programs, we’d still pay taxes. And those tax revenues would be spent—ideally —on such reasonable things as schools, roads, and national defense, in case the British invade again and try to hand over Wall Street to the Red Chinese. Or take the real-world example of two kids who graduate from college with honors. One is an admirable idealist. The other is on the make. The idealist joins Friends of the Earth and chains himself to a sequoia. The sharpie goes to work for an investment bank selling fishy derivatives and makes $500,000 a year. Even assuming that the selfish young banker cheats the IRS—and he will—he’ll end up paying $100,000 a year in taxes: income tax, property tax, sales tax, etc. While the admirable idealist has saved one tree (if the logging company doesn’t own bolt cutters), the pirate in a necktie has contributed to society $100,000 worth of schools, roads, and U.S. Marines, not to mention Interior Department funding sufficient to save any number of trees and the young idealists chained thereto. And if the soulless yuppie cheats the IRS so well that he ends up keeping the whole half million? That cash isn’t going to sit in his cuff link box. Whether spent or saved, the money winds up invested somewhere, and maybe that investment leads to the creation of the twenty-first century’s equivalent of the moldboard plow, the microchip, or the mocha latte. Society wins. Wealth brings great benefits to the world. Rich people are heroes. They don’t usually mean to be, but that’s their problem, not ours. Almost everyone in the world now admits that the free market tells us the economic truth. Economic liberty makes wealth. Economic repression makes poverty. Poverty is hard, wretched, and humiliating. Poverty is schoolgirl prostitutes trying to feed their parents in Cuba. Poverty is John driving around in the Tanzanian night looking for the doctor while his daughter dies. It’s grandmothers begging on the streets of Moscow. But what poverty is not is sad. Poverty is infuriating. These things don’t have to happen. These conditions don’t need to exist. We can’t solve all the problems of life, but we can solve the problem of gross, worldwide material deprivation. The solution doesn’t work perfectly. The solution doesn’t work uniformly. Nonetheless, the solution works. If we can’t fix everything, let’s fix the easy stuff. We know how to get rid of poverty. We know how to create wealth. But because of laziness, fear,
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