Last week, a Pew Research Center study found that the affluent believe the poor have it easy, while the impecunious believe the rich also have it easy. The results of the organization’s report led to an influx of op-eds and articles explaining how rich the top 10 percent are in the United States and how poor the most impoverished are.
What all of the opinion pieces failed to realize is the fact that we all have it relatively easy in the West.
Indeed, Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, France and all of the other Western nations do have its fair share of problems, particularly debt, but to complain about our standard of living certainly displays a level of ingratitude, and we should be ashamed considering that people in Africa don’t even have access to adequate food and water.
Over the past century, our living standards have greatly enhanced thanks to capitalism, free markets, property rights and human innovation. Although the government does try to hinder entrepreneurs, the marketplace and our mediums of exchange on a daily basis, Westerners in general should be more grateful for what we have.
Even the poorest in our Western society today have it better than most of the population in Africa, Eastern Europe and various regions of Asia and South America. North America and Western Europe have daily access to water, electricity, the Internet, food and an array of other necessities as well as luxurious goods and services.
Now, compare this to the situation in Venezuela today, where a socialist society has forced its people to line up for hours just to purchase the bare necessities, such as food, laundry detergent and diapers. In North Korea, families have been relegated to cannibalism and rat consumption – can anyone imagine a 21-year-old hipster in Williamsburg eating a mouse?
For a lot of people in the middle-class and those in lower incomes, some of their major daily problems will be if they will be able to watch Netflix tonight or if the air conditioner will properly work in the summer.
The Heritage Foundation released a report a few years ago that asked the question: what is poverty? It’s an important question to answer and define because how can we describe someone who is poor besides what income they earn?
If someone is living under a park bench then that could reasonably be considered poverty. However, if a family has a couple of smartphones, a video game console, color televisions and a coffee maker but earning $40,000 a year then should we really be shedding a tear and redundantly bashing income inequality?
Here is what the right-wing think tank wrote in 2011:
“Poor families certainly struggle to make ends meet, but in most cases, they are struggling to pay for air conditioning and the cable TV bill as well as to put food on the table. Their living standards are far different from the images of dire deprivation promoted by activists and the mainstream media.
“As a rule of thumb, poor households tend to obtain modern conveniences about a dozen years after the middle class. Today, most poor families have conveniences that were unaffordable to the middle class not too long ago.”
To reiterate, we have an abundance of problems in our part of the globe: rising public and private debt levels, corruption in government, price inflation, unsound currencies, an uncouth general public and so on. Whether or not these are solved remain to be seen. But we’re living like kings today compared to the kings that were around centuries ago.
We should be grateful for our first-world problems. Thank you capitalism.
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