From: Richard Plourde (rplourde@andesign.mv.com)
Date: Fri Sep 19 1997 - 11:18:39 MDT
At 11:26 PM 9/18/97 -0700, Fred Foldvary wrote:
>On Thu, 18 Sep 1997, The Low Golden Willow wrote:
>
>> Poverty has no causes! Only prosperity has causes. Poverty
and
>> ignorance are the natural state of humanity, which we work to
rise
>> above.
>
>Everything has a cause.
>Why is poverty the natural state?
>If I am dropped naked in a tropical island and can pick bananas
>and coconuts, I am not poor.
>The natural state of man in his natural state is natural wealth.
>
>Mr. Natural
>
Before making too many assumptions about "natural state," you
might want to consider the world as it exists. A recent article
in Scientific American ["Global Population and the Nitrogen Cycle"
--Vaclav Smil, July 97) suggests, to me, that we cannot assume
'natural' sources of fixed nitrogen as sufficient to avoid
starvation.
(That, of course, rather begs some peculiar assumptions about what
constitutes 'natural'; if a beaver-dam is 'natural' and a
human-dam an 'artifact,' then 'natural' seems to represent
anything that denies the existence of the human cortex -- and yet
the human cortex exists. Naturally.)
---------begin quotation--------
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man.
Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded -- here and there,
now and then -- are the work of an extremely small minority,
frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by
all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept
from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a
society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as "bad luck."
--Robert A. Heinlein
---------end quotation---------
-R
Richard Plourde .. rplourde@andesign.mv.com
"The word is not the thing, the map is not the territory"
http://www.crl.com/~isgs/isgshome.html
http://www.general-semantics.org/
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