Quotation of the Day
18th March 2015
Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist.
It’s important to keep in mind the distinction between inequality and poverty. To confuse the two (as is common today) risks addressing the wrong malady. Just as we do not blame a cancer victim’s suffering on an unequal distribution of good health – that is, just as we recognize that a cancer victim’s illness is not caused by the good health of others and cannot be cured by making healthy people less healthy – we should recognize that a poor person’s poverty is not caused by the prosperity of others and cannot be cured by making wealthy people less wealthy. Indeed, recent research suggests that simply transferring more money to relatively poor people in rich societies does not provide much relief; poverty persists for reasons that run far more deeply than the fact that some people earn more income than do others.
The whole ‘inequality’ fetish is the perennial refuge of low-information people who mistakenly believe that an economy is a zero-sum game, i.e. if X has more then Y necessarily has less.
I blame Rawls and the professors who make him required reading.