Ending Poverty

"POVERTY EXISTS not because we cannot feed the poor, but because we cannot satisfy the wealthy". So goes the provocative assertion. First and foremost, it provokes the question: Is it true? The second question, provoked by the first, is: If it sn't, then, what is? And, if it is,then, what can we and should we do about it to change it? Because, beyond a doubt, nobody but nobody wants anybody else to live in poverty. We can assume that, correct? WE need to eradicate all poverty, but, how? Is it really caused by the wealthy, and, could the wealthy really remedy it, presumably by sharing their wealth? In other words, is economics a zero sum game,or not? It certainly is, if one considers only a moment in time, if one takes a snapshot of a certain moment,and mesaures the amount of and distribution of wealth, at that precise moment. But reality is, of course, more than a single precise moment, more than a certain number of precise moments in time; life is an endlessly flowing succession of moments, an unbroken river of time. Two undeniable facts emerge: There is in fact enough food, water, clothing, and money on Earth for everyone. And, the elite wealthy few, on a global basis,own and control a huge percentage of the wealth, an entirely disproportionate share of it. The top one percent own forty percent of the wealth of the world, or something even more hideous, grotesque, and extreme than that. But the question is: could the huge majority of poor people, about half the world or more, "catch up" with the middle class, without disturbing or taking much of the wealth of the wealthy? And, Do the wealthy actually prevent billions of other people from getting wealthy, or even from having a decent standard of living, or having enough to eat? Often overlooked is that Adam Smith said that in the absence of all economic externalities and distortions, then a truly free market should naturally distribute the wealth essentially equally among everyone, including workers, managers, and owners. Assuming this is true, then obviously our current supposed"free market" capitalist system is not working, and/or is very heavily, deeply distorted and fraght with externalities and corrupting factors. Some of these are easy to see. Monopoly formation, and a political system which not only does not prevent monopoly formation by law, as intended in the U.S. and other countries by law, but actually tends to encourage it. In the U.S., virtually every major industry is a virtual monopoly, with only a few, a handful of corporate participants, few enough for them to eschew actual competition in favor of unspoken, unwritten, informal de facto coopertation, acting as a single cartel, cotrolling the makrdt, setting prices, price gouging at will, and exploiting labor. There are many other corrupting, "external" factors, such as the obvious fact that in the United States, the corporate oligarchy which actually governs us, "our corporate masters" as Gore Vidal called them, own and control the political system by virtue of having long ago purchased all the politicians, and keeping them under control, over the decades. In the United States, and throughout the world, much, much greater economic equality is needed,for a wide variety of reasons. Our current system in which a tiny fraction of the global population possesses a huge portion of the world's wealth and power is harmful, destructive, and unsustainable for many reasons. Some of the moe obvious reasons include widespread pvoerty, starvation, ad a political tyranny of the wealthy. Some obvious remedies include a progressive income tax system, progresive property taxes, and wealth taxes. But when the wealthy sue their wealth to purchase political power, which they are doing now, and hae alwasy doen in the United State of America, even these basic remedies, these fundamental solutions to a major problem, are impossible. The wealthy simply will not allow it. Before the world's poor gain a fair share of the wealth, they must gain a fair share of the power, by whatever means necessary.