Do Governments Have the Political Will to End Poverty?

No, governments do not have the will to end poverty or the means. I would love to paint a rosy picture of this world and how things are looking up and that all the efforts of the government, economic bailouts for the poorest countries proposed by Obama and all the anti-poverty campaigns in the United States, right up to, an individual decision to give a meal to a homeless person are making a dent in how much poverty there is on a global scale, but this is simply not true.

All the efforts that society makes to end poverty, both in the United States and worldwide are about like taking an old pair of jeans full of holes and attempting to fix them by sewing on a new pretty patch, they are so old and so worn out, that the new stylish patch holds them for a short time and then of course, the new patch just causes the old rip to expand even further.

The fact is, there is only one way to end poverty, both in the short term and the long term, and that is to entirely rebuild society from the ground up. The monetary system has been, is now and forever will be the primary engine for inequality creation. There is no way that you can have fairness and decency and equality when wealth and poverty exist side by side. We are all essentially, barcodes and every one of us is exploited, rich and poor, but with the poor, the exploitation is magnified to a greater level. The monetary system, whether it takes the form of capitalism, communism, socialism or whatever system that has been tried, it simply means that each one of us has a value assigned to us, of that which can be bought and sold. We all have a price tag on our heads. We are all commodities. Our value has been reduced to that of barcodes. To declare anything less, would be a lie.

The reality is this, that competition in the market place is a polite and politically correct word for war. We are essentially, at war with each other, in the form of job competition; where, instead of tanks and guns, the mind becomes the deadly weapon, making one person poor and unable to provide even the essentials and one person rich and comfy.

There are healthy forms of competition, but they are not part of the monetary system. In a system of social stratification created through money, a person's value, no matter how a person may see themselves, is simply measured by society as a whole, as the amount of money that he/she possesses. The second that we decide to abolish the monetary system, we will have to cooperate instead of compete to get our needs met. The question is, are we ready to do that? How much worse and how many people must suffer before we realize that this is what must be done to end poverty forever. Governments cannot do this.

Society has not yet taken the necessary steps to end poverty for good, because the root cause of poverty has not been addressed. Instead, we put in time and money to make the picture look pretty, just like covering up an old pair of jeans in our closet in disrepair with a pretty new patch. We have to throw out the old monetary system out and rebuild an entirely new system based on the premise that every single person has innate worth and value, declaring the earth's resources available to all people. Then and only then, will the true value of the individual be restored and we will never see those children's sunken eyes taunting us on our tv screens again.