This “meme” illustrates fixed-pie thinking wherein in order for anyone to be rich, someone else has to be poor… or some many elses. This is simply untrue.
It’s not only possible, but very common, for people to work productively and create wealth. This is infinite-pie thinking. If I work hard and create wealth, it does not make other people poor. It simply creates wealth for me. If I invest my time in cutting down a tree and carving a shaft of wood into a long-bow and putting together the sinew for the string… I have created something from nothing. That long bow is my wealth. If someone pays me for it, awesome. Now I have money serving as a proxy for the wealth I created. The poor guy sitting on the sidelines sees my money and shouts “gib me dat.” That poor guy had nothing to do with my creation of the long bow, nothing to do with my creation of wealth, but now that we can measure his zero dollars and my three hundred dollars, suddenly I am rich and owe the poor guy a living.
No thanks. I’ll be productive, create wealth and buy all the toys I can afford before I die.
You said this much more eloquently than I could have.
Poverty doesn't exist because we can't feed the poor, it exists because the poor cannot feed themselves. And I'm not necessarily blaming the poor for that, we live in an economic system where it's difficult to get out of poverty. It didn't used to be that way.
Government both disincentivizes the general population from helping them, and also squanders the money they steal from us in the name of "helping" the poor.
This “meme” illustrates fixed-pie thinking wherein in order for anyone to be rich, someone else has to be poor… or some many elses. This is simply untrue.
It’s not only possible, but very common, for people to work productively and create wealth. This is infinite-pie thinking. If I work hard and create wealth, it does not make other people poor. It simply creates wealth for me. If I invest my time in cutting down a tree and carving a shaft of wood into a long-bow and putting together the sinew for the string… I have created something from nothing. That long bow is my wealth. If someone pays me for it, awesome. Now I have money serving as a proxy for the wealth I created. The poor guy sitting on the sidelines sees my money and shouts “gib me dat.” That poor guy had nothing to do with my creation of the long bow, nothing to do with my creation of wealth, but now that we can measure his zero dollars and my three hundred dollars, suddenly I am rich and owe the poor guy a living.
No thanks. I’ll be productive, create wealth and buy all the toys I can afford before I die.
You said this much more eloquently than I could have.
Poverty doesn't exist because we can't feed the poor, it exists because the poor cannot feed themselves. And I'm not necessarily blaming the poor for that, we live in an economic system where it's difficult to get out of poverty. It didn't used to be that way.
Government both disincentivizes the general population from helping them, and also squanders the money they steal from us in the name of "helping" the poor.