Snake-Oilers Extraordinaire

 Deceived and Deceiving

Watching Al Jazeera news the other day, we were treated to a doomster (er . . . spokeswoman) from Oxfam telling us that more and more wealth is being concentrated into the hands of fewer and fewer plutocrats, whilst the poor are getting poorer.  The terms of description were profoundly apocalyptic. 

One is left wondering what on earth is going on the minds and hearts of these doomsters.  Surely they know better.  Surely their thinking and reasoning cannot be that purblind and stupid.  Surely they are pulling a confidence trick--and doing so self-consciously.  If that were the case it would be more understandable and (in a perverse way) more respectable than the only other option--which is, that Oxfam personnel really believe their own propaganda.  If the latter were to be the case, it makes them pitiable.

One thing is clear: there is a great confusion involved when spokespeople conflate two quite distinct and separate things together, as if they were the same.  On the one hand, there is the issue of poverty in the world--absolute poverty, no less--and on the other, there is the issue of the discrepancy in wealth between the most wealthy and the least wealthy.  A growing discrepancy or gap between the two tells us precisely nothing about the incidence of poverty in the world. 

The Oxfam spokeswoman, taken in the full flight of apocalyptic dooming, assumed that these two things are the same.  Why, it's so obvious, it need not be debated.  Another grand suppressed premise is that the world's wealth is fixed, finite, and unchangeable, such that the more wealth plutocrat A holds in his Scrooge McDuck-vault, the less wealth is available for the poor. 

Oxfam's nonsense was too much for The Telegraph editorial writers.  Their headline cut to the chase:

"Capitalism, not Oxfam, is defeating poverty"

Even this headline is inaccurate and misleading.  "Capitalism" is yet another idol. Far more accurate would be a headline asserting that private property rights and human ingenuity and work are defeating poverty, but that's by-the-by.

Every year it is the same story: in early January, Oxfam releases a report stating that a handful of people are, collectively, as wealthy as the planet’s poorest 50 per cent. Only the number of this gilded elite changes. In 2010 it was the richest 388 who possessed the same as all those benighted billions at the bottom. By last year that had fallen to 80. Now, Oxfam informs us with appalled incredulity, the figure is 62.

One may ask why the charity, which is committed to reducing poverty, is so interested in billionaires. Surely it is the fate of those living on next to nothing that it should be concerned with, not playboys with fleets of superyachts and private jets. Unfortunately, that would present a problem: for when Oxfam concentrates on statistics not politics, it concedes that “extreme poverty has halved in just 15 years”.

The reality is that Oxfam is not campaigning against poverty any more. It is campaigning against wealth, as if the global economy were a zero sum game, with a finite amount of cash to be divided among the citizens of the Earth. Yet that is patently not true. Capitalism generates wealth. Currently its fruits are lifting people out of extreme poverty at unprecedented rates. To everybody but Oxfam, this represents extremely good news. The charity, however, gives the impression that it would be happier if everyone were poorer, as long as we were all equally poor.

Oxfam’s annual report is designed to make us all blush. We are supposed to feel ashamed that we can live in a world of such manifest, astonishing inequality. But it is outcomes that matter, not equality. To pretend otherwise really is shameless.

Surely the Oxfam hierarchy self-consciously knows it is actually campaigning for egalitarianism and against the discrepancy of wealth, not against poverty.  Surely.  It has chosen to do so in a deceptive and misleading manner so as to employ emotive appeals to pity, or appeals against injustice.  This must surely be what really concerns them and that their real commitment is to material egalitarianism--to a redistribution of property to each according to need, from each according to their ability.  Of course such Marxist commitments can only be brought into reality by the control of all assets and property by the state. 

On the other hand, if the Oxfam hierarchy is not in fact committed to property egalitarianism, but only to emotive appeals to pity then they deserve to be laughed off the stage.  Either way Oxfam is guilty of egregiously discrediting itself.