According to www.financer.com, the United States of America is the richest country in the world, with a GDP of $31.8 trillion. We have held this title since 1890, when the U.S. surpassed the United Kingdom.
A pretty good run.
Historically speaking, wealth is a relatively new phenomenon.
In his “Why Poverty Exists” podcast, Nick Freitas explains, “For 99 percent of human history, almost everyone who ever lived was poor.” Not poor by today’s standards. Dirt poor.
Before the 1820s, humanity’s default state was extreme poverty, with people barely surviving. They spent most of their time growing and hunting for food. People lived with chronic hunger, no medicine, no sanitation, no heat and no electricity.
As Freitas says in his podcast, “poverty doesn’t need an explanation. It’s not something that happens to people. Poverty is the default state of humanity.”
A chart by Our World Data shows the Global average GDP per capita over time. GDP per capita is GDP divided by population. The chart mirrors a hockey stick. World GDP per capita from the time of Christ until 1850 was between $1,100 and $1,800 — in 2021 dollars. That’s less than $5 per day. In 1950, the chart shows $4,600. By 2025, it shot up to $21,914.
Economists call this period of the last 200 years the Great Enrichment, when the average person’s income rose by 10 to 30 times.
Kings were wealthy throughout history. But they did not have a fraction of the amenities we take for granted like running water and electricity.
According to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the group that wants to take over the United States, “Poverty is not created in a vacuum. Socialists understand that poverty is caused by the natural workings of a capitalist marketplace that has always excluded a significant part of the population from decent jobs.”
This fails to consider that capitalism has only been around for a couple hundred years.
Freitas raises a question the political left has never considered. It’s not why we have poverty, but why does wealth exist?
In 2025, Rainer Zitelmann wrote, “The Origins of Poverty and Wealth.” So you don’t have to read the whole book, Tim Tapp has a commentary online covering Zietelmann’s main points. Here are four:
• Zitelmann criticizes oversimplified views that blame the rich for oppressing the poor, instead asserting that poverty often stems from issues including ineffective governance, cultural factors, and limited access to capital and education.
• Zitelmann analyzes countries with ongoing poverty and reveals how corruption, weak property rights, and inadequate institutions can hinder economic development.
• Zitelmann explores the reasons behind wealth accumulation, emphasizing the significance of institutions, the rule of law, and market economies. Through The Origins of Wealth and Poverty, he asserts that successful economies foster innovation, entrepreneurship, and freedom. Failed economies, at a minimum, actively hinder these things.
• By analyzing wealthy nations, especially in the West, he attributes their success to systems that promote personal responsibility, property rights, and free-market principles.
Did you notice that many items Zitelmann points to, the far left is attacking in America:
• Property rights — Zohran Mamdani with rent control in New York City
• The rule of law — vilifying Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
“When you believe it (poverty) is something that is done to people,” Freitas said, “your solution is always to find who’s doing it and to make them stop.”
Addressing poverty, the famed economist Milton Friedman said, “In the only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty you’re talking about, the only cases in recorded history, are where they have had capitalism and largely free trade.”
Look around the world at the poorest countries. They lack three things: a democracy, capitalism, and free trade. Yet that is what the far left continually attacks, in the name of eliminating poverty.
————————————————
Two stories on voter fraud from last week: In Maine, a conservative legal group identified 3,181 potentially dead individuals on voter rolls and another 693 duplicates. In Virginia, a dog who has been dead for five years received an official document restoring its right to vote. Both are blue states. Have you ever noticed the lack of voter fraud stories from red states?
