Poverty

Dictionary.com defines poverty as:

1. the state or condition of having little or no money, goods, or means of support; condition of being poor.

Antonyms: riches, wealth, plenty.

2. deficiency of necessary or desirable ingredients, qualities, etc.:

poverty of the soil.

3. scantiness; insufficiency:

Their efforts to stamp out disease were hampered by a poverty of medical supplies.

After President Trump’s remarks (in a supposedly private meeting) have caused such a stir, I thought I would point out a few things about poverty and economic refugees.

For those of you who have chosen to forget, the wealth of America was built on sacrifice and blood. It was built by a small percentage of Americans who rebelled against British rule rather than flee the country they had settled. They were never able to share in the wealth of the nation they helped create–most of the signers of the Declaration of Independence died in poverty. They fought tyranny. Why are the economic refugees we are taking in fleeing tyranny rather than fighting it?

What are the keys to economic prosperity in a country? Hernando de Soto is a Peruvian economist who has done decades of pioneering work for presidents and in the streets on behalf of property rights for the poor.

His biography, posted at the Cato Institute website states:

Having made enough money to retire, he decided to devote his life full-time to solving the riddle of development: Why are some countries rich and others poor? De Soto knew that Peruvians did not lack entrepreneurial energy. The bustling informal economy of Lima was testament to that. Nor did they lack assets, per se. From countryside to urban shantytown, ownership was governed by a system of informally evolved and acknowledged property rights.

But as de Soto explained in his 1986 book The Other Path, these de facto owners were locked out of the formal, legal economy—and that was the root of the problem. “They have houses but not titles; crops but not deeds; businesses but not statutes of incorporation.”

In 1980 de Soto created the Institute for Liberty and Democracy. The more he and his fellow researchers at the ILD investigated, the more they realized that dealing with the Peruvian state to obtain legal recognition of one’s assets was maddeningly difficult, if not impossible.

As an author and an activist, and later as adviser to President Alberto Fujimori in the early years of his administration, de Soto moved to bring his impoverished fellow countrymen out of the shadow economy and unlock their potential to build wealth, a process that continues today.

His biography also talks about some of the challenges of what Mr. de Soto is attempting:

For his efforts, the Peruvian Marxist terror group Shining Path targeted him for assassination. The institute’s offices were bombed. His car was machine-gunned. Today the Shining Path is moribund, but de Soto remains very much alive and a passionate advocate. Delivering formal property rights to the poor can bring them out of the sway of demagogues and into the extended order of the modern global economy. “Are we going to make [capitalism] inclusive and start breaking the monopoly of the left on the poor and showing that the system can be geared to them as well?” That’s de Soto’s challenge and his life’s work. (The italics are mine)

So what is compassion? Is it giving money to the leaders of impoverished countries only to have the leaders spend it on luxuries while the people starve? Is it giving to grass roots organizations that work on a people-to-people level to help the poor? Is it simply allowing the poor to escape their homes? Where will we find the people who will work with Mr. de Soto to change the way some of the world’s poorest countries are run?

Economic migration is not necessarily a good thing–you are taking people away from a place where they might be able to make a difference to a new culture where they are total aliens who may or may not be willing to assimilate. We have had a problem in many of the cities that have taken large numbers of foreign immigrants of people using public streets as toilets. There are pictures all over the internet of people relieving themselves in public and wiping themselves with their hands. That is not acceptable in American culture, but because we have overwhelmed the local populations in some towns and cities, it is becoming a problem. We have an obligation to help those in poverty in a constructive way, but we also have the right to protect our own cultural heritage.