Clever Comparisons Dept.

     I’ve just encountered this, from Alice Smith:

Calling capitalism the cause of poverty is like calling physics the cause of gravity.

— Alice Smith (@TheAliceSmith) October 1, 2026

     Alice, as she’ll readily inform you, is a direct descendant from Adam Smith. Her comparison is exceptionally clever, but – as is frequently the case with clever things said by intelligent people – many people will fail to get it on their first reading. But its value is greater than just its stimulus to comprehension.

     As I’m in one of those phases at the moment, have a little (more) Heinlein:

     Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded-here and there, now and then-are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
     This is known as "bad luck."

     [Once again, from Time Enough For Love.]

     The human condition is something everyone thinks he understands. Nearly everyone is wrong. While I dislike most of his assertions, Thomas Hobbes got this one right:

     The life of man in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. [From Leviathan]

     Subsistence-level existence, a.k.a. “poverty,” is what predominates in the savage “state of nature” that precedes the development of key ideas:

• Private property;
• Free, uncoerced exchange;
• The “social contract.”

     Now, some of us have accepted those ideas and participate in societies that honor them. Call us the West, or the First World, for convenience. Is the understanding of them uniform among us? Not quite. But it prevails sufficiently in America and Europe to have supported economic development of a high order.

     For a long time, there have been people who hate those ideas. They have their reasons, highest of all the acquisition of power and wealth at our expense. So they seek to defame them. One of their gurus, a certain Karl Marx, did so by coining a term that he hoped would displace the understanding of economic freedom.

     The term is capitalism.

     Marx’s effort was spectacularly successful. The use of capitalism as a shorthand for economic freedom became widespread swiftly after his book Capital was published. No doubt he was pleased, for the term capitalist acquired unpleasant connotations along with it. “Social crusaders” slandered and vilified “capitalists” for having produced poverty: a condition that predated them by eons. I’m sure you’ve seen some of the caricatures.

     Economic freedom was the human advance that made the gradual elimination of poverty possible. Its mechanisms – specialization and the division of labor; the development of money; the codification of property rights; the emergence of banking, investment systems, and the concept of group ownership of an enterprise – brought steadily increasing prosperity to millions of people. Yet most of them lacked any understanding of the dynamics that made economic freedom work. That made them easy to deceive.

     The treatment of capitalism and capitalist as pejoratives was instrumental in pulling off one of the greatest frauds in written history: the representation that the “capitalist,” the creator of wealth where none had previously existed, was the reason that some people are poor. As an illustration of the power of words, this one has few equals.

     It’s still going on today, of course. You can probably hear it near you. But let’s return to Alice Smith’s clever analogy:

     Calling capitalism the cause of poverty is like calling physics the cause [of] gravity.

     It takes a wee bit of thought, though not much, to see what that means. Physics, the study of the patterns that run through the natural world, didn’t create or modify the natural world. It merely seeks to understand natural phenomena, and to propose “laws” that would assist others in understanding them. No one with three functioning brain cells would claim that before physics and physicists, there was no force that attracted one mass to another – what we term gravity.

     But those hostile to freedom have cleverly exploited envy, ignorance, and the desire of good men for social improvement to make it seem that some have little because some – the most enterprising and productive members of our species – have much. And they’ve done it largely through the manipulation of our language, especially Marx’s key coinage capitalism.

     Need I say more?

     A man that should call everything by its right name would hardly pass the streets without being knocked down as a common enemy. – Sir George Savile