Herb Meyer discussing The Cure for Poverty on Power Trading Radio

The Cure for Poverty

From the Introduction:

“One day, when scientists discover the cure for cancer, the world will erupt in joyous celebration.  And rightly so.  Cancer is a horrible disease that each year destroys the lives of millions of people, and finding a cure will be recognized as one of history’s greatest achievements.

There’s another disease that destroys vastly more lives each year than cancer.  And we’ve found the cure for it – but no one is celebrating.  Indeed, hardly anyone seems even to have noticed that we’ve already figured out how to rid the world of its most destructive scourge.

This disease is poverty.  And the cure for poverty is the Free Market.  That’s because the Free Market is the only environment in which entrepreneurs can flourish.  And it’s the entrepreneurs – and only the entrepreneurs -- who create the jobs that lift us all out of poverty.

Let’s begin at the beginning:

The dictionary defines entrepreneur as “a person who organizes and manages a business undertaking, assuming the risk for the sake of the profit.”   When we think of entrepreneurs, we tend to think of famous people like Bill Gates of Microsoft, or Apple’s Steve Jobs.  But that nice man who lives down the street, and who opened a new auto repair shop last month, is also an entrepreneur.  So is the woman who stopped by your house yesterday to see if you might be interested in buying some of those fancy cookies she’s baked, or that couple you hired last month to paint your house.  Farmers are entrepreneurs, and so are dentists.  So’s the kid next door who mows your lawn.  In short, anyone who launches any kind of business whatsoever – who sells goods or services and who doesn’t have an income until someone purchases these goods or services – is an entrepreneur.

Why do some countries have entrepreneurs while others don’t?  It’s for the same reason there’s life here on Earth and none on the moon:  Life requires a specific atmosphere to support it – nitrogen, oxygen, traces of argon and carbon dioxide with some water vapor.  We have that kind of atmosphere here on Earth; the moon doesn’t.

The “atmosphere” that entrepreneurs require to survive and flourish is called the Free Market.  The Free Market is comprised of property rights, the rule of law, a modest level of taxation, competent regulation, and a government that protects its citizens by assuring the country’s defense while doing the everyday things a government is supposed to do, such as building roads and bridges, operating schools, and delivering the mail.

Because the Free-Market “atmosphere” that entrepreneurs require to survive and flourish is political and economic – rather than chemical, like the Earth’s atmosphere – there’s no one formula that any competent technician can look up in a textbook and then follow.  Maintaining this “atmosphere” – monitoring it constantly and making the adjustments needed to sustain it as political and economic conditions change -- is as much an art as a science.  It takes a combination of technical knowledge, hard work, vision, and that unquantifiable “gut feel” for what to do and when to do it.

And it’s the responsibility of every government’s leaders to get this combination right.  Simply put, maintaining an “atmosphere” that will result in more and better jobs is largely what we elect our government’s leaders to do...”

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Review From FrontPageMagazine.com

"The Cure for Poverty could not come at a better time. A primer on capitalism, this timely treatise reminds us in clear terms what accounts for this country's affluence and prosperity. Those concerned about its future would do well to read Herbert Meyer's guide and ponder its basic but timeless truths."

Vasko Kohlmayer

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Review From American Thinker

“A generation or two of American school children have grown up without a clue about how wealth is created. If they ever think about the people who organize and create businesses, the people who actually create wealth and carry out the innovations that cause the rest of us to prosper, they think in terms of responsibility for bad things like pollution, discrimination, and other crimes.

Entrepreneurs are the heroes of capitalism, the brave risk takers who see a need and fill it. Most fail, but those who succeed provide jobs, products, innovation, and tax revenues to the rest of us. But because they are so little-understood, it is easy to portray entrepreneurs as a selfish and greedy lot. With a president in office who wants to spread the money around, we are in for open season on successful entrepreneurs, who often earn enough to become "rich" in the eyes of Obama & Co.

Fortunately, there is someone who can help begin to vanquish some of the illusions about wealth and its sources in a way everyone can understand. That man is Herb Meyer, the creator of The Siege of Western Civilization and How to Analyze Information. I admire Herb as a writer because he uses very concrete examples to explain complex concepts. Never pompous, never condescending, but straightforward and deeply grounded in reality and experience. He writes and speaks compellingly and clearly.

In his latest project...The Cure for Poverty, Herb explains, in terms everyone can understand, the complex magic of entrepreneurship, and how dependent entrepreneurship is on certain minimum conditions being met. In a mere 6000 words, Herb can help almost anyone understand why the economic program put forth by President Obama will end in disaster.”

Thomas Lifson

Editor and Publisher