Excerpt:
Imagine you are an unborn spirit whom God has condemned to a life of poverty but has permitted to choose the nation in which to live. I’m betting that most any such condemned unborn spirit would choose the United States. Why? What has historically been defined as poverty, nationally or internationally, no longer exists in the U.S. Let’s look at it.
And here’s what he finds:
— Forty-three percent of all poor households actually own their own homes. The average home owned by persons classified as poor by the Census Bureau is a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage and a porch or patio.
— Eighty percent of poor households have air conditioning. By contrast, in 1970, only 36 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.
— The typical poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens and other cities throughout Europe. (These comparisons are to the average citizens in foreign countries, not to those classified as poor.)
— Nearly three-quarters of poor households own a car; 31 percent own two or more cars.
— Ninety-seven percent of poor households have a color television; over half own two or more color televisions.
— Seventy-eight percent have a VCR or DVD player; 62 percent have cable or satellite TV reception.
— Eighty-nine percent own microwave ovens, more than half have a stereo, and a more than a third have an automatic dishwasher.
And he concludes:
Yesterday’s material poverty is all but gone. In all too many cases, it has been replaced by a more debilitating kind of poverty — behavioral poverty or poverty of the spirit. This kind of poverty refers to conduct and values that prevent the development of healthy families, work ethic and self-sufficiency. The absence of these values virtually guarantees pathological lifestyles that include: drug and alcohol addiction, crime, violence, incarceration, illegitimacy, single-parent households, dependency and erosion of work ethic. Poverty of the spirit is a direct result of the perverse incentives created by some of our efforts to address material poverty.
Instead of exporting foreign aid to poor nations, we should be investing and trading with them to encourage them to start businesses and hire people. We should also be exporting our Judeo-Chrsitian values and our economic/political views, e.g. – private property, capitalism, the Constitution, federalism,the rule of law, etc. Knowledge and good character are solutions to the problem of poverty – not wealth redistribution.
Walter Williams is my #2 favorite economist.
WINTERY KNIGHT 