You can only sell your kidney once, but you have to make rent every month. Selling off assets to pay the rent is a losing game. When you’ve spent all the money, you’re back where you were, but living on one kidney.
More generally, the more money available to the poor, the more rent-seekers will take it away from them. That doesn’t mean that the poor will necessarily be left in the same place, but it is an ancient observation that “ye have the poor always with you”. That remains true today, everywhere in the world, despite the enormously greater wealth around.
That’s partly because “poor” means “relatively poor” as much as it means “absolutely poor”, and a poor person in a present-day rich society is in at least some ways much better off than a poor person in, say, the society where that statement was originally made.
You can only sell your kidney once, but you have to make rent every month. Selling off assets to pay the rent is a losing game. When you’ve spent all the money, you’re back where you were, but living on one kidney.
More generally, the more money available to the poor, the more rent-seekers will take it away from them. That doesn’t mean that the poor will necessarily be left in the same place, but it is an ancient observation that “ye have the poor always with you”. That remains true today, everywhere in the world, despite the enormously greater wealth around.
That’s partly because “poor” means “relatively poor” as much as it means “absolutely poor”, and a poor person in a present-day rich society is in at least some ways much better off than a poor person in, say, the society where that statement was originally made.