A Conservative Manifesto (Part 2)

Appendix 1: On Poverty And Inequality And Their Nature And Amelioration

It is of crucial importance that conservatives understand and discuss the true nature of material privation and the unequal distribution of both resources and rewards.

Absolute poverty, per se, is not primarily the consequence of individual sin or the corruption of social systems. It is instead a brute and irreducible fact of nature. All living things are fated to exert costly effort and garner expendable resources to survive. Thus, the poverty that must be overcome so that privation, pain and death can be kept at bay and reproduction ensured is not most fundamentally or properly attributed to the exploitation of one individual by another or the corruption and oppression of social institutions. The overcoming of dire want, in the first place, is to be regarded instead as unlikely and as the direct result of laudable personal endeavour and functional and sustainable social enterprise.