“In 1820, 94% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty. In 1990, 34.8%, and in 2015, just 9.6%.”
…In the last quarter century, more than 1.25 billion people escaped extreme poverty – that equates to over 138,000 people (i.e., 38,000 more than the Parisian crowd that greeted Father Wresinski in 1987) being lifted out of poverty every day. If it takes you five minutes to read this article, another 480 people will have escaped the shackles of extreme of poverty by the time you finish. Progress is awesome. In 1820, only 60 million people didn’t live in extreme poverty. In 2015, 6.6 billion did not.
Since its economic liberalization reforms in 1991, India’s average income has increased by 7.5 percent per year. That means that average income has more than tripled over the last quarter century. As wealth increased, the poverty rate in India declined by almost 24 percent. But most significantly, for the Dalits – the poorest and lowest caste in Indian society – the poverty rate during this period declined even faster, by 31 percent. That means that in the nation that has by far the largest number of people in extreme poverty, it is the people at the very bottom of the social strata who are getting richer faster.
In order to help the poorest, consider the impact free-market capitalism has had in the last 200 years in alleviating extreme poverty. The Industrial Revolution turned the once impoverished western countries into abundant societies. The new age of globalization, which started around 1980, saw the developing world enter the global economy and resulted in the largest escape from poverty ever recorded. That is something that the late Father Wresinski would have been eager to celebrate.
And the environmentalists and Socialists are working as hard as they can to reverse what Free Market capitalism has done. This is a good time to listen to our namesake’s (sorta, sideways) laments about these kinds to totalitarians:
“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as “bad luck.”
– Robert A. Heinlein (sci-fi writer, from whose “Stranger in a Strange Land” that “Grok” is derived)
And do you think the Socialists that ran Venezuela for the last 17 years took that to heart? Ummm,
In 2001 Venezuela was the richest country in South America; it is now among the poorest.
And Democrats are the Party of Socialism
Indeed, the Democrats ARE the Party of Socialism – openly and unabashedly.
