GAK TO WOW:

In 2005 a coalition of groups organized a campaign to "Make Poverty History." The very idea--making poverty history--startles, considering the grind that was once the life of virtually everyone on the planet, a few nobles and priests excepted. To be quantitative about it, the beginning of scientific wisdom about economic history is to realize that in the year 1800 worldwide, the miserable average of production and consumption per person was about $3 day.

Even in the newly prosperous United States, Holland, and Britain, it was a mere $6. Gak. Those are the figures in terms of roughly present-day prices, understand: no tricks with money involved. Try living in your neighborhood on $3 or $6 a day. And realize by contrast that in the United States it's now about $130 a day, and $33 as a world average, doubling in every long generation.

The poorest have been the biggest beneficiaries. Contrary to what you hear, further, since the mid-20th century, inequality in the world has fallen dramatically. The wretched of the earth are coming to a dignified level of income, and more. Wow.

Our task is to convey the gak and to explain the wow--and to show that the change from gak to wow came from liberty.

The view in 1651 of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes was that without an all-powerful king there must have been once upon a time a "war of all against all." We doubt he was correct about the king or about the once upon a time, in light of modern scholarship in history and anthropology. But his famous vision of the poverty of a society without some sort of discipline, whether a coercive visible hand or a voluntary invisible hand, can serve to characterize the world that the campaign to Make Poverty History wants to escape:

In such condition [as he imagined, "the state of nature," with no discipline] there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain [think: no incentive if the fruit will anyway be stolen]: and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation [think: no caravels of Prince Henry the Navigator exploring the coast of Africa], nor use of commodities that may be imported by sea [think: no pepper from the East]; no commodious building [think: no Amsterdam city hall on the Dam]; no instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force [think: no coaches on the king's highway]; no knowledge of the face of the earth [think: "Don't know much about geography"]; no account of time [no clocks, no history: "Don't know much about the Middle Ages"]; no arts; no letters, no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Double gak. Not nice. People on their own, Hobbes supposed, are cruel and selfish and above all unable to organize themselves voluntarily. To tame them, they need a "leviathan," as he called it in the title of his 1651 work--that is, a great beast of a government.

Only a top-down king, like his beloved if recently beheaded master, Charles I of England, or Charles's son hiding out in France, the future Charles II, would protect peace and civilization. (His is rather similar, we note, to the argument on the left nowadays that a leviathan government, much more powerful than anything Charles I could have imagined, is necessary to protect peace and civilization and the poor.) The choice, he said, was between utter misery without a masterful king or a moderated misery (even) with him.

Many people nowadays, whether on the left or the right of politics, still credit Hobbes's argument for top-down government. They believe, writes the liberal economist Donald Boudreaux, "that we human beings left undirected by a sovereign power are either inert blobs, capable of achieving nothing (thus say the Dems and Labour, and old John Dewey), or unintelligent and brutal barbarians destined only to rob, rape, plunder, and kill each other (thus say the GOP and the Tories, and old Thomas Hobbes) until and unless a sovereign power restrains us and directs economic energies onto more productive avenues.

The people who believe such things are properly called statists, such as in recent politics Elizabeth Warren on the left of the conventional spectrum and Donald Trump on the right. The left or right, or middle, wants very much to coerce the blockheads and the barbarians to get organized. Both the progressives and the conservatives, in other words, view ordinary people as children, ignorant or unruly, unable to take care of themselves, and dangerous to others, to be tightly governed. Terrible twos.

We modern liberals don't. We want to persuade you to join us in liberalism in the old and honorable sense--or, if you insist on the word, to join us in a generous version of libertarianism (a 1950s coinage we would like to retire). You don't really favor pushing people around with a prison-industrial complex, or with regulations preventing people from braiding hair for a living, or with collateral damage from drone strikes, or with a separation of toddlers from their mothers at the southern US border, do you?

We bet not. As one version of the Golden Rule puts it, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. With an open mind and a generous heart, dear reader, we believe you will tilt toward a humane true liberalism. Welcome, then, to a society held together by sweet talk among free adults, rather than by the leviathan's coercion applied to slaves and children.

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