Poverty has always been the shadow of prosperity, but now we have an advancing global depression creating more of it — pulling in more and more of the middle class, the folks who aren’t used to it. This is where the headlines are.
Oh, the drama. A suicide epidemic manifests in struggling Europe:
"On March 28, Giuseppe Campaniello set himself on fire in front of the Equitalia office" — Italy’s tax-collection agency — "in Bologna after he received a final notice about the doubling of a fine he could not pay," Newsweek reported last week. "He died in a burn ward nine days later."
Economics is a cruel game. The stakes are life and death. The driving theory is simplistic, mechanical, with a cauldron of emotion and judgment bubbling just below the surface.
"Today many people want much bigger government and still more handouts; these freeloaders want others to pay for their sloth," writes Richard M. Salsman in Forbes. "‘Soak the rich,’ they cry, for the rich allegedly have no right to the wealth they’ve actually earned, but the freeloaders supposedly have a ‘right’ to the wealth they didn’t earn."