Jack: Simply Put, Free Markets Solve Poverty

Greg:

I like my responses to have some planning and structure to them; but I want to get something to you that you can chew on.  So'll I'll just offer a numbered list of comments on your last memo.

1.  You objected to my characterization of our poverty level as "stunningly low" and suggested it was actually "stunningly high."  The context of my original remark involved the great success story of free markets and the fact that poverty in America is a small exception to the rule rather than the overwhelming rule, as it has been almost everywhere else for all of recorded history.  Your 643,000 homeless people (BTW, I don't think there's been anything close to a consistent way of discovering their numbers) sound like a lot; but as a percentage of our population it's "stunningly low."

Lest I get tagged as heartless, let me hasten to one of my most basic points.  When you point out a social problem such as hunger or homelessness, you're talking about the fate of all of us absent some kind of productivity that has delivered most of us from it.  Your complaint arises from the fact that our great productivity has only rescued most of us and not all of us.  But systems other than free markets have failed, over and over, to rescue more than just a few within a population.  

And...an important "and"...people living in a free market are not without compassion.  Conservatives, as I've pointed out, are famously big-hearted in a free country.  Their compassion is expressed through private agencies that are much more efficient, with the resources given them, than are government agencies pursuing the same need.  But the taxation extracted by the government, to fund the public agencies, reduces the money remaining for taxpayers to contribute to these more-effective private agencies.  This is why I have argued that it's not good enough to say that the government programs have at least tried to do something.  In their attempts, they have squandered good resources on very sub-optimal achievements.  Good intentions don't guarantee good results; and it's the results that the poor need to eat!

2.  You spoke of free markets as a "rigged game," favoring those born with resources and talents and opportunities.  OK; but that's not injustice unless you want to blame God.  The important thing is this:  if it's a game, "rigged" or not, it's a win-win game.  In a free exchange, both parties gain--unlike those exchanges dictated by government.

3.  You show intense and genuine concern about people in the inner city who would apply for jobs if any capital owners would build workplaces there.  You recognize that owners don't do it because the labor resources there are not very capable of the high productivity any new enterprise would need; and you express frustration because it leaves unemployed, people you know personally and care about.

But consider the viewpoint of someone who owns financial capital.  She wants to invest that capital in places where it will initiate a large volume of profitable exchanges so more wealth can be created for all involved, including both herself and the new employees hired.  If she tries to go to the inner city, where businesses have failed or fled, she'll probably turn out to have wasted her resources--producing goods whose value falls short of the value of the resources consumed.  She'll face loss and possible bankruptcy, instead of the profit that would demonstrate that she has created wealth in the world.  Inner cities have already killed most of their businesses; how can she hope to survive in that kind of bleak environment?  Would you place a garden on ground where all the plants have died?

Now, does that mean that the people still living there have no hope?  NO.  But they have to go where the jobs are.  Example:  In the early 1900s Henry Ford needed reliable workers to make cars.  He needed to stay in Michigan because that's where the iron processing could be transported in on cargo ships from Minnesota.  So he advertised jobs for unusually high wages, to people all over the country, as did other nearby manufacturers who supplied his plants.  In the Deep South, where conditions were as bad as inner cities, thousands of men (of any color) hitched north to apply and to prosper.  These poor people entered the middle class thanks to the partnerships that made Ford so rich.  But they did have to move.  That's what happens in a dynamic free market.

Now, would it be good to help inner-city dwellers to train and relocate?  Yes, that's a fine appeal to people who'd like to give to a productive cause.  But in Ford's case it also appealed to an entrepreneur who wanted to build a prosperous business.  Is that unfair, offering only an opportunity that requires them to leave their home environment?  No, because building the auto plant in Jackson MS would just have meant that it couldn't compete profitably and therefore wouldn't happen at all.  In this description, "escaping poverty" involves a real movement, geographically and not just economically.

Building a plant in the inner city means a business that can't support itself and would require continuing infusion from the more prosperous parts of the company.  That means that the employees continue in a dependency only slightly different from handing out food packages to them each week.  But if as individuals they go to where their work actually creates product worth more than their wages, then they are in a self-sustaining enterprise.  Poverty is not just relieved; it's replace by prosperity.

3.  You saw "irony" in my reference to hospitals and the fact that so many were established by Christian organizations, apparently because they were not started to generate profit for their owners.  I don't see that.  Free markets are what makes it possible for people to to have the needed prosperity, to generate enough wealth for them to donate it to causes like that, and like other causes you pursue. Imagine trying to raise donations of that size in a country without free markets, where the people would be much poorer.  Not every successful organization needs to be set up for profit; and those set up to keep their surpluses (so-called "non-profits) are more efficient with their resources than are those finances with forcibly-extracted tax money.

Regarding profit-making hospital organizations, I disagree with the idea that they are immoral.  To conclude thus, we'd also have to say that foodstores and housing contractors are immoral; since what they produce is also necessary for life.  We require medical care; but we also require food and shelter.  Why shouldn't those who provide all of these exchange them to us and make a profit?

4.  You raised a point about where resources would go if the government did not tax them away for public purposes.  You argue that the saved resources would "simply not be in the hands of the poor," but "in the hands of those who control the means of production."  Yes, of course they would; we want them to be there!  First, these people have the resources because they created them out of their own entrepreneurial efforts, so it's just that they should have first claim over them.  But more important, they are the ones who know how to make these resources productive.  That's what creates jobs to make poor people into prosperous people.  You can kill that golden goose to give a meal to a poor family; but you'll get no more golden eggs.

5.  You pointed out an apparent contradiction in my statistics about what happens to poor families over the years.  I probably should have offered more detail.  In a University of Michigan study of hundreds of thousands of families, surveying their income levels from 1975-1991, we find that the bottom quintile mostly escaped poverty--all but 3 to 5% of that 20% of all households.  Those people--the 3%--represent the persistent poor with the multi-generational behavior patterns that I referred to.  This 3-5% of a quintile--less than 1% of all families--are a small but real group, with a problem they need help with.  But pause to note that the rest of their quintile--the 15-18%--are indeed escaping.  This is the miracle, so different from countries and eras of permanent stagnation.  On the other hand, the ones remaining permanently in poverty produce so many of our prison occupants and illegitimate babies.

6.  I ask you now to concede that there are not two, but three fates for the poor: you've spoken of two:  they have no help and either starve or find some bootstraps on their own; or a government program somehow gives them help that doesn't create incentive-killing dependency.  But I advocate for a third way:  private individuals exercising compassion, who interact with the poor one-on-one in private help programs, funded voluntarily by donors convinced of the programs' efficacy.  These donors can cut off funding the moment they suspect that the program is growing wasteful or ineffective, and choose alternate programs to help people.  (Try that with government programs!)

7.  You brought up the very interesting topic of what "freedom" means.  I suppose some philosopher may have at some time written a sentence or two about that, right?  But you've a right to ask me to express if I can, what I mean.  I think I'd say that Freedom is a condition of being unconstrained, of having a genuine capacity to select among options without restriction by another.  And in answer to the fine point you raise, I think that Jesus might have tolerated my poor attempt at definition, so long as it recognizes that it's not just other people or organizations that put bonds on us, but Sin, which comes from within us.  He sets us free from that.  And it's for us to set each other free from the bonds we keep placing on each other.  Government limits our freedom, as it must, in cases where we use it to interfere with the freedom of others.  "...and governments are instituted among men to secure these rights, deriving their JUST powers from the consent of the governed."

How are we doing?

Greg: "The Poor are Just Lazy" and Other Devilish Lies

“So wickedly, devilishly false is that common objection, ‘They are poor, only because they are idle’.” - John Wesley, 1753

Jack,

There is so much to address here.  I feel like we are juggling a dozen topics all at once. Part of the reason I take so long in replying is because it always seems like such a daunting task to write on this wide set of issues.  So, for the sake of clarity and to keep this exercise more enjoyable for myself, I will respond to only one or two of your points right now.  Perhaps we can cycle back around to some of the other ones at a later time.

In this post, I want to state why I disagree with your contention that government programs aimed at poverty alleviation actually make matters worse.  First of all, conservatives just love to point to the worst abuses of the welfare system, medicare, etc. in order to justify their opposition to providing a just and robust safety net for those in need.  To be sure, you can find examples of those who abuse the system -- plenty of them.  But is this as widespread as you and many others claim?  I do not believe that it is.  Not long ago one of my research professors investigated the welfare system and found that, at the time of his study, of those currently on welfare, 70% had been on it for less than two years.  Another 20% or so had been on it less than five years.  And only 7% of those on welfare could be considered "chronic abusers" of the system.  To hear some conservatives talk, you'd think the inverse of these figures would be true.

The fact is that the majority of those Americans who are caught in poverty genuinely desire to work and would prefer to have a job as opposed to receiving a handout.  My own experience as a pastor and community organizer in the inner city for four years confirmed this fact for me.  Far from the picture that many paint of the poor as lazy couch potatoes who would prefer to draw a free paycheck instead of doing an honest day's work (and there ARE those people, but they are a very small minority -- 7% is about right according to my own encounters with hundreds of people), most are eager to work and are even willing to do menial tasks or hard labor -- tasks that I would personally hate to do -- for a minimum wage paycheck if it were available to them.  In fact, whenever I announced a job opening at our weekly food pantry, I would have people lining up to ask me about how they could apply.  One time one of my co-workers announced a free class would be offered to help people acquire basic employment skills such as learning how to dress for an interview, what businesses look for and expect from their employees, etc. and we literally had to keep going back to make more copies of the flyer we had created because the demand was so great.  And when I managed to acquire a database of business in the area that hired felons, I ran out of copies of the list on a weekly basis.  No matter what the talking heads may say about the poor, no one will convince me that they are a mass of leeches on society unwilling to lift a finger to help themselves.  Instead, a whole host of factors contribute to chronic unemployment in the inner city.  Allow me to offer just a few scenarios/factors from real life:

- Teens (and adults) who want to get a job but literally have nothing presentable to wear to an interview.  I knew a teenage girl whose mother would sell her daughter's clothes for drugs.  The girl kept wanting to apply for a job, but every time we'd buy her a set of clothes for the interview, they would be gone by the next morning.

- Being geographically located in an economic desert in which jobs are simply unavailable.  And being unable to find transportation every day to the suburbs or downtown where businesses are actually hiring.  Public transit is the best option for most of in this situation, but even coming up with bus fare on a daily basis can be very difficult for the unemployed.  And it doesn't help when local politicians keep cutting funding for public transit.

- Inadequate access to computers and the internet for the purposes of finding job listings and submitting applications.  Some have called this the "technology gap."  Middle and upper class families take for granted the tools they have in their own homes for research and communication.  Job hunting is immensely more difficult when you have no internet, no computer, no phone, and sometimes no electricity at home.  (This is one reason I fought so hard to keep our local public library branch open in our neighborhood.  Our Republican mayor wanted to shut it down -- along with five other branches in inner city neighborhoods -- but together we raised such a fuss that he had to back down.  Interesting that he didn't propose shutting any libraries down in the wealthy suburbs.  If you're interested in this, here's a link for you: NUVO article )

- Lack of basic social skills make employers less likely to hire people who speak with improper grammar, who are unfamiliar with protocols of etiquette that middle class folks learn by osmosis, who struggle with issues of literacy, etc.  Not to mention racial discrimination which is still a very serious issue even in 2013.

- If the only job you qualify for is manual or physical labor (and it usually is if you're a high school drop-out), then what do you do if you deal with chronic pain?  Or if you've been restricted from lifting anything over 10 lbs by your doctor?  This automatically eliminates you from a huge percentage of the jobs available in your area.

- Young adult males who can make ten to twenty times as much money selling drugs on the corner than competing for that one position that just opened up at the Dollar General down the street.  Capitalists are right about this:  human beings are rational and will do what they need to do to survive.

- Felons who are immediately disqualified from 95% of employment opportunities before the interview even begins.

- The woman whose husband has abandoned her with three children that she alone must care for and who somehow must find a way to job hunt and hold down a full-time position that will actually be profitable after deducting the costs of childcare.

- Middle aged workers whose parents require constant medical care and attention and who cannot afford the expense of a nursing home or elderly living facility.

These are only a few examples of the obstacles that the poor face when seeking employment (and I'm sorry they are so roughly written -- I'm typing this all very quickly because otherwise it won't get done).  Of course, the government is not the answer to all of these problems.  No one is saying that.  But some of these issues can either be exacerbated or alleviated according to how as a society we choose to address them.  

I submit to you that the "invisible hand" does very little to rectify much of what I've listed above.  Guided purely by self-interest and the pursuit of profit, a business owner will simply not choose to locate her business where the threat of break-ins is constant, where the workforce is uneducated, where the base of consumers have little to no disposable income, where real estate prices are in free fall, where the broken down infrastructure makes "importing" and "exporting" supplies through the economic desert a hassle, and so on.  If businesses are to be located in the inner city in order to provide jobs for the urban poor, the business owner must be motivated by more than the bottom line.  They must see it as their mission.  (There are examples of this being done in our country -- often by Christians -- and I applaud those efforts.  But they are far too few.)  The invisible hand does not provide that sense of mission.

Meanwhile the government can actually address some of the issues in productive ways.  We can provide cheap (or free!) public transportation.  We can maintain a robust and well-funded system of public libraries in order to lessen the technology gap.  We can ensure that the poor have basic healthcare so that a freak accident like a broken arm doesn't cause a family to go bankrupt.  We can fund our schools and pay our teachers adequately so that every child in our nation can learn to read and excel academically.  We can provide funds for counselors, psychiatrists, and social workers who want to address the complexities of poverty on an individual level and bring healing to damaged minds.  We can fund summer lunch programs in the park so that children don't have to go hungry three months each year.  We can provide re-entry programs for rehabilitated felons seeking to enter the workforce.  We can provide programs like Jobs for Life that equip unskilled workers with basic tools to make themselves more employable.  I could go on and on and on.  But here's the thing:  doing these things costs money.  Money isn't the ultimate solution, but it is an important part of the equation.  And the question I am asking is this:  As the richest nation that has ever existed in the history of the world, can we find enough money to make sure that our poor are given ample opportunity to work themselves up and out of poverty?  Will we collective address on a system-wide level the systemic causes of poverty in our nation?  And when people do hit hard times due to loss of a job or major medical issues, will we provide a safety net to catch them when they fall and see them through until they can get back up on their feet?  I believe we can.  And as a Christian I believe that we have a moral obligation to see that it gets done.  

Next time I write, I want to address this frequent claim by libertarians and conservatives that taxes are theft.  But I think I should wrap up this post for now.  I'm enjoying this dialog so let's keep it up. My replies may be somewhat infrequent in coming months due to how busy my Ph D work is keeping me, but I will reply eventually.

Be Well,

Greg

Greg: The Sin of Usury, or Why Credit Card Companies Are Evil

Hi again Jack,

We are finally fully moved in here in Evanston.  Courtney put the last box away last night.  So I'm happy to have the time and energy renew our conversation.

I found it very insightful for you to point out that one of my examples of a dysfunctional society is actually due to the fact that "a free market has been eliminated."  You state this about my argument concerning the collapsed building in Bangladesh and other similar tragedies that befall poor laborers who work in nations with no or very minimal labor laws.  So perhaps I can ask a similar follow-up question:  Is it possible for free markets to truly remain free without at least a minimal amount of regulation?  Labor laws protect the rights of workers to be able to use their mental and physical abilities to attain the full worth of what they create.  Trust-busting and anti-monolopy laws improve competition driving down prices for the consumer and reducing the practice of price gouging.  OSHA makes sure that the hamburger I buy at Joe's Sandwich Shop doesn't kill me.  Financial regulators ensure that large banks don't cook the books so that our nation is led into a terrible recession (2008).  I could cite many others laws and regulations such as the minimum wage, child labor laws, worker safety protections, etc.  Do you see where I'm going?  If you agree that the conditions I have describes are actually examples of free markets malfunctioning, then do you also accept proposals for regulations of the free market to ensure its viability?  If so, you will sound very close to my own position (and the position of more left-leaning economists like Paul Kruegman and his "Conscience of a Liberal," among others).  You have suggested the necessity of a "constitution" to safeguard against the natural tendency of the strong to oppress the weak, but I suggest that we must go beyond a mere constitution and be proactive about addressing social problems as they arise.  Or perhaps I'm misunderstanding the meaning of how you are using "constitution."

I have been thinking recently about a business practice ubiquitous in the inner city which I always found particularly angering -- the practices of loan sharks.  On almost every street corner you find places that will give you cash today for a "small fee" and provided that you sign over your paycheck to them later.  (I'm referring to businesses like "Check N to Cash," for example).  Now the medieval Christians as well as the long Judeo-Christian tradition dating back to Moses has always condemned this practice and termed it the sin of "usury."  Interestingly, the church has largely fallen silent on the issue (in fact, in the 32 years of my life, I have never once heard a sermon on the subject of usury).  I interpret this as one way in which the church has accommodated to (and capitulated to) the American capitalist ethos.  In short, do you find it morally reprehensible for businesses to take advantage of the poor who desperately need cash right away for basic necessities like food, healthcare, water, shelter, and clothing?  I do.  Do you agree with the vast majority of the Christian and Jewish tradition (and I believe Muslim as well) that usury is a sin?  I would suggest that the Christian Church must actively oppose such systematic abuses of power since they keep the poor in poverty and, in fact, exacerbate their plight.  You could apply this to credit card companies and their 39% interest rates as well.  For this reason, I applaud the Obama administration, for example, for setting restrictions on credit card companies for the fees and interest rates that they are allowed to charge.  I once met a man (a janitor and maintenance worker at Greenville College, actually) who foolishly racked up thousands of dollars of debt on his credit cards shortly after graduating from high school.  He told me that he was just about to pay off the last of his debt, but as a 35 year old man it had taken him over twelve years to do so.  I suppose the conservative might say that this man deserved to basically work as an indentured servant (let's call a spade a spade here) for over a decade since he made such rash decisions.  I, however, don't take that line.  I find fault in a credit card system and a society that allows such an injustice to take place legally.

To boil down this post (and I realize I'm only touching on a fraction of what we have been discussing), I'll state things this way:  You claim that there are three ways to get money (creating it, stealing it, or receiving it as a gift).  I believe that many businesses in our nation such as the loan sharks, pawn shops (some of which are attached to liquor stores so that you can go right in, sell your stuff, and come out with your whiskey all at once), and banks/credit card companies are actually STEALING rather than creating wealth.  What say you, good sir?  Ought Big Brother step in and meddle with the lassie-faire free market to prevent such theft?  I vote yes.

Yours,

Greg

Jack: Individuals CREATE Wealth

I'm going to try to offer only brief comments, but ones that may stimulate good further discussion.

I'm not into formalities with old friends.  If you find it comfortable to call me Jack, please do.

I think your definitions of wealth and happiness work pretty well; but would like to refine them further.  Individuals create wealth--they CREATE wealth--by combining resources and specializing in skills valued by others. I emphasize the creating, because God our Creator created us in his image and gave us the capacity to create.  Most of the wealth that exists today did not exist at all 1000 years ago, or even 100 years ago.  People created it.

They did this creating mostly as individuals, seeking profitable ways to meet the needs of others so they could trade for wealth that those others, with other specializations, had created to trade.  This will take us directly to a Justice argument, in which I would say that whatever you create, you have first claim to, prior to the claim of any human who did not create it.  This is both just and prudent--prudent because such a property right creates a natural incentive to create all you can, and the human race grows better off.

For a working definition, we could say that wealth is anything that can give benefit to people--either in itself or by enabling a greater productivity of other things that produce benefits to people.  We create it by producing more than we consume, and then using the surplus for the purposes above.  And your definitions of happiness seem nice; although they are hard to quantify.

When social scientists try to measure happiness (in order to correlate it to other things) I think they usually use self-reported questions:  How happy are you?  How bright does your future look? Things like that.  It's hard, though, to find other phenomena that consistently correlate.  One that has shown up in recent scholarship is a sense of "earned success."  Those who believe they have experienced success from their own purposes and efforts, also tend to rate themselves as happy. See Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute for scholarly studies on this.

About the film you asked me to look at:  Again, beautiful graphics.  BUT:  Look at it again and take note of the verbs he uses in reference to income and wealth.  He's arguing for injustice by talking about how much income different people "receive" or "get" or "take home."  He sees the great disparity as unjust.  Also, regarding wealth, he's concerned with who "has" it, or "controls" it.  (I think that's accurate; I didn't look at the film again before writing this.  But typically such arguments do use these verbs.)

The problem is that he ignores what caused the income, or the wealth, to exist in the first place.  An individual creates income by delivering a service to someone who places a higher value, on that service, than the money (wages or profit) he exchanges for it.  So both gain in wealth.  And we create or accumulate wealth by consuming less than we produce, using the surplus to form capital--items that multiply the productivity of labor and other resources.

My point is that people PRODUCE income; they don't just "receive" it.  They CREATE wealth; they don't just "have" it.  It's theirs.  Go through your film, or any text that makes the same point, and mentally substitute the words "produce" or "create" where the author uses "receive" or "have" or whatever.  It changes the whole tenor of the argument.  For example, if the top 1% PRODUCE 25% of the income (or whatever amount), you might tend to ask a different kind of question.  Instead of "why do we allow the injustice of those few "getting" so much," we might ask "Why do those few bear such a heavy productive burden, even though all of society benefits from what they've produced to earn that income?"  Or, "When will the other 99% get off their collective duffs to produce more?"  Or perhaps more compassionately, "What can we do to help those at the bottom to produce more, so they can relieve their poverty?"

The fallacy in the film author's argument, I think is common to such people as Jim Wallis et al:  They look at people primarily as Consumers, rather than as Producers/ Creators.  People are a liability rather than an asset; an appetite rather than a discovering, producing mind.

When Steve Jobs grew so rich, his high income and net worth took nothing from people in lower classes.  He gave more than he received; the reason he got so rich was that he managed to produce so richly of his gifts.  The same is true of the very richest of entrepreneurs--Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, John Rockefeller, the Vanderbilts, the Astors, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and so forth.  All of these people produced in order to trade, and all of them made everyone, at all social levels, better off economically.

I do want to respond to your answered objections: For #2: Economics is not amoral, any more than physics is.  Both are concerned with finding the truth, and we all should try to behave morally and rationally in reaction to what those disciplines reveal.  For #1:  you quote "some economists" suggesting that the poor are worse off than 30 years ago.  This is demonstrably false, both nation- and world-wide.  The pie is indeed getting bigger.  It is almost impossible to come up with even a strained measure that would suggest otherwise.  We all eat better, live longer, and have access to wider opportunities.  The only exceptions occur under regimes that seek to control people more tightly, ostensibly for "their own good."

But now here's Objection #3 for you, based on all the above:  A free market, more than any less free environment, delivers greater justice (to each his own) and greater human flourishing.  Individuals combine voluntarily in various companies, teams, and families, to produce as much as the earth will permit them to, motivated by the common and natural desire to improve their own lot and that of their families and neighbors.  All they need is Rule of Law and Property Rights, so that they can have confidence that whatever they create, they can keep and enjoy.

Your turn.

Jack

Jack: Where Does Wealth Come From?

The following is written by Jack Chism in his first response to the video and blog I shared with him and with you readers previously.

Hi Greg:

I just got back from a trip and looked at your blog.  Much, much, much to respond to, both in that and in the film.  

First, I like your blog much better than the film.  The film is a wonderful work of graphic communication, and very persuasive if you accept its presuppositions.  I'm surprised that its author could process his argument so well without examining its foundations better than he seems to.

As for your blog, I'm interested in the conflicted spirit you seem to bring to it.  You want to look at both sides of an argument by doing kind of a Thomian analysis; but to do that you need to list the very best arguments before challenging them.  Otherwise you fall into the trap of making "paper tiger" arguments, as I fear you have here.  The two objections you answer are by no means the strongest arguments for the position you want to challenge.

I think that to come at it correctly, you have to get a clear idea of where wealth comes from.  This will help with questions of justice about who is entitled to possess and use wealth. Also it will help with questions about best results.  Actually, I'd like to read something from you in answer to that question:  Where do you believe wealth comes from?  It would give us a good basis, I think, for further discussion.

Also let me voice a concern about what you wrote comparing India's poor with ours.  To make such an argument, you'd need to quote some objective studies, telling how you measure happiness of one vs another group of poor people.  But also beware of the similarity of that argument to a pre-Civil War justification of the position of slave families:  "Those pickaninny kids are happier than we are on a winter night, all packed together in bed in their little cabin. And they sing and dance all day!"

It's a fact that studies have shown that in most societies, at most levels, there's little correlation between happiness and income level. (except for those living below absolute survival level--say $500 a year per person)  Should be obvious to us: if income correlated to happiness, then the richest would have little divorce, alcoholism, mental illness, etc.  But if that's so, then why do some feel a duty to redistribute income by force?

We can get clearer answers to that after we find a good answer to the question I gave above:  Where does wealth come from?  (Also what is it?) In addition, we might ask What is happiness?  And where does it come from--what precedes and produces it?

Ready to go?

Jack