During the strike here at Miami University in scenic Oxford, Ohio, I remember one of the strikers holding up a sign which read, "Miami is rich because we are poor." I remember that my first reaction to this sign was that it was terribly wrong. The sentence on that sign forms a statement of causality: Miami is rich, therefore, we are poor. Cause: Miami is rich; effect: we are poor. The immediate consequence of Miami's wealth, the sign asserts, is the poverty of its workers. Can we write this statement in reverse? "Since we are poor, Miami is rich." This is an entirely different causal relationship: the immediate consequence of the workers' poverty is Miami's wealth; Miami is wealthy because of the poverty of its workers. This statement is completely wrong.

I often get upset at statements which insuate that the only way wealth can be made is by depriving others of wealth. To say that wealth can only be made by taking it from others is to assert that there is a finite amount of wealth -- an economy of wealth, if you will. If I were a beautiful female chemistry student, I would say that wealth is a "closed system": no wealth can enter or leave the system, thereby resulting in a conservation of wealth, where no wealth is created or destroyed. It merely changes hands. The world of chemistry's ideal gas laws depend on the existence of a closed system; unfortunately, in the real world, there are few closed systems. So, too, it is with wealth: the money system is not closed. Capitalist societies create money all the time; it is usually achieved by investment, sometimes achieved by physically printing new money (but this is a bad idea), most often achieved without taking money from anyone.

Does this mean that becoming rich means that someone necessarily becomes poor? In the sense that someone else could have received money that was newly created, then yes, everyone who is not the recipient of that new money is poorer in the sense of economic profit, which measures the amount of money someone could have made. However, in the sense of real profit, the people who did not receive that new money are no poorer than they were before. Revenue that you didn't receive at all can't be considered "lost" revenue, because it was never yours to begin with! You never had it, so you couldn't have lost it!

Capitalism requires hard work to create money, and cynics would contend that it takes less physical labor to make a million dollars than it does a hundred dollars. Are we better off with capitalism than we were before? The short answer is: yes. (The long answer is "yes," too.)

Capitalism comes from the tradition of democracy of the 18th century. The 18th century was the world of reason, whose motto was "Think for yourself." This motto implies that you have the ability to think for yourself, and that you are obligated to exercise that ability. Your reality is determined by you and you alone. This also means that others cannot determine it for you by any means, and this is where democracy comes into play. Prior to the 18th century, there was no possibility of economic success for everyone. People, by virtue of their birth, had a maximum possibility of success imposed on them. There was no opportunity for them to exercise the individual liberty which Enlightenment philosophers contended that they had; the framework of European civilization at that time said that a person was born to a particular place in the social hierarchy and really couldn't change his place in that hierarchy. Where's the individual liberty in that?

As with the movement toward democracy from a limited monarchy (people using their individual liberty to choose their own leaders rather than an external entity -- alternatively called "God" or "Tradition"), there was a movement toward a more democratic economic system, which allowed for success based on merit, a person's ability to use his individual liberty to determine his level of success, regardless of the conditions of his birth (which he cannot control, by the way). This Age of Reason hit the middle class where everything always hits the middle class in every society: in the pocketbook.

Capitalism gave the "middling sorts" -- doctors, lawyers, merchants, and other people who did not use their physical labor to make a living -- the chance for success based on this concept of merit: if you worked hard, then you were worthy of whatever you earned. It was, like so many other things in this time, an empirical method. A person was worthy of success based on how hard he worked, which was the proof (empirical data) that he should have that success.

Since the late 19th century, this idea has begun to change. No longer should success be based upon merit, but upon need. Everyone needs success, and therefore, everyone should have it. It's not quite correct to call this Marxism or socialism; more correct to call it communism. It could even be called Utopianism -- a perfect world where everyone has as much as he needs, no more and no less. Even so, as it is in its present incarnation, the idea of success based on need is a return to the old system success "because we say so." This time, however, instead of a higher authority proclaiming that only a few people are worthy of success, everyone, this authority says, deserves success. This is not feasible in real life. As Lincoln said that you cannot fool all the people all of the time, neither can you cannot guarantee success for everyone all of the time. The creation of wealth depends on successful people to create that wealth. If everyone has wealth -- regardless of success level -- then we will miss that crucial step where each person has the wealth he created and we will have to start taking wealth from other people.

Does it follow that Miami is rich because its workers are poor? No. Miami is rich because it is a university of 15,000 students that charges about $15,000 per year to attend. Miami is rich because it is the largest land-holder in Butler County and has made wise investments. Miami did not make anyone poorer in these activities. If anything, it created more wealth through education, land holdings, and investments. Miami did not steal any money from its workers and Miami did not make them poor in the process of making itself rich. Each person has the right -- the liberty -- to be poor or to be rich, and as much as I think Miami should give its workers a living wage, I totally disagree that the university is responsible for their poverty, just as I disagree that their poverty is what has made the university rich. Wealth is not created in this country by impoverishing others; it is created by merit, and anyone who thinks that making others poor will necessarily make him rich will soon be one of those poor.