Bernard de Mandeville (1670–1733) famously (or infamously) suggested that the cause of wealth is vice. If everyone were perfect, Mandeville thought, no one would demand anything. Everyone would be content with little. With no aggregate demand, no production would arise to meet that demand. If no one drinks beer, no brewing industry would exist. No brewing industry would mean no growing of hops and barley, thus no farmers, no market for bottles or cans, no Clydesdales, nor anything refreshing to drink at baseball games.

Plato, by contrast, had indicated that a society driven by unlimited demands would be a “city of pigs.” It would be a people with no interest higher than producing ever more sophisticated items for consumption. Such a people, without military guardians, would be unable to defend themselves from their own passions or from the desires of other armed cities coveting what they had produced for their luxury.

In some sense, then, economics has been saddled with a dubious heritage. Growth will be caused by vice and distribution by greed. Virtue will produce stagnation. We see, moreover, certain governments, because their own people lack internal virtue, desperately buying out the opium poppy supply of other countries that sell them for heroin in order not to ruin the “legitimate” business of the enterprising farmers in their own poor countries who grow the plant’s narcotic for profit. We also have seen that giving or selling surplus farm products at a low price on a foreign market for humanitarian purposes often ruins the higher-priced production of local farmers. Doing good, in other words, seems to foster further wrong.

Read the entire commentary on how best to help the poor here…

Read the article “How Do We Help the Poor?” on acton.org.