St. Maximos' Hut

Tyler Cowen has some comments and a link on poverty statistics that are worth reading over at Marginal Revolution.

We know something important about the role of property rights and poverty. David Schmidtz, who I think is one of the best contemporary philosophers in part because he writes so clearly, has an essay The Institution of Property. There is a web version here.

Here's an important part of Schmidtz' argument:

Philosophers writing about original appropriation tend to speak as if people who arrive first are luckier than those who come later. The truth is, first appropriators begin the process of resource creation; latecomers get most of the benefits. Consider America’s first permanent English settlement, the Jamestown colony of 1607. (Or, if you prefer, imagine the lifestyles of people crossing the Bering Strait from Asia twelve thousand years ago.) Was their situation better than ours? How so? Was it that they never worried about being overcharged for car repairs? They never awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of noisy refrigerators, leaky faucets, or flushing toilets? They never had to change a light bulb? They never agonized over the choice of long-distance telephone companies?
Philosophers are taught to say, in effect, that original appropriators got the good stuff for free. We have to pay for ugly leftovers. But in truth, original appropriation benefits latecomers far more than it benefits original appropriators. Original appropriation is a cornucopia of wealth, but mainly for latecomers. The people who got here first never dreamt of things we latecomers take for granted. The poorest among us have life expectancies exceeding theirs by several decades. This is not political theory. It is not economic rhetoric. It is fact.

It is so. And when we read moral condemnations of property or capitalism, we should remember that both have done more to raise the standard of living among the poor than all the government programs since the dawn of time. Relative poverty is impossible to eradicate. Absolute poverty is being eradicated wherever the institutions that destroy it spread. Surely that is a moral message we could hear more about from those preaching a social gospel.