Editor,
In his column on Monday, Joe Wagner stands courageously on his moral high ground, criticizes name calling, and declares he won’t be “bullied into compliance with… boogey-man idioms.” He then proceeds to explain that there’s no such thing as an honest rich person and that the wealthy are the direct cause of crime, death, starvation, genocide and war.
His main argument can be summed up as: “Anyone who disagrees with me just hates poor people and wants them to all to die slowly.”
As evidence of his claim that the rich are the primary source of all societal ills, he offers up 10,000 years of history, which he claims show the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor. Well, that’s mostly true, but only if you ignore the last few decades.
According to United Nations studies, the number of people living on a dollar a day has decreased by half in the past fifteen years.
This year, the Penn World Tables, created by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, found that wealth across the globe has increased substantially in the past couple generations.
This does not mean that poverty has been eradicated. But this rise in wealth is unprecedented in human history. And this is at a time when economies across the globe, on average, have become more liberated, meaning that markets are freer than they’ve ever been in most of 10,000 years of human history.
According to reports by the Heritage Foundation, some of the most regulated economies in the world are found in Africa, and the continent as a whole has also received about $1 trillion in humanitarian aid since 1970. And yet, the countries that compose the continent remain some of the poorest in the world.
In Africa, you can see the result in some of the “progressive” policies that Wagner advocates being carried out with some of the worst results on the planet. And if one needs an example closer to home, just look to Detroit.
In fact, if one looks at recent history, we find plenty of evidence to oppose Wagner’s “destroy the rich” approach to solving the world’s problems.
If Wagner sincerely cares about the poor as much as he claims in his emotional column, he would do well to sincerely listen to the arguments of people like myself who advocate economic liberty, which is sometimes labeled with the “boogey-man idiom” capitalism.
It’s not some master plan by the wealthy to protect their interests at the expense of the poor.
Like Wagner, we do care about the poor and want to see everyone prosper. Unlike Wagner, however, we’re more interested in advancing real solutions than failed ideologies.
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Kevin Killough
UNM alumnus
