Starvation Is Caused By An Insufficiency Of Billionaires
Yes, by too few, not too many
Places which have few billionaires have lots of starvation. Places with lots of billionaires have no starvation. QED.
We can even show this graphically:
If you weight by population - percentage of the population that are billionaires - then the correlation becomes even closer.
Of course, we do then need to consider causation for correlation is not enough to prove something.
Correlation is enough to disprove something of course. That leftish claim that billionaires cause poverty for example. If that were true then there would be more poverty - hunger and starvation being damn good measures of poverty - where there are more billionaires. There ain’t. So the leftish contention is, as so often, disproved by simple empirics.
But causation. It isn’t that billionaires prevent starvation. It’s that the policies which lead to it being possible to be a billionaire also prevent starvation.
We can use our same two maps to outline something else.
Those with many billionaires and little to no hunger are those places which have, largely enough, followed a roughly capitalist and free market economic policy for the past few decades. It doesn’t take all that many in fact - China in 1978 was a grossly poor, zero billionaires and very hungry place. Now it ain’t. India didn’t change policies until the mid 1990s so it’s still catching up.
Those places with the few billionaires and lots of hunger are those that have not been largely and roughly enough capitalist and free market these past four or five decades. They have instead been following anything from proper full on communism through to the feeble idiocies of Fabianism and the University of Sussex’s economic development proposals.
It isn’t that billionaires prevent hunger. It’s that the policies that allow billionaires are the policies that feed the people. We also know of no policy space which allows the feeding of the people which does not also allow the emergence of billionaires.
We can even go to the extreme of our argument and say that billionaires are the cost of the people being fed. But since the people being fed is a Good Thing then the existence of billionaires is a cheap price to have to pay for that benefit.
Having done the QED thing we’re now just left with what our policy proposals should be. Shoot the Fabians and blow up the University of Sussex. All those in favour?
Let's pretend that Nike stops making all its sneakers. All those workers, who are underpaid by WESTERN standards, will they be poorer, or ecstatic that the 'evil corporation' no longer exploits their labor? They do the work because it's the best they can find and it feeds them, and without it they'll be back to picking rags from landfills.
“…billionaires are the cost of the people being fed”
You’ had me until here. In a free market, billionaires are not a cost, they’re a benefit, providing jobs and investments both directly and indirectly.
(I grant you they may not be a benefit if what they invest in are politicians.)