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Comment by pjzedalis | Hacker News Reader

Why does capitalism have to lift anyone out of poverty? The opportunity to own assets and control your own production sometimes provides the means to do so. Just because enough impoverished people are not becoming rich per year does not mean capitalism is not working as intended.

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Why does capitalism have to lift anyone out of poverty?

Because poor people tend to get sick of their lot and revolt sooner or later. It's been a problem for monarchs through the ages.

Less people are living in poverty now more than ever:

http://www.worldvision.org/news/worldwide-fewer-people-live-...

Its just that wealth is being more evenly distributed and the U.S. is feeling some of that pressure.

Evenly distributed across the world, you mean. The pressure discussed in this article and probably most of this thread doesn't have to do with that distribution, though. It has to do with the distribution in the US, which has most definitely skewed towards the top. Wealth might be on some trend to level out world-wide, but what's happening here right now and over the past few decades is not that global trend. It's an American trend.

The trend in the US has nothing to do with capitalism per se. We added ten million Central and South American peasants to the bottom end of the job market over the last twenty years or so. I don't know why anyone would be surprised to see a bifurcation of income strata.

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