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What?

Pravda liked it so much, they wrote about it. Maybe that should tell us something.

This is what his website says:

Edwards calls for a national effort to:

• Cut poverty by one third within a decade, lifting 12 million Americans out of poverty by 2016.
• End poverty within 30 years, lifting 37 million Americans out of poverty by 2036.

Needless to say this sounds ridiculous. The fact that Edwards’ plan for a Great Society or New Deal would only stagger economic growth aside, one has to question: how can he say that he (he says ‘we’ but we all knows he means ‘me’) will end poverty? Can poverty ever really be ended?

The point is that poverty is a reletive term and it depends on one’s standard for poverty. By the standards of the Middle Ages–when economic production remained litteraly stagnant for centuries–the Industrial Revolution “ended poverty”. By the standards of the Great Depression, America’s modern economic expansion “ended poverty”. In 2000 97% of Americans below the poverty line had color televisions, they would be considered well-to-do at least by the standards of 1950.

But no matter what Edwards’ standards for poverty are, one thing is for sure: “ending poverty” will require economic progress that no politician can achieve. The innovation and labor of the mind that future economic growth will require can only be achieved by free people motivated by the incentives of a free market just like was required every other time capitalism “ended poverty”.

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The John Edwards doesn’t “end poverty”; Capitalism ends poverty by New School Politics, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.