Nature's default

This is the first of a 3 part post on supporting the least among society.

I stole this idea from Tom Woods, and if you're interested I could probably dig up the video somewhere.  He asks what the world (as in nature) hands us at birth?  What were our ancestors and ancient ancestors given at birth?  The answer is nothing except parents, and the parents were given nothing except their parents ad infinitum (at least practically).  Nature provides us with nothing -- it does not clothe us or hand feed us -- and so nature's default position is poverty.

Our parents give us food and shelter, but what are they entitled to?  What food can they eat?  Cavemen were not handed food stamps redeemable at Walmart.  They lived in grinding poverty, constantly searching for food, not eating for days, and their children after breastfeeding did likewise.  They lived in tribes, were hunters and gatherers.  They survived but not very luxuriously.

If cavemen got together and developed a constitutional republic they would still be in poverty because governments produce nothing.  Even what governments "provide" they do so by stealing, not by trading.  Only producers, the division of labor, and trade could lift humanity out of poverty.

We live in a world of abundance; this much human life could not exist without it.  What we call "poverty" is not even close to the default position of nature.  Perhaps it is in some parts of Africa, but in the United States the cavemen would laugh at us for where we put the poverty line (e.g. a family of 3 making $18,310 or less per year).  It's a shame that some people live in leaky apartments, but my mother-in-law, just a few decades ago, lived without in-door plumbing and was not considered impoverished.  Calling something "poverty" does not justify theft from the non-impoverished.  The term itself is subjective and relies on comparing the well being of some to others.  This subjectivity of poverty and thus the "necessary" welfare is partly why I oppose the state's efforts to help the less fortunate.  I don't want people to live at the default position of nature, but I see no justification in using the threat of violence to make me help anyone rise above that.

What I'm trying to do here is draw an absolute or at least a baseline: Poverty is nature's default position for mankind.  In my opinion, if you want to help the poor then end the regressive burden of government.  End the drug war that destroys poor families, end sales and sin taxes which are regressive, end minimum wage that necessarily unemploys the poor, end the Fed and inflation that steals wealth from the elderly and cash based families, end all foreign wars that steal the young from the poor (admittedly, we have a volunteer Army, but the poor would be in much safer occupations), end foreign aid to kleptocracies, end the corporatist distribution of wealth from the poor to the rich, end our militarized police force, and most importantly end the state.  For more on the regressive burden of government, check out Chapter 8 of Murray Rothbard's "For a New Liberty".  Also in there is the Mormon Church's excellent model for a welfare program.