was like third world nations - a few very wealthy elite and masses of poor people.

Let me see if I'm getting this straight, before 1964-1970 and beyond, there was no middle class in America, and the American population was characterized by a gigantic mass of poor and dispossessed toiling serfs, living in Third World conditions, ruled by a tiny oligarchy of rich industrialists in stove pipe hats and black suits with tails, chomping on expensive cigars and throwing pennies from their limousines to the ragged children of the empoverished, toiling masses as they drive to work each morning, and it was then the Great Society welfare programs that were the engine and source of economic growth and prosperity only beginning in the mid-1960s.

No, I got mixed up on this one. For some reason I was thinking FDR, not LBJ.

[_Buffalo]

A wild dodge like this isn't going to cut it, Buff. How is wealth created? I'd like to see your understanding of that phenomena, not a nebulous evasion.

but wealth in not infinite. It's always a finite number, and without a base of poor people supporting them, there can be no wealthy.

I'm not at all sure I understand this, Buff. How can a vast mass of poor people support general affluence (I assume here when you say "wealthy" you mean not just the top 3% or so, but the entire middle and upper middle classes)?

If the wealth of the affluent is based upon the poverty of the poor, we would appear to have a severe problem in envisioning just how that state of affairs could come about in a free market system. Its quite obvious how this state of affairs could come about in a socialist system (which, in point of fact, is just how all socialist societies are actually structured in the end), but its not at all clear just how masses of poor people could ever generate the wealth of the rich since those masses of poor would not have the resources to actually consume any but a tiny fraction of the wealth they created. Vast warehouses of unsold goods are of no use to "the rich" if they cannot be sold to consumers who themselves have the resources to purchase them.

The capitalist's real incentive and hope, it would seem, would be for a generally prosperous and economically upwardly mobile general population capable of consuming ever larger quantities of goods and services in ever widening circles.

With a vast pool of poor, destitute workers as the base of society, the rich could really only become and stay rich by hoarding gold and silver and other real property (like works of art) and holding onto them while the toiling masses try to subsist. If the masses cannot buy and consume the products of their own labor to a sufficient degree, the rich cannot either become or maintain their wealth. There factories would be producing goods and commodities with only the most minimal of markets for them, and if they cannot cover the costs of production in the sale of goods to the masses, there is little point in producing much of anything at all.

Actual economic history shows, after all, the exact opposite of what you are claiming. The people that invented aluminum foil became rich, and their employees moved en masse into the middle classes by producing something, in large quantities, that large numbers of people wanted to buy and use. This vast mass of buyers could afford to purchase, on a continual basis -and long before the seventies - large quantities of aluminum foil (and wash machines, stoves, vacuum cleaners, clothing, toasters, TVs, cars, radios, superballs, silly putty, Barbie dolls, surfboards etc.) because their own ever increasing wages and living standards embedded within an environment of ever expanding economic growth throughout the economy, made possible by ever increasing rates of production (through competitive innovation, technological advance, better management, modest taxation and regulation etc.), made their demand for goods and their ability to pay for them sufficient to keep the rich, job producing classes rich and to keep them continually investing in new lines of production and in expanding existing lines, providing more jobs and ever rising wages.

Its not that the poor are the foundation of the rich. In a free market society (if it really is), the rich and the poor are in an inextricably linked symbiotic relationship in which the wealth of the wealthy is dependent upon the rising affluence (rising wages, consumption, demand) of those in lower economic strata.

Wealth creation does not generate poverty. This is counter intuitive on its face, and historically untenable. This is tantamount to claiming that work - productive labor itself - leads inherently to impoverishment.

You cannot shift more resources to fewer people without leaving the majority with less, Droopy. That's basic math.

[_Droopy]

It depends upon how attractive the hypothetical socialist system was. If the hypothetical socialist system was assumed to work great and produce a GDP even greater than that of your hypothetical laissez faire system, then I might go with that one. But on the other hand, I’m pretty good at competing in the free market, so perhaps I’d be better served by being rich in the well-functioning laissez faire system than merely average in the socialist one. After all, I can’t live a life of luxury off of the work of others unless I’m winning at the game of capitalism.

Enough bobbing and weaving please. Here's the crux of the OP:

If it were possible to abolish poverty from the human condition utilizing either a free market capitalist economic order, or a socialist economic order, which would be preferred, assuming, for all intents and purposes, the same outcome?

If poverty qua poverty could be abolished in either system, which would be preferrible? The question was not how well you or anybody else could do under either system, but that system's relation to the abolition of poverty.

I don’t think anybody would say that “economic equality” is more important than the abolition of poverty. Even Karl Marx argued that as society progressed towards Communism, they first needed to pass through the status of Capitalism where the poor themselves created wealth. Marx’s revolution wasn’t about the unproductive poor stealing wealth from the productive rich, but rather, about the workers claiming the right to the wealth that they themselves created.

Marx' revolution, leaving aside his fantabulous future anarchic utopia, was about capitalism moving necessarily through the state of socialism as a precondition of achieving the final state of communism. That intermediary state is one of complete, or as complete as possible economic egalitarianism among the mass of the population govrened and controlled by a totalistic state in which is thought to inhere the will and aspirations of the workers (the dictatorship of the proletariat). That state of egalitarian redistribution of wealth throughout the population is in preparation for the final state of communism, envisioned, not just as an economically egalitarian society, but a classless society.

I won't go into Marx' theoretical nonsense about the workers right to all the wealth they have created (the labor theory of value) as it isn't endemic to the point at hand, which is if either system could abolish poverty from the human condition, which means, the socialist or the free market democratic capitalist, would be preferable. If poverty could be eliminated in either system, which would be preferable, to eliminate it through redistribution of wealth and total equality of income (David Bokovoy's formulation, just for the sake of the argument), or economic growth and the productive labor and economic self sufficiency of the poor through their own productive contribution to society?

I state it this way because a part of the assumption here is that either system has a number of other effects upon society and the form that society will take, overall, and this mus be relevant to the question. In other words my question becomes, if we can eliminate poverty in either way, what price are we willing to pay for that elimination? What are the secondary effects of eliminating it in one way or the other way, and would it be worth that price?

Paul Krugman recently addressed this question when he said,

My vision of economic morality is more or less Rawlsian: we should try to create the society each of us would want if we didn’t know in advance who we’d be. And I believe that this vision leads, in practice, to something like the kind of society Western democracies have constructed since World War II — societies in which the hard-working, talented and/or lucky can get rich, but in which some of their wealth is taxed away to pay for a social safety net, because you could have been one of those who strikes out.

The existence of a social safety net is not in question. The problem of safety nets is not one of whether their should be one at all, but at what level of government, to what degree, and in what manner administered.

[_Droopy]

You cannot shift more resources to fewer people without leaving the majority with less, Droopy. That's basic math.

I have no idea what you're talking about here.

[_Buffalo]

You cannot shift more resources to fewer people without leaving the majority with less, Droopy. That's basic math.

I have no idea what you're talking about here.

Perhaps this will help: