There's Poor, and Then There's Capitalist Poor

There’s a lot of self-declared Anti-Capitalists in my social media feeds. Fine by me. I like being exposed to thoughts I disagree with because it sharpens my own thinking, and truth is far more valuable than being right. It forces me to wrestle with flaws in my own thinking, and it forces me to search for strong rebuttals.

So I find that quite often I hear the idea that the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer. This simplistic mantra kept rubbing me the wrong way, but I couldn’t quite articulate why. While writing this I wrote this line critiquing Capitalism:

[In Capitalism] everyone’s belly is full, (especially the shareholders).

What I’m hoping to highlight in this line is a genuine moral character flaw in Capitalism. Capitalism claims to be purely merit-based and yet there is case after case of ludicrously wealthy individuals making mountains of cash via exploitative working conditions, deceptive marketing practices, and at times straight up fraud.

This is undeniably a symptom of an unhealthy society¹. I can hear the Anti-Capitalist countering me by saying “No, everyone’s belly is not full. Look at all the poor.” to which I respond:

Would you rather be a poor Capitalist or a poor Marxist?

No matter where you live, being poor objectively sucks. I don’t wish poverty on anyone.

But I can tell you without a millisecond of hesitation that I’d rather be poor in America than poor in Venezuela. Between 2008 and 2019, Venezuela had so little food on store shelves that the poor were forced to resort to eating garbage and stray animals. In the same period of time, in America, the price of smart phones dropped dramatically such that more than half of homeless people in America own a smart phone. Being poor in America is awful, but at least there are several homeless shelters in practically every city.

In nearly 250 years of American history, the US has had exactly one famine, and it was on an isolated Alaskan island. And yet in a far shorter period of time the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea had several famines. Worse yet, many if not most of these famines were self-inflicted by ridiculous policies directly inspired by Marxist ideology. In the late 50s, tens of millions of Chinese people starved to death because of poor management of labor and resources. Instead of correcting their systemic issues, the Chinese Communist Party doubled down by blaming food shortages on the birds and commanding millions of citizens to slaughter birds en masse. This arrogant policy not only did not fix the problem, it actively made the problem far worse! By killing the birds they took away the natural predator of the bugs, and massive swarms of bugs ate their crops. The famine got so abysmally bad in China that people ate tree bark just to feel full. Even cannibalism was rampant.

Why hasn’t this happened in America? Is America smarter, better, more fortunate? I don’t think so. America has had several food shortages in its history but only one of them became a famine. Why? Because when there is a need, there is an opportunity. When those darn greedy Capitalists see a natural disaster, what do they do every time? Sell a bunch of stuff. If there’s a lack of water, then businesses come into the area and sell more water. Many even jack up their prices to ridiculous heights just because they know their customers are desperate and willing to pay practically anything. It’s selfish, it’s heartless, and yet here we are not starving to death. But it immediately balances itself out. Soon other greedy Capitalists see the same opportunity and sell the same water at a slightly cheaper price. And the market stabilizes.

Do the poor keep getting poorer in America? Absolutely not. The poorest person in America today is far wealthier than the poorest person in America 50 years ago. Today poor American have free ubiquitous access to warm beds, canned food, basic medicine, long-distance communication, vast libraries, and so much more. They certainly do not have it easy. But they absolutely do not have it harder than past generations.

For the vast majority of human civilization, poverty was effectively a death sentence. Only the wealthy had the privilege of living to grow old. Today, the life expectancy of a poor citizen in a Capitalist society is not a whole lot shorter than the life expectancy of a wealthy citizen. So to all the Anti-Capitalists out there, go on keep criticizing Capitalism. It needs your critiques. But remember this, being Capitalist poor isn’t nearly as bad as being non-Capitalist poor.