A Life of One's Own: Individual Rights and the Welfare State by David Kelley

Author:David Kelley [Kelley, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, Ethics & Moral Philosophy, Political Science, Civil Rights, Public Policy, General
ISBN: 9781882577705
Google: eH2qfxtPLGAC
Publisher: Cato Institute
Published: 1998-07-15T04:10:43+00:00

Social scientists have had much more success in answering the question, "What are the causes of wealth?" than the question, "What are the causes of poverty?" The answer to the first question rests on a coherent science: economics. We know that wealth is created through production, trade, the division of labor, the investment of capital, and the invention of new technologies and procedures. But social scientists have met with no such success in explaining poverty. For all the books, studies, and articles in learned journals, for all the data that have been collected and all the hypotheses put forward, the explanation of poverty remains speculative and rife with controversy.

The reason for that disparity lies partly in the fact that human beings have only recently, in certain parts of the world, taken definite actions to create wealth. Against the backdrop of millennia of human history, it is wealth that stands out and calls for explanation. Poverty is simply the absence of wealth. It is the natural human condition, which persists in the absence of efforts to overcome it. Why do some individuals put forth the effort when others do not? Why do some succeed when others do not? Here lies the other reason for the disparity. Those last questions do not admit of general answers. Individuals act or fail to act from countless motives. They are subject to myriad social influences, arising from causes far removed in time and place as well as from the actions of their neighbors. They are also capable of initiating action, exploiting opportunities, and creating new ones within at least a delimited sphere. Scholars can trace the effects of particular factors on specific groups of people, drawing on a dizzying abundance of data. But we cannot tally the effects of all the influences on a given person, much less on all the people in a society. The reality is far too complex for that. This is why there is no science of poverty.

It is best to restrict the concept of freedom to the exercise of choice among the opportunities at hand, and to restrict the concept of coercion to the deliberate interference with that choice by other people. One thing we do know, after all, is that the freedom to acquire and use property, to earn an income, to trade freely with others, is at least a necessary condition for escaping poverty. It muddies the water to say that a person is coerced by the operation of impersonal economic forces, or by his own lack of ability or ambition.

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