Thomas Sowell: Curing Poverty or Using Poverty?

As a product of the late 70s and early 80s college scene, I was exposed to the academic worship of Mao. My sociology class was filled with worship for the Chairman and the way his people pulled together for the common good. I don't remember it being mentioned that if the populace didn't comply with the communist edicts that they would be shot or stoned or buried alive, but that is another issue.

There was the massive fly killings (and let me tell you, 600 million Chinese could swat a lot of flies,) the snailocides, the bird killings, the country medics, etc. These were all testaments to a system of commonality that was to produce the communist utopian society of equality and good will.

Of course there was a bit of a problem. Millions of people were starving to death, falling deathly ill from disease and poor living conditions, were unable to access even nominal health care, and were subjected to grave poverty. Much of this was completely lost on the college campuses of my day where Mao was God to many, including my sociology professor.

Writing in Townhall, Thomas Sowell discusses a statistic that is being forwarded by Tim Hartford in his book "The Undercover Economist," namely that China today is a different China than the one that Mao controlled, and is eliminating poverty for 1 million people per month.

He also finds a bit of irony where

(t)he left showed far more interest in China back when it was run by Mao in far left fashion -- and when millions of Chinese were starving.

Those of us who are not on the left ought to take a closer look at today's Chinese rising out of poverty. First of all, what does it even mean to say that "China is lifting a million people a month out of poverty"? Where would the Chinese government get the money to do that? The only people the Chinese government can tax are mainly the people in China. A country can't lift itself up by its own bootstraps that way. Nor has there ever been enough foreign aid to lift a million people a month out of poverty. If the Chinese government hasn't done it, then who has? The Chinese people. They did not rise out of poverty by receiving largess from anybody. The only thing that can cure poverty is wealth. The Chinese acquired wealth the old-fashioned way: They created it.

After the death of Mao, government controls over the market began to be relaxed -- first tentatively, in selected places and for selected industries. Then, as those places and those industries began to prosper dramatically, similar relaxations of government control took place elsewhere, with similar results.

Sowell opines that with the change in fortune for millions that are embracing the free market and the wealth it creates that those sincerely interested in bettering the standing of those currently in poverty, would embrace the concepts of free market enterprise and would reject the failed concept of wealth redistribution.

Not so.

While the creation of wealth may be more effective for enabling millions of people to rise out of poverty, it provides no special role for the political left, no puffed up importance, no moral superiority, no power for them to wield over others. Redistribution is clearly better for the left.

Leftist emphasis on "the poor" proceeds as if the poor were some separate group. But, in most Western countries, at least, millions of people who are "poor" at one period of their lives are "rich" at another period of their lives -- as these terms are conventionally defined. How can that be?

People tend to become more productive -- create more wealth -- over time, with more experience and an accumulation of skills and training. That is reflected in incomes that are two or three times higher in later years than at the beginning of a career. But that too is of little or no interest to the political left.

Things that work for millions of people offer little to the left, and ultimately the left is about the left, not about the people they claim to want to lift out of poverty.

Sowell's attitude about the left is quite cynical and there is one other possibility. Perhaps economic and social hacks of the left are simply too stupid to understand the basics. Either scenario is less than complimentary.