2005/06/26 - José Carlos Rodríguez - Libertad Digital

Enemies Of The Poor

This Sunday, enemies of the poor gathered in Madrid and in other places around the world. “Zero poverty”, they demanded –having done nothing to reduce it. Nothing good, I mean.

This Sunday, enemies of the poor gathered in Madrid and in other places around the world. “Zero poverty”, they demanded –having done nothing to reduce it. Nothing good, I mean. If there is anything to highlight about this demonstration, beside the insignificant number of participants compared to Madrid’s three previous marches, is that its message was terribly poor.

The entire program could not be more indigent. After offering up various statistics on poverty in the world, whose origin was never revealed, the demonstrators moved on to say “despite all the efforts made over the past decades, the gap between rich and poor continues to grow”. This is patently false. As Andrés Gil opportunely reminded everyone, Spanish economist Xavier Sala i Martin directed the best constructed study on world poverty and inequality. He concluded that “the poverty rate measured by people living on a dollar a day has dropped from 20% to 5% in the past 20 years. The rate as measured by those living on two dollars a day has fallen from 44% to 18%. There were between 300 and 500 million fewer poor people in 1998 than in the 1960s.” The protagonists of this historic and unprecedented decline in poverty are the Asian Tigers, China and India. Their common denominator is they all opened up to the free market and foreign goods: in short, to capitalism and globalization.  

In 1979, one of those bits of data that capture the public’s imagination was published. “20% of the world’s population holds 80% of the wealth, while 80% of the population must divide up the remaining 20%.” Today, things have changed and that 20% of the population possesses 75% of the world’s wealth. Not only has inequality not increased, but it has been lowered. And this was possible because what spread over the last two decades and a half is the source of wealth creation, capitalism –something that was badly distributed. And let’s not forget that if 20% of the population owns 75% of the wealth, it is because that 20% produced it! If rich nations are precisely the most capitalistic ones, it would appear common sense to say the thing to do is extend this model, as has happened over these past two decades, not try to eliminate capitalism.

But that is exactly what the “Zero Poverty” organizers intend to do. They say “the reason for inequality and poverty can be found in the way human beings organize their political and economic activities. International trade and financial speculation benefit only the most powerful economies.” So it is globalization, the same globalization that managed to lift millions out of poverty, and not poverty itself the Sunday gatherers want to get rid of. And what is their alternative? The same as Kyoto, a world government. They say it is “vital to advance toward global, democratic and participative governance.”

The model they propose has produced more poverty than any other in history: socialism. They even ask for the protection of “public services from liberalizations and privatizations.” In North Korea, the world’s armpit where such ideas are actually practiced to perfection, the number of dead from starvation is in the millions: and we aren’t talking about environmentalism. They are repulsed by wealth creation, blaming it for every imaginable evil. And in particular the imaginable, because the truth is that wealth creation only brings benefits.

The environmentalist and anti-globalization movements, the motor driving this demonstration, do not see poverty as a threat, but the exact opposite. They watch in horror as capitalism advances, raising wealth and reducing poverty. In a world of progress, their message loses importance. And their black beast, free societies, is strengthened. Do not let them block globalization and international trade, the best liberators of our time.