Posted on 12/26/2006 6:54:20 AM PST by nancyvideo
The media and academic obsessions with economic "disparities" have gone international. Recent news stories proclaim that most of "the world's wealth" belongs to a small fraction of the world's people.
Let's go back to square one. Just what is "the world's wealth"?
You can check in your local phone book, surf the Internet or do genealogical research: There is no one named "The World." How can a non-existent being own wealth?
Human beings own wealth. Once we put aside lofty poetic nonsense about "the world's wealth," we at least have a fighting chance of talking sense about realities.
Who are these minority of the world's population who own a majority of the world's wealth?
(Excerpt) Read more at humanevents.com ...
--as usual, a great article by Thomas Sowell--
Thomas Sowell clears the air beautifully...he could also have sub- titled his article "By Accident of Birth".
Can it also be said that at this point in history more people own the world's wealth than ever before?
Depends upon how one phrases it ........
And just where do I go to get my share?
I know a Pakistani who wants the congress to vote his country money. He doesn't understand that his countrymen would all buy Coca Cola and the money would end up back here real quick.
Wealth is a function of personal choices.
Some of the wealthiest families in the Caribbean live in Haiti, one of the "poorest" nations. They have achieved this wealth by providing products such as oil and food that the people of Haiti buy. Wealth is, after all, the product of someone doing something to harvest the resources of others. If it is a desirable activity it will generate wealth. Simple.
Two men live on an island. One has two sheep, the other twenty. Two years later, the man who had twenty through successful breeding has two hundred sheep, whereas the man who had two now has twenty. Which of the following is true?
Each man has ten times as much sheep-wealth as he had before.
A single individual owns more of the island's sheep-wealth than ever before, and the gap appears to be increasing.
The answer is both expressions are true, but only one of them is grossly misleading.
A small portion may be extremely wealthy however, it is ALSO this small portion that keep the LARGE protion in business and creating their wealth as qwell. The left just can't seem to grasp this as they're steaming up the windows of the wealthy by looking in on their wealth with jealousy. http://sacredscoop.com
I think you missed the point completely.
As usual, Sowell's content is spot-on. The later part of the article nicely deconstruct's the left's notion of economics as a zero-sum game. The lead, however, is stupid: carping about the aggregation of wealth in the phrase 'the world's wealth' is silly, and silly rhetoric weakens the presentation of valid arguments.
good point
bttt
btt
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