Poverty in Egypt, or anywhere else, is not very difficult to explain. There are three basic causes: People are poor because they cannot produce anything highly valued by others. They can produce things highly valued by others but are hampered or prevented from doing so. Or, they volunteer to be poor.
Interpretation
Poverty can be attributed to lack of productivity, external barriers, or personal choice.
Walter E. Williams argues that poverty has three main causes: the inability to produce valuable goods, external obstacles that prevent productive efforts, and a conscious choice to remain in poverty. This perspective challenges simplistic views of poverty, highlighting the complexity of economic and social dynamics.
In practice
During a lecture on economics, I could use this quote to explain the complexities of poverty.
However, if we wish to be compassionate with our fellow man, we must learn to engage in dispassionate analysis. In other words, thinking with our hearts, rather than our brains, is a surefire method to hurt those whom we wish to help.
In a free society, government has the responsibility of protecting us from others, but not from ourselves.
What we call the market is really a democratic process involving millions, and in some markets billions, of people making personal decisions that express their preferences. When you hear someone say that he doesn't trust the market, and wants to replace it with government edicts, he's really calling for a switch from a democratic process to a totalitarian one.
The true test of one's commitment to liberty and private property rights doesn't come when we permit people to be free to do those voluntary things with which we agree. The true test comes when we permit people to be free to do those voluntary things with which we disagree.
Powerful government tends to draw into it people with bloated egos, people who think they know more than everyone else and have little hesitance in coercing their fellow man. Or as Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek said, "in government, the scum rises to the top".
If one person has a right to something he did not earn, of necessity it requires that another person not have a right to something that he did earn.
Our crime against criminals lies in the fact that we treat them like rascals.
Evil is not to be traced back to the individual but to the collective behavior of humanity.
A man is rational in proportion as his intelligence informs and controls his desires.
Our future may look fearfully intimidating, yet we can look up to the Engineer of the Universe, confident that nothing escapes His attention or slips out of the control of those strong hands.
Man does not live by soap alone; and hygiene, or even health, is not much good unless you can take a healthy view of it or, better still, feel a healthy indifference to it.
In what way can a man believing in God cease believing due to his personal vanity? There are only two ways. The man should either begin to think himself a rival of God, or he may begin to believe himself to be God.
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