The Free Liberal: How to Extirpate Poverty

"Governments today do not extirpate poverty. They treat the symptoms with assistance for food, shelter, and medicine. The poor fall into a poverty trap, since getting a job implies a loss of the welfare benefits. The highest tax rates are on the poor seeking to escape poverty, since they have to pay taxes, pay to take care of children, pay for transit, and they lose the free benefits. There then develops a culture of poverty, where children are brought up to see themselves as victims who can at best just beg for more welfare favors.

Only the efficiency tax shift, replacing taxes on wages with taxes on land rent, will go to the root cause of poverty, and pull out those roots. Anything else just makes the poor feel better, but they remain poor. As Henry George write in his book Social Problems, 'There is in nature no reason for poverty.'"