Blog Action Day - Root Causes of Poverty

Blog Action Day is today. Bloggers are supposed to blog about poverty in the world to call attention to the problem.

So I’ve decided to join the fun and highlight the issue of poverty and approaching its solution in light of the Copenhagen Consensus.

Basically one of the greatest impediments to alleviate poverty is government intervention in the economy. You know bailing out favored industries and heaping the cost of that on the taxpayers in the name of helping the tax payers.

Governments penalize their people and keep them in poverty or from bettering themselves in a number of ways, chiefly in creating barriers to starting businesses and accumulating capital.

In plain language, people on the “street” call those things red tape and taxes in the United States. In other parts of the world they may call it bureaucracy and government thugs.

Either way, the issue is that governments often erect barriers to people working and earning a living.

In the US, it’s frequently seen in legislation that artificially limits home employment using guidelines that assume businesses produce street traffic and waste. That was an assumption that was true in the 1950’s perhaps but is much less true today. But it’s a legal threat that hangs over many home based workers or aspiring home based workers.

In the US it’s also seen in tax structures that limit the mobility of workers. For instance, giving full deductability of health insurance premiums only to corporations keeps workers tied to jobs they hate just to keep the insurance. It skews the insurance market to so that they cater to groups and businesses instead of individual consumers. Attempts to change this are vilified as “taxing the middle class” these days… but when did political ads ever have to tell the truth when their proponents want to nationalize more of the American economy?

Outside the US formerly, the major threat was not taxation per se, but pure thuggery… governments who could not be trusted not to steal what one accumulates or trusted to protect people from thieves. Before the recent dilution of private property rights in the US by local governments willing to steal your homestead to build malls to fill their coffers, we at least had the protection of the eminent domain provisions of the US Constitution which encouraged people to build wealth free from the fear of envious government sponsored crooks.

Today, the world leaders behind the Copenhagen Consensus still agree that freedom from onerous government regulations and business promotion are good. And they still warn us that protecting private property is the way to alleviating poverty.

Unfortunately the nation whose history was a laboratory for these good things is seeing them scuttled by messianic politicians who believe all will be well with one more bureaucratic bail out.

On Blog Action Day it’s time to remember - this is just another lie to give them more power and take away our remaining freedoms.