Stephanie’s ex-husband. But we’re more likely to be mugged in the District of Columbia. Not that we should begrudge the crimes of those poor people. They’re just practicing politics on a small scale. If they’d listen to their own political leaders, they’d put down the gun and pick up the ballot box, and steal from everybody instead of just us. Political systems must love poverty—they produce so much of it. Poor people make easier targets for a demagogue. No Mao or even Jiang Zemin is likely to arise on the New York Stock Exchange floor. And politicians in democracies benefit from destitution, too. The United States has had a broad range of poverty programs for thirty years. Those programs have failed. Millions of people are still poor. And those people vote for politicians who favor keeping the poverty programs in place. There’s a Matt Drudge conspiracy theory in that somewhere. Many religions claim to admire poverty. And some religions even advocate the practice of being poor. (Although all those religions seem willing to accept large cash donations.) You’d think that businessmen, in the search for new customers, would always be opposed to impecuniousness. But Kathie Lee Gifford is not alone in depending on destitute workers to take pay-nothing jobs. Then there is a certain kind of environmentalist who thinks that human deprivation means plant and animal wealth. Tanzania’s experience of rhino- subsidizing rich tourists versus rhino-killing impoverished poachers argues against this. (And an Asia where every man could afford Viagra would be the best thing that could happen to the rhinoceros.) But many “greens” still believe that increasing human prosperity is wrong. For example, the famous population- control advocate Paul Ehrlich has said, “Giving society cheap, abundant energy . . . would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” Finally, general poverty benefits specific wealth. If most people are broke, that’s great for the wealthy few. They get cheap household help, low ancestral- manor real-estate prices, and no crowds on Martha’s Vineyard. This explains the small, nasty plutocracies in impoverished countries. Maybe it also accounts for the rich socialists prominent on the political landscape for the last two centuries.
I began this book by asking why some parts of the world are rich and others are poor, and I naturally had prejudices about what the answers would be. I favored
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