To be Poor or to be Rich

Being poor is terrible. No one ever wants to be poor, and whenever politicians and activists speak out about it, they denounce it and address it as one would best address a deadly disease, delicately, but not so. If you really want to get into the economics of it, poverty-stricken people would always have to exist, because wealth is very subjective. Furthermore, if everyone were "rich" and had endless money at their disposal, there would be mass inflation--and we can't have that--or everyone would be "equal" in wealth, making us all socialists or communists. Either way, we find that we must deal with our situations and that money does not necessarily correlate with happiness. (A good example which I am lifting straight from my textbook is the economic boom in China after 1994. Although urban people are wealthier by many degrees and conditions are improving, they are no more happy than the rural farmer.)

In Hazlitt's "On the Want of Money", he outright states that "Literally and truly, one cannot get on well in the world without money." This is true; without two pennies to rub together, you find yourself wondering where to get your next meal from and where you can sleep safely from night to night. There is no security in abject poverty, but at the same time, too much security in wealth leads to dissatisfaction and boredom. Hazlitt goes on to detail all that affluent people can do, but also the misery and unhappiness that accompanies it. He makes us realize that material wealth is superficial, and that we'll be unhappy no matter how much, or how little, we have of it until we reach the self-actualizaion stage on Maslow's hierarchy of needs and pursue what makes us happy. Or as Alan Watts put it, "What if money were no object? How would you really live your life?" In a society that places so much emphasis on having money to be successful, a majority of us compromise our true happiness for it. In the end, Hazlitt illustrates, we all meet the same fate, rich or poor, and we all have just one life to live. We can live happy and die happy, or life unhappy and die unhappy.