Don Boudreaux: Innate Wealth
on Tuesday, November 24, 2020Don Boudreaux Money Quote saying there are reasons for some things that money can’t explain or resolve – no matter our expectations. Don Boudreaux said:
“Poverty has no causes. Wealth has causes. But capitalism has been so enormously successful at producing widespread material abundance that we today … regard wealth as innate to our existence, as our default mode. It is not” — Don Boudreaux
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In this quote, Don Boudreaux seems to be challenging common assumptions about wealth and poverty. By stating that “poverty has no causes” while “wealth has causes”, Boudreaux implies poverty is a natural baseline state for humanity that requires explanation, while abundance is an achieved condition with identifiable contributing factors.
His comment that capitalism’s success makes wealth seem “innate” and “our default mode” but it is not conveys Boudreaux’s perspective that widespread prosperity is a historic anomaly achieved through free-market policies, not the natural order.
Overall, the quote portrays Boudreaux’s view that poverty, not wealth, should be society’s expected state, and that attributing poverty to personal faults ignores it as humanity’s natural condition absent factors like industry and free exchange that facilitated unprecedented gains.