Why Some People Are Poorer - Henry Hazlitt - Mises Institute

Why Some People Are Poorer - Henry Hazlitt - Mises Institute: "Pockets of poverty may be the result of a failure to meet domestic or foreign competition, of a shrinkage or disappearance of demand for some product, of mines or wells that have been exhausted, of land that has become a dust bowl, and of droughts, floods, earthquakes, and other natural disasters. There is no way of preventing most of these contingencies, and no all encompassing cure for them. Each is likely to call for its own special measures of alleviation or adjustment."

"We are most likely to see the problem clearly, however, if we stop blaming 'society' in advance and seek an unemotional analysis."

"Historically, many so-called 'conservatives' have tended to blame poverty entirely on the poor: they are shiftless, or drunks or bums: 'Let them go to work.' Most so-called 'liberals,' on the other hand, have tended to blame poverty on everybody but the poor: they are at best the 'unfortunate,' the 'underprivileged,' if not actually the 'exploited,' the 'victims' of the 'maldistribution of wealth,' or of 'heartless laissez faire.' The truth, of course, is not that simple, either way."

"An 'ideal' assistance program, whether private or governmental, would

1. supply everyone in dire need, through no fault of his own, enough to maintain him in reasonable health;
2. would give nothing to anybody not in such need; and
3. would not diminish or undermine anybody's incentive to work or save or improve his skills and earning power, but would hopefully even increase such incentives.
But these three aims are extremely difficult to reconcile. The nearer we come to achieving any one of them fully, the less likely we are to achieve one of the others. Society has found no perfect solution of this problem in the past, and seems unlikely to find one in the future. The best we can look forward to, I suspect, is some never-quite-satisfactory compromise.

Fortunately, in the United States the problem of relief is now merely a residual problem, likely to be of constantly diminishing importance as, under free enterprise, we constantly increase total production. The real problem of poverty is not a problem of "distribution" but of production. The poor are poor not because something is being withheld from them, but because, for whatever reason, they are not producing enough. The only permanent way to cure their poverty is to increase their earning power."