They are so poor because the society has no standards, and the state is organized around cultural jingoism rather than pragmatism. They are poor because people will steal anything.
I appreciate your patience, dang. I genuinely never intended for this to become flamebait. I have no idea why people are so nasty to eachother. I'm not promoting any form of "nationalism" here (especially not living in South Africa or having business there), I just meant to counter the idea that poverty deterministically makes people immoral, with a point that sometimes immorality will make your society poor. Whatever everyone else is talking about is their business, but I honestly don't see how I can participate at the same level of conversation as the parent comment, and not have some risk of people reading way more into it than is necessary. You say "it's nasty", but from my perspective, it's pretty nasty to say that all poor people will just steal your stuff and can't be helped; sounds like supremecism to me, even if it can come from a good place.
If you're saying that your intention was to defend poor people, I believe you; but this is not the way to express it. You'd need to provide a much more patient explanation than that, and then go over it again to take out any provocations.
That's rather odd, because if anything I'd say the opposite is best - you can trust your ingroup to have similar values to you, and thus can afford to forgive them/be generous without being taken advantage of. On the other hand, outgroups WON'T share your values, and being more generous to them than to the ingroup is just self destructive.
And I would have thought both of those were common sense, too.
But that IS how the world works! Or at least how parts of it have worked and still work. Puritan settlements in the Americas, Mormon communities today, arguably the Nordic countries, other closely knit peoples and communities throughout history... It's just that that comes from favoring the ingroup, not the outgroup.