Arthur Brooks: 'Does Free Enterprise Hurt The Poor?'

Source:American Enterprise Institute- from Arthur Brooks piece about free enterprise and the poor.

"Arthur Brooks, author of the new book "The Road to Freedom," takes on the top myths about free enterprise. Part 3: "Free enterprise hurts the poor."

Free enterprise is the only system that truly helps the poor around the world.  It helps the poor more than anyone, as a matter of fact. Since 1970, 80 percent of the world's worst poverty's been eradicated. Eighty percent. The reason for that is globalization, open trade, entrepreneurship, and free enterprise. A lot of people don't know that trade from China to the United States has increased by 1,000 percent since 1980.  That's lifted 600 million Chinese out of the worst poverty. Free enterprise is the reason that people around the world aren't starving to death. If we're good Samaritans, if we really love the poor, we have to fight for free enterprise for everyone." 

From the American Enterprise Institute

I'm all in favor of a private enterprise system (what others, especially on the Right call free enterprise) and capitalism. But even with the most unregulated economic system in the world (and no developed country has a completely unregulated private enterprise system) we're still going to have poor people. Because we're still going to have people who lack the skills to be successful in life, either by making mistakes early as young adults, like leaving school or having kids early, or simply not having enough of an opportunity to be successful, like not having the access needed to get themselves a good education. 

So you want to encourage people to be successful in life and having taxes and regulations fairly low and are easy to enough to understand and to work with, are ways of achieving economic freedom for the most people possible in any society. But you need an education system, as well as safety net, that encourage people and empowers people to be as successful as they possibly can then allow them to enjoy the fruits of the success, but only taxing them based on the services that they receive from government.