Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn:
Retrato de mujer joven (Portrait of young woman)
(1634)

"Are we smart enough to share?"

The United States is not the most prosperous nation in the world, not by a long, long shot! Depending on the referenced index, the US ranks between 15th and 40th, despite its clearly enormous economic scale. It falls far short when it comes to equity. I might characterize Prosperity as a society’s capacity to transform income into social benefit. Our United States clearly wastes much of our income on the social equivalent of candy and gum. We seem to do this for all of the usual, truly terribly good reasons. We say we want to avoid socialism while forking over fortunes to industries that should have long ago become self-sufficient, like our poverty-stricken petroleum industry. Indeed, Texas would be another Mississippi were it not for Federal transfer payments made to industries there that could be profitably making their own ways. We purchase our penury at a personal premium. We each more or less contribute. Those most capable of contributing, by longstanding tradition, contribute a much lower percentage of their income and wealth than do the rest of us. This is not by any means Prosperity in action.

In practice, Prosperity might have little to do with wealth. Those of us not raised in the MostProsperous nation in the world have learned to compensate for the conditions we find on the ground. We might not be independently wealthy, but we nonetheless figure out how to acquire what matters most to us. Some of us accumulate embarrassing amounts of debt to acquire our education, mortgaging our present and future for the bounded freedom to practice our chosen profession. Gone might be the dream of self-sufficiency that once accompanied the pursuit of any American Dream. We have more than proven ourselves more than able to assume onerous debt to pursue a Prosperity few even believe they’ll ever achieve, regardless of how successful they become.

Importance tends to find its own level. Historical metrics prove meaningless as economies twist and shift. Our recent focus on re-achieving a revered, if mythical, past has left us further behind than we were before we started. We committed the error of mistaking an apparently wealthy man for a wise one, when the two measures only rarely converge to manifest in one person. The correlation between wealth and wisdom has proven to be one of the most misleading across millennia, and seems to be enjoying a resurgence today. As John Kenneth Galbraith said, financial genius only ever exists before a crash. After, everybody seems like a fool. And we have been successfully fooled by a succession of attractive fools who promised what nobody in even their wrongest mind would ever wish for anybody to deliver. Our mammon had the feature of being reductive by nature. The more we produced, the less Prosperity we had. We apparently agreed to this under the guise of it being for our own good.

We could have been good Christian martyrs for all the benefit such attitudes brought us. We sacrificed to false gods. We contributed in good conscience, but the alms box was raided by those lacking both conscience and judgment. We have been intermittently led by fools who insisted that fools follow them. The wise were steadfastly marginalized as having fallen out of fashion. The innocent were rudely plundered. We could have been the MostProsperous nation in the world, but we found that proposition too expensive for what passed for our taste. We had to prioritize our investments to satisfy a few of the least productive uses wealth ever supported. We needed a strong and powerful military. How else could we defend our way of life? We apparently needed indebtedness since that’s what we continually insisted upon purchasing for ourselves. We’d make some progress on achieving greater equality until some bigot or other started screaming that those others are not our brothers, that equality amounted to penury, until we’d abandon our pursuit of Prosperity in favor of our historical bigotry.

Prosperity will remain a stranger as long as we hold such falsehoods to be self-evident truths. I pray that we might be exiting the days when such ignorance tried to govern us. It was never not beneath us. We might not yet be better than this, but with dedicated effort, we might well eventually become better than this. We might even become prosperous. We presently seem wounded. Worshiping wealth has left us poorer. Our insistence upon believing fantastical financial advice has reliably left us poorer, too, though it has successfully made the rich even richer than ever before. The rich, of course, have no clue what to do with their great wealth, so they hoard it like medieval dragons jealously guarding their lairs. They could share.

Prosperity is not necessarily a function of accumulated wealth. It might be better measured as a conversion function, as I hinted at above, the ability to transform productivity into benefits for the members of society, not just a privileged class, but especially the least able among us. Prosperity is tenaciously generous. It believes there’s plenty to go around, and even more if that plenty is freely shared. It is not communism or socialism or democratic socialism, but decency in action, action that actually matters, utterly unlike schemes to travel to Mars. Even without resorting to some ultimately devastating form of leverage, we are plenty wealthy enough to ensure Prosperity for everybody who desires it. Are we smart enough to share?

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Prosperity, #PureSchmaltz