With Bernie Sander’s most recent campaign it would be easy to believe that we are poor and getting poorer. And that the only salvation available to us is to beg government to save us.
Let us never forget – the natural state of man is poverty and the only cure to date, the ONLY condition where the lot of the everyday man has improved, is freer and more open markets:
Despite the recent recession in the West, absolute poverty is continuing to retreat in fast-growing developing countries. The escape from poverty that was once limited to the industrialized countries of the West is also happening in “the rest.”
Unfortunately, many people remain unaware of the dramatic decline in global poverty, let alone the reasons for it.
According to an announcement released this week by the World Bank, “less than 10% of the world’s population will be living in extreme poverty by the end of 2015.”
The bank has “used a new income figure of $1.90 per day to define extreme poverty, up from $1.25. It forecasts that the proportion of the world’s population in this category will fall from 12.8% in 2012 to 9.6%.”
Now, to be sure, 9.6% is still high – higher than it should/could be. So whence came you?
Grinding poverty was the norm for most ordinary people throughout human history. As recently as 1980, the World Bank estimated that 50% of the global population lived in absolute poverty.
Even in the most economically advanced parts of the world, life used to be miserable until relatively recently.
At the end of the 18th century, to give one example, France had the fourth highest standard of living of any country in the world, behind the U.S., Great Britain and the Netherlands.
Yet, 10 million of France’s 23 million people relied on some sort of public or private charity to survive, and 3 million were full-time beggars.
All of this occurred, of course, with not a single Commissar in charge of this phenomenal growth.
Cast off the chains of regulation and throw open the doors of the freer market!