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InvisibleSilversoul
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Re: If our job was to build the "Kindgdom of Heaven" on Earth... [Re: TameMe]
    #4983761 - 11/26/05 05:08 PM (18 years, 4 months ago)

Not for a while, I'm afraid. I just realized a bunch of shit I'm going to have to include, which may take me years. Then there's the issue of trying to get published when I'm basically a nobody. However, I can post the first chapter, if you like. It deals with several misconceptions about poverty.


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OfflineTameMe
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Re: If our job was to build the "Kindgdom of Heaven" on Earth... [Re: Silversoul]
    #4984208 - 11/26/05 07:06 PM (18 years, 4 months ago)

yes please...that would be nice =)

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InvisibleSilversoul
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Re: If our job was to build the "Kindgdom of Heaven" on Earth... [Re: TameMe]
    #4987918 - 11/27/05 09:28 PM (18 years, 4 months ago)

Quote:

It is often assumed that poverty is an inevitable aspect of human existence, and that the best one can do to help is give to charity or support social programs that make life easier for those who are less fortunate. There are others who believe that the poor are victims of the inherently predatory nature of the free market, and that socialism is the only solution. Still others think that the poor are simply lazy, and not motivated enough to improve their circumstances. I intend to show the fallacy in each of these beliefs, and many others. Poverty is, in fact, a product of our socioeconomic structure, but not the free market, as those on the far-left assert. Nor is it simply the product of lazy attitudes, as the right-wing Social Darwinists believe. Moreover, there is a cure for it, and it is not a painful one.

First, we must understand what poverty is. Obviously, we can understand poverty in a more general sense as a lack of wealth, but the degree of that lacking must be better defined. There are two types of poverty: absolute and relative. Absolute poverty is the level of poverty at which one can not afford the basic means of survival. People at this level of poverty often die of hunger-related illnesses. Relative poverty is dependent upon the wealth distribution of the country in question. A person is relatively poor if they are in the bottom portion of their country?s income distribution. Now, when I say that poverty can be cured, I should probably elaborate: Relative poverty will remain with us insofar as there will still be inequalities of income, but it is possible to make those inequalities exceedingly more meritocratic, such that they are due almost entirely to differences in work ethic, intelligence, talent, or other virtues unrelated to the circumstances one?s birth. Thus, anyone with the right ambition and/or the right gifts should be able to improve their situation if my proposal is carried out.

In this chapter, I will address some common fallacies and misconceptions about poverty. It is important that one be able to discern fact from fiction in order to fully understand later in the book where I focus on the true causes of poverty, its solution, why the solution works, and why it is the best possible solution. For the remainder of this chapter, I will debunk some of the most common falsehoods on the subject.

?Poverty is natural?

It is often claimed or assumed that poverty is a natural state of affairs which cannot be changed. The absurdity of this claim becomes apparent if we look back far enough in human history to when we were hunter-gatherers on the African savanna. The earth is ripe with plenty of natural resources, which was the original form of wealth that mattered, long before currency was invented. While a common perception is that hunter-gatherers were always occupied in a constant struggle to stay alive, available anthropological shows this not to be the case. In the Kalahari Desert of southern Africa, the !Kung tribe today lives a hunter-gatherer lifestyle which is most likely not dissimilar from how our ancient ancestors lived. It is interesting to note that despite living in a desert, they spend much less time working to support themselves than the average American. Now, consider that a desert is the most desolate of biomes, and imagine the ease with which ancient peoples living on the savanna or in the jungles and forests survived. Naturally, things like predators, disease, and violence threatened the survival of our ancient ancestors, but there was no scarcity of resources, save for the occasional natural disaster such as drought or flooding.

Even today, despite the heavy development and vast population growth since the industrial revolution, there are still sufficient natural resources for everyone on the planet to be well-nourished. So if there are sufficient resources for everyone, why are people still dying of hunger? An uneven distribution wealth lies at the heart of the matter. People are hungry not because there is no food, but because they can?t afford food. This brings me to my next item.

?We could end poverty by sending enough foreign aid?

This statement is actually not entirely inaccurate, but the underlying assumptions of people who make this assertion are often uninformed, and even those who are making correct assumptions often missing the full picture. Na?ve leftists will sometimes claim that America could end world hunger by spending its military budget on sending food to all the poor countries in the world. But as I mentioned before, the problem is not a lack of food, but a lack of the means to buy food. Even if the food were given away, this would be disastrous for the economy of most countries. This is because many Third World countries, particularly in Africa, rely on agriculture as their primary export. If the market were to be flooded with cheap or free food, their livelihood would be destroyed, and with it, the national economy. Their whole country would, at best, become dependent upon handouts from the United States indefinitely. For this very reason, the United Nations no longer supports food aid except in special cases such as famine.

However, there is another kind of foreign aid which can be more helpful. It is known as developmental aid. This is central to the plan for eliminating poverty laid out by economist Jeffrey Sachs in his book, The End of Poverty. Developmental aid helps finance the building of infrastructure in poorly developed countries. As Sachs points out, many countries lack the trade and commerce routes and means of communication to allow people who live in more isolated areas access to the world market. Governments are often unable to build this infrastructure because either there is not enough national income to tax or the taxes they do collect get spent up paying off foreign debts. With developmental aid, the necessary infrastructure can get built with funds that would otherwise be unavailable. I do not contest the fact that developmental aid can help, and it may actually be able to solve world poverty if used in accordance with Sachs? plan. However, as I will elaborate in later chapters, it is an imperfect and inferior solution to the one I will present.

?Capitalism causes poverty?

Having majored in Sociology in college, I heard no shortage of these kinds of statements from bright-eyed, idealistic leftists in my classes, including many professors, some of them self-described Marxists. To address this argument, we should first define what is meant by capitalism. In this context, capitalism refers to a market economy in which the means of production are privately owned. In a later chapter, I will dissect the term ?means of production? to explain why the solution to poverty involves a system which is neither capitalist nor socialist. But for now, let us address this particular argument about capitalism, particularly with regards to the market economy. Leftists often assume that capitalism is a zero sum game. That is, one can only get ahead by keeping someone else down. Following this logic, they claim that the United States enjoys all its wealth and high standard of living only by keeping other countries in poverty, pointing to the sweatshops in Southeast Asia which make so many of the products we consume. However, most economists could identify the fallacy here. The sweatshops, meager as their wages might be, still provide their workers with more money than they would otherwise have, and improve the nation?s economy as a whole, allowing the government the resources it needs to help improve the lives of their people. Now, let me clarify something: I find many of the practices of these sweatshops deplorable, and would never dream of defending them, but I bring this up only in regards to the argument I am addressing. Clearly, the United States is not responsible for coercing these nations into poverty when U.S. companies are actually stimulating economic growth for them. Now, there is the issue of how well economic growth measures national well-being, but I will get to that in another chapter.

The same argument is used when speaking of poverty within a given country. They claim that in order for one person to get ahead in the market, someone else must be held back. Thus, as the old clich? goes, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. While this can be said to be the situation in many countries, it has not been true for all. The four so-called ?East Asian Tigers? -- Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea -- all experienced rapid economic growth and industrialization during the later half of the 20th century, during which time the income gap shrank among their populations, for reasons which you will better understand by the end of this book. So clearly there can be cases where the rich and poor both get richer, sometimes with the poor doing so at a higher rate. Even in cases where the income gap widens, the poor can often still be better off in absolute terms than they were before, even if they are poorer relative to their country?s income distribution.

Some other common arguments against capitalism often cite examples of things which have nothing to do with a free market. For example, people often cite the power that major corporations exert over government policy. But this is the antithesis of a free market. A free market means the government stays out of the economy. Government intervention in the economy, whether influenced by labor, business, or any other special interest, is not a feature of a free market. It is indicative of a regulated or manipulated market. This goes for farm subsidies, corporate welfare, legal monopolies, and any other pork barrel projects in the federal budget. Obviously, it also goes for things like environmental regulations, social programs, labor laws, and so on, and I do not mean to imply that regulation is always bad. However, let?s call a spade a spade and recognize government intervention as government intervention, and not as an inherent feature of capitalism.

?Liberalization of the Third World economies will end poverty?

On the other end of the spectrum are the neoliberals such as those running the World Bank and IMF who believe that the solution to poverty is to deregulate Third World economies and make them pinnacles of free enterprise. It is true that a country opening up its market and reducing social spending can stimulate economic growth, but that growth is often very unequal, mainly benefiting the top income earners without helping the poor much if at all. Meanwhile, the cutting of social programs that those poor people may have once depended on ends up making them worse off than before, because they have no more social safety net to ease the effects of poverty on them. Sometimes, education and health care are privatized as well, barring many people from an opportunity they once had for better lives. To add insult to injury, such deregulation programs often include privatization of water, sometimes to the point of making it illegal to collect rainwater. Also, the traditional practice of gathering seeds from a harvest has been outlawed in many countries due to patent laws over the seeds. Clearly, privatization can often much too far. What?s tragic is that many of the countries following these programs aren?t doing so because they want to, but rather because they are in debt to the World Bank or IMF, and have to do as they say in order to receive any future loans, which they will again be unable to pay off, trapping them in a vicious cycle, making them little more than slaves to these international organizations.

?Education for everyone will end poverty?

This type of argument is known in logic as a fallacy of composition. It assumes that something is true for the whole if it is true for some or even all of its parts. It is equivalent to arguing that because any one person has a almost no chance of winning the lottery that therefore there is almost no chance of anyone winning the lottery. In short, this argument assumes that if getting an education can help an individual get out of poverty that everyone getting an education would help everyone escape poverty. It doesn?t work that way. Things like education can only provide a comparative advantage, meaning that in order to help you get ahead, there have to be a sufficiently large group of people who don?t have an education. Once everyone has an education, the bar gets raised, people have to find a new comparative advantage to get ahead. It is easy to see this trend in the United States. In pre-industrial times, one didn?t even need any education in order to live comfortably by the day?s standards. Even for much of the 20th century, one could get by fairly easily on just a High School education. Now, we see more and more pressure to go to college, and that, too, is beginning to lose its comparative advantage. If this trend continues, we may even see a generation in which people with graduate degrees cannot find work. All the while, we condemn our children to waste an ever-increasing portion of their youth(not to mention an ever-increasing chunk of our life savings) taking classes and doing homework that often has little to do with the actual jobs they?ll end up at, just to keep their heads above water. We must stop this game of normalizing previous comparative advantages and examine the root causes of poverty instead.

?People are poor because they are lazy?

This argument is all too popular among the right. It?s a nifty little substitute for actual thought. Yes, it?s true that many people particularly in post-industrialized welfare states will be content to live on the dole rather than work for a living. However, this does not explain poverty in countries with no social safety net, nor does it address the unequal opportunities available to the lower class. I need not point out that people in poor communities go to schools which make for a very poor learning atmosphere, as this point has been made ad nauseam. Others have responded that this is largely because of the delinquents who go to those schools. This also has a lot of truth to it. What tends to make one the most significant differences, however, is not where a child goes to school, but rather what their life is like at home. If a child lives in a single-parent household, as many poor children do, and that parent is working most of the time, then the child will miss out on some crucial parenting that they desperately need to get ahead. If their parents aren?t there to help them with their homework, then the child may not get it or even do it at all. If the parents aren?t there to discipline their child, then the child may develop irresponsible or harmful habits. If the parents aren?t there to keep track of where they are, then that child may go out and get into trouble, or fall in with the wrong crowd. Having a parent around is crucial to help a child develop into a healthy, responsible adult. But why is the parent often not around? Because they are working to try and make ends meet. This could explain why many poor single mothers prefer to stay on welfare while their child grows up. It may be the best hope they have for the child not to end up on welfare themselves.

Some people will point to some of the token success stories of people who managed to get out of poverty. But this goes back to the comparative advantage issue we looked at with education. More often than not, such people are smarter or more talented than their peers, and it is precisely because they have this comparative advantage over them that they are able to escape the poverty trap. The top student in any graduating High School class, even a poor inner-city school, should be able to get into college with a full-ride scholarship. But not everyone can be the top student. Thus, what is true for the individual does not logically follow for the whole.

?People are poor because they have too many children?

This argument is most often made in reference to Third World poverty by people who have no understanding of the socioeconomic differences between their respective countries. They assume that because children are so expensive to raise in the United States and other developed nations, that the same is true for underdeveloped nations. This argument reeks of ignorance. In Third World countries where there are no child labor laws, children tend to be a financial asset rather than a burden. After just a few years of raising them, they are old enough to enter the workforce and bring home income for the family. On top of that, these countries don?t tend to have social security either, so a family relies on their children to take care of them in their old age. The fact is that reduction in fertility rate usually occurs after industrialization, indicating that it is an effect of economic improvement, not a cause. A poor family of three or four in an undeveloped sub-Saharan country is likely to be worse off financially than a family of seven or eight.



I realize I may not have addressed all issues pertaining to poverty and how it is perceived, but hopefully I?ve answered some of the more significant ones. If there are still some issues I haven?t addressed to your satisfaction, keep reading. There are some that I will cover more in detail in later chapters.




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Offlinesignoffate
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Re: If our job was to build the "Kindgdom of Heaven" on Earth... [Re: Silversoul]
    #5033806 - 12/08/05 11:49 AM (18 years, 3 months ago)

I just wanted to share what I read last night with all who read this still read this thread.

Mathew 13 (New testiment)

24Jesus told them another parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. 25But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. 26When the wheat sprouted and formed heads, then the weeds also appeared.

27"The owner's servants came to him and said, 'Sir, didn't you sow good seed in your field? Where then did the weeds come from?'

28" 'An enemy did this,' he replied.
"The servants asked him, 'Do you want us to go and pull them up?'

29" 'No,' he answered, 'because while you are pulling the weeds, you may root up the wheat with them. 30Let both grow together until the harvest. At that time I will tell the harvesters: First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned; then gather the wheat and bring it into my barn.' "
The Parables of the Mustard Seed and the Yeast
31He told them another parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. 32Though it is the smallest of all your seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and perch in its branches."

33He told them still another parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough."

34Jesus spoke all these things to the crowd in parables; he did not say anything to them without using a parable. 35So was fulfilled what was spoken through the prophet:
"I will open my mouth in parables,
I will utter things hidden since the creation of the world."[c]
The Parable of the Weeds Explained
36Then he left the crowd and went into the house. His disciples came to him and said, "Explain to us the parable of the weeds in the field."

37He answered, "The one who sowed the good seed is the Son of Man. 38The field is the world, and the good seed stands for the sons of the kingdom. The weeds are the sons of the evil one, 39and the enemy who sows them is the devil. The harvest is the end of the age, and the harvesters are angels.

40"As the weeds are pulled up and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of the age. 41The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil. 42They will throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. 43Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He who has ears, let him hear.
The Parables of the Hidden Treasure and the Pearl
44"The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.

45"Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. 46When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it.
The Parable of the Net
47"Once again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was let down into the lake and caught all kinds of fish. 48When it was full, the fishermen pulled it up on the shore. Then they sat down and collected the good fish in baskets, but threw the bad away. 49This is how it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come and separate the wicked from the righteous 50and throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

51"Have you understood all these things?" Jesus asked.
"Yes," they replied.

52He said to them, "Therefore every teacher of the law who has been instructed about the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old."

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OfflineEuG
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Re: If our job was to build the "Kindgdom of Heaven" on Earth... [Re: signoffate]
    #5033941 - 12/08/05 12:37 PM (18 years, 3 months ago)

In my opinion Utopia is a society where everyone has their physical needs meet, and nothing else, then there is no class distinction, there is no materialism, people should not work for money, they should work to make food, and then barter. That would be the only way that everyone would be happy! It is now impossible to go back to such a simple life because our world is so corrupt with capitalistic ideals and everything, but a simple world is the Utopian world

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