A World Without the Poor

Just step back and consider for a moment a world in which there are no poor. Where everyone has enough money to not be considered poor or lacking and everyone has disposable income to spend not only on 'luxuries' but also to spend on lawyers, political rights, education, etc. Lets put the economic and sociological feasibility of this project aside for the time being because I am going to stay away from that.

Instead, consider how you would act in such a world. When you want to buy a new hot tub you have to find a way to produce the electricity needed for it. You could not build another coal power plant somewhere because the people living there wouldn't allow it, and in this world they would have the means to make that desire a reality. You couldn't even build a windmill somewhere because there would always be some active protester who didn't want the eyesore on his ridge top. Instead you'd have to either build a power plant in your community, and mine the coal from your backyard to power it. With every kilowatt put into the hot tub, you inhale a little breath of coal smoke. Suddenly the hot tub becomes less appealing.

Next lets drive to the store for some groceries. But would you think twice about getting into your car if you know gasoline costs $20 a gallon? If the people in the middle east, Colombia, Nigeria and Sudan were as well off as we are, do you think they'd be selling crude oil for as cheap as they are? No, they, and everyone, would be using more and they'd live in a society that didn't give away its resources. Just imagine if Saudi Arabia's oil reserves were under America instead, would we be giving the stuff away at $70 a barrel? No, we'd be calling it a strategic resource and trying to manage it responsibly so that we can drive gas cars long after the rest of the world is starving for good old fossile fuels.

Then you'd get to the store, maybe on your bike at this point, and go in. Maybe you feel like ham for dinner. But as you reach for the pork you begin to smell the stench of the hog farm just outside the grocery store, because after all no body else wants a hog farm stinking up their backyard unless its going to benefit them in the only particular way a hog farm can: giving them pork. I mean, the only other reason you'd have a hog farm would be to make a living, and if it came down to making $30,000 a year raising hogs or $30,000 a year sitting in a puffy chair writing political satire, which would you choose? Given a free choice I'm not sure how many people would choose the pigs.

When anyone says 'not in my back yard' it either means 'I'm rich enough that i don't have to deal with this' or 'I'm not rich enough and the only thing I can do is complain to the few people who will listen'.

A world without poor is probably not possible, but I'm no theoretical economist. What I do know is that we profess ideals of humanism and equality and hold the power of money in politics in contempt. But as Americans we often blatantly overlook how our own actions may contribute to perpetuating the poverty, pollution and corruption that plagues our supposedly developed and modern society.