Comments Elsewhere

Jake Squid: Have there been any real world examples of this?

I’m not sure what you’re asking for. Real world examples of government intervention and ossified structural poverty hurting poor people and aiding the rich? Sure, lots. Kleptocratic government is a pretty well-known phenomenon, both in the U.S. and abroad.

Or real world examples of the benefits of free markets for the worst-off? Well, sure; but it’s harder here because there are so many different cases to consider and because there isn’t any way to quantitatively compare actual state-distorted markets with counterfactual free markets under otherwise equivalent circumstances, or actual free markets with counterfactual state-distorted markets under otherwise equivalent circumstances. But here are some examples of ways in which freer markets would help the worst-off more than the better off: by ending the “War on Drugs” (which imprisons and destroys the lives of lots of people, usually the worst-off people, because the best-off people rarely take the fall); by stopping police harassment of women in prostitution; by ending agricultural subsidies that systematically subsidize huge planters and agribusiness to the detriment of the rural poor; by drastically reducing food prices currently inflated by those same agriculture subsidies and price floors (which matter more to the worst-off than to the best-off); by repealing the (regressive) payroll tax, thus directly increasing poor people’s income by a greater percentage than rich people’s; by removing regulations and red tape that systematically constrain small competitors against established corporate players; etc. There’s a lot of different ways in which government intervention harms the poor, and a lot of different ways in which prosperous free markets tend to help the worst-off most of all (N.B.: as opposed to pseudo-prosperous mercantilist markets of the sort that bond traders and politicians like to promote). I realize this hasn’t clarified very much but I’d really probably need a more specific question to give a better illustration or explanation.