MONTANA, United States. — Few statements can be as easily verified empirically as “Wealth saves lives”. As scholarly economist and columnist Thomas Sowell points out: “Few things have saved as many lives as the simple growth of wealth.”
For example, a powerful earthquake may kill dozens of people in California, but it will kill hundreds in a less wealthy country and thousands in an impoverished third world nation. California’s greatest wealth is what allows it to build better structures to withstand the force of the earthquake. Just as it is their greatest wealth that facilitates the quickest transfer of the injured during an earthquake to better equipped hospitals and with the most trained medical personnel (Sowell).
Wealth opens countless avenues that contribute to saving lives. The fact that wealth saves lives is an undeniable and patent reality for all of us. This is why it is very difficult to understand why many on the political left are so strongly opposed to wealth growth and hate wealth creators so much. Let’s be clear: Advocating for policies that inhibit economic growth means accepting the resulting loss of human life.
This is a calculation never made by those who advocate massive trade regulations, taxes, and other policies that inhibit economic growth. However, we must insist that they do the calculation. It’s simple: populations in the poorest countries have shorter lives. An increase in national income saves lives. Conversely, any slowdown in the growth of national wealth costs lives. The unusual remedy offered by progressives is to demonize wealth and those who help create it.
Usually, this demonization of wealth is accompanied by arguments in favor of egalitarianism. The most refined arguments use the “Gini coefficient” to show that income in the United States is distributed less equally than in the comparable group of developed countries. The Gini coefficient is intended to be a measure to assess the inequality of a country in the distribution of income. A zero Gini coefficient (0) expresses perfect equality and a unit coefficient (1) expresses maximum inequality.
One difficulty with the Gini coefficient is the different way in which each country reports income. The United States, unlike many of its peer countries, does not report transfers to low-income households. That is to say: The United States disregards the real income of low-income households by not including Medicare, Medicaid and other payments in its calculations. When the data is adjusted to account for such government programs, the income distribution of the United States is comparable to that of its peers.
Likewise, taxes on personal income and business profits account for approximately 49 percent of all tax revenue in the United States. In most developed countries, the average of such taxes is 34 percent. Our approach to tax penalizes wealth producers more than in other developed countries, which rely on more universal methods.
A new consideration in wealth distribution calculations is that of the distribution of “knowledge” in society. Measurements like the Gini coefficient capture only material wealth. However, knowledge is just as important as material wealth, or more, when it comes to saving lives. Knowledge helps us live healthier, regardless of income inequality, and access to knowledge is equally distributed in our society.
Almost no one in the United States is excluded from accessing the Internet and the vast amount of knowledge available online. According to a survey, more than 87 percent of households have a computer and 77 percent have broadband Internet. Most interestingly, more than 84 percent of low-income households ($25,000 to $49,999) have a computer. This compares to 98 percent of wealthy households (income over $150,000) having a computer. When it comes to the opportunity to learn, we have never been as rich and equal as we are now.
However, the demonization of wealth and wealth producers by liberals persists and resists the reality that wealth saves lives and that access to knowledge is evenly distributed in our society. To paraphrase Irving Kristol, the liberals have been assailed by reality, but they refuse to press charges.
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