This guy deserves the nobel prize for economics.

The answer to the problem of poverty in just 7 words.

well... yeah actually, he does.

Right, cuz even when there was little regulation and almost no oversight...there was no poverty. The gilded age was simply a period of people not willing to become millionaires themselves.

Poverty is also somewhat relative. People who live in houses without running water, dirt floors and outdoor privy's would easily be considered poor. Over 100 year ago, it was commonplace.

Child poverty is caused by people having children they cannot afford.

Subsidies are used to encourage production. Benefits are a subsidy. Subsidies have more effect the lower the market income of the receiver.

So child benefit is in reality child poverty encouragement benefit! It annoys me tremendously when those idiotarians call themselves moral for stealing from me to encourage this sort of behaviour!

New Hampshire here I come!

Rob Read writes:
"So child benefit is in reality child poverty encouragement benefit!"

Perhaps it is more accurate to say that child benefits encourage the poor and cognitively disadvantaged to have children, i.e. that child benefits have objectively dysgenic effects on the population.

One solution would be to pay the poor NOT to reproduce - a proposal recently made by the distinguished Danish psychologist Helmuth Nyborg (Univerity of Aarhus).
As usual, the response to his suggestion was the usual argumentum ad Hitlerum.
For more details, read the artlicle on this subject published on 1 October in the Daily Telegraph:
http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-dane01.html

"Subsidies are used to encourage production. Benefits are a subsidy. Subsidies have more effect the lower the market income of the receiver."

oh yeah, 'cos like, there were no daft teenagers having babies they couldn't afford to feed in say, the 1850's before the advent of child benefits.... suuuure.

The only difference was, lots of the babies ended up dead. Now if you wanna go back to those days, you're entitled to wish for them, but good luck getting the support of anyone who's read any Dickens, or doesn't like having starving children by their feet as they tread the pavements.

& on the topic of the original post, i'm with ChiSean; do you think poverty didn't exist prior to big government? Yes, some government policies do probably have a net poverty-increasing effect, but to suggest that government is the cause of poverty is a ridiculously simplistic analysis, & unworthy of any worthwhile prize i can think of.

& on the topic of the original post, i'm with ChiSean; do you think poverty didn't exist prior to big government? Yes, some government policies do probably have a net poverty-increasing effect, but to suggest that government is the cause of poverty is a ridiculously simplistic analysis, & unworthy of any worthwhile prize i can think of.

In modern times, when I can buy a 5-lb bag of flour for less than $1.00 which is the what the lowest paid worker in America makes in 10 minutes, and which can provide 7500 nutritous calories - enough to feed a family of three for a day....

...poverty is emphatically created by governments. Governments are factories of mass production of poverty. They have perfected the process.

A_t:
It might be interesting to study the stats on "daft teenagers having babies they couldn't afford" in 1850 and 2003... But of course you're just teasing, in your disingenuous Guardianista fashion: you know perfectly well that Rob Read is not advocating any sort of return to Gin Lane squalour, but castigating the wicked immorality of ta "benefits" system that not merely subsidises but positively encourages feckless reproduction by the "cognitively disadvantaged" (love that, Charles!), lazy, morally delinquent, and feckless. People are of course entirely free to breed - it's a matter of choice - but absolutely not at my expense, and not when encouraged by cynical politicians pandering to their client constituency.

Is is just me, or is "feckless" being used a lot lately?

Sounds kinda naughty, and insulting, and...just.... weird! But, it sure adds color to any conversation.

Tony H... a) drop the guardianista tag... i'm not some blind ideologue, & i don't appreciate the derogatory implications. I think for myself, thank you.

b) errr.. I know you resent the benefits system, & yes, in some cases it may well encourage indolence, but it also stops people who are down on their luck from starving/becoming homeless. For every feckless exploiter, there are a number of proud, hardworking people who've lost their jobs & for whom there is currently no work. In another era, other people in the village/neighbourhood might have taken care of them, either through charity or by helping them find something else to do. We're not living in villages any more though, & many of us don't have the extended sense of community we previously had. With that in mind, none of the posters herein have explained what would, if anything, take on this role. So i'm forced to conclude that, in order to pay less tax, you're happy to see *some* people (perhaps not many... we'll see, maybe) starve to death. If this is the case, fair enough; you're entitled to believe this is a worthwhile tradeoff. If you don't think this would happen, would you be able to explain why, without resorting to insulting stereotypes?

HA!! In the fall of 2001, my girlfriend (now wife) was denied more than one months food stamps, while we lived in our van, BECAUSE SHE DIDN'T HAVE A JOB.

Shove that in your welfare state and smoke it. People WILL feed you, you just have to ask. The State will only make you dependant. NOTHING motivates like hunger.

hmm... a) this is presumably in the US, where they have a bunch of weird rules. Would not apply over here (UK)

b) yeah, nothing motivates like hunger, well... except maybe the threat of having your family executed or something, but there are gonna be people who *are* motivated but just can't get jobs; bad shit happens to the best of people. If you support this policy, you have to accept this. Also, who WILL feed you? Are people supposed to go panhandling round restaurant kitchens?

I actually have gone panhandling around restaurant kitchens before, and ended up getting work more than once in the process. I would like a fairly radical anarcho-capitalist future that won't in all likelihood come to pass, hence I rest in minarchist pragmatism. From that intellectual position let me say that I am much more opposed to bureaucratic waste than to the saftey nets the people seem to desire per se. It's been estimated by some that overhead eats up several times the amount of benefits paid in American social services programs, and I have a hard time believing that the situation can be much better (if not worse) in Europe. Why not cut all that fat out; hell pay a severance of a year or 2 for them to find something productive to do.

There are many places in the world where there is no effective government - quite a few of them are very poor. And the richest countries in the world all have governments. So I think the quote is misleading.

Long-term poverty is caused by inability or failure to accumulate capital. This is sometimes the fault of government, but hardly always. Often it is the result of lack of enforced property rights, absence of law and order, social conflict, and so on. Other times it is caused by excessive regulatory burdens, high taxation, or disincentives to productive work, investment, and saving. One cannot generalise and attribute all cases of poverty to one cause alone.

why are you so naive when discussing poverty? why dont you take a closer look at poverty in the developing world?