The Poor

"Give me your tired, your poor.
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door."

This is the inscription on the famous Statue of Liberty.

The world needs the tired and the poor. It was actually on them that the capitalistic world that exists today was built. America in its tumultuous ontogenesis needed them the most then and they came in by the thousands creating the leader of all nations that we know today. It was the colonial countries, which had the poor and needy, that built the English empire and also most of Europe.

So, you see, basic utopian theories on society are flawed on two counts- there can’t be economic equality and you can’t expect them to behave rationally. That is why perceptions and decisions formed by such systems go wrong most of the time and we end up resorting to the proverbial statement of ‘Man proposes, God disposes’ to lie to ourselves that life is all dandy. In fact, perfect society can be envisaged by factoring in selfishness and irrationality and then the only aberrations in the system would be random acts of kindness, which are rare enough.

But, that argument is for a different day. Let’s talk about economic inequality or the need for it. The rich need countries like Columbia to make sure that they get their weekly lines of cocaine, the tired from Africa so they can test their drugs, the needy from Mexico to give them their blood plasma to big drug companies so they can process it and resell it for 80 times the price to get it, the poor to provide their wombs so that women can have kids without having cellulite to worry about, they are needed to build Xanadus in deserts.

The poor do all this because they aspire for sustenance and better lives which the rich ideate everyday through extravagances. The inevitable consequence is that people eventually would grow out of poverty and the developed world would go in search for better pastures to exploit. Africa is still fertile with poverty and the lords of war make sure they stay that way by financing military governments. At least, when the rich are done with the world, people would at least have 3 square meals a day and then the relatively poor would have another chance to go up the ranks.