Royce asked:

Can market capitalism by defended on moral grounds given the fact that so much poverty exists in
Western countries?

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Economics isn't really my field, but I'd like to ask you a question: can anytype of economy be
defended on moral grounds, given the fact that so much poverty exists (and has always existed) in
the a) Far East, b) Middle East c) anywhere else in the world? And I don't mean poverty in the sense
that the rich in one society are poor relative to the rich in some other, I mean in the sense that there
are people with insufficient (relative to the rich in their society) to eat, insufficient shelter, etc.

If you're going to attack capitalism, fine, but there's poverty everywhere, with the possible exception
of Scandinavia, and those countries are basically capitalist with some socialism, aren't they? So given
that, should we blame capitalism for the world's ills? To put it another way, before capitalism, why
was there so much poverty in the world? Look at human history and find a place or time in which all
societies did not have a poor (in the above relative sense) segment. I can't think of any, offhand,
except perhaps some very small hunter-gatherer tribes living in a very rich environment... they at
least had sufficient to eat, if not much else material.

It's all very fine to say that in some hypothetical ideal society there would be no poverty; my response,
a very non-philosophical one, would be to say: ok, now prove it; set up the society, let it run, and see
what happens. There have been no successes by that criterion yet. Not in the West nor in the East.
Perhaps, just perhaps, you might cite the Iroquois Nation just around or before the arrival of the
Europeans. That was a fairly large society, but first, not really that large, second, they lived in an
extremely rich environment, third, they were constantly at war with other tribes, and fourth, how do we
know that they did nothave poverty? As far as I know there are no records. But that's the only case I
can think of where a reasonably-sized society might not have had poverty: hunter-gatherers living in a
rich environment. So if there were some way to cut down the world's population to a fraction of what it
is today, and move everyone left to a very lush area, perhaps it would work... but I doubt it, given
human history.

Steven Ravett Brown