Poverty is the most natural thing. It's the default state for any creature. That's why we have instincts that motivate us to fight against the natural state of doing nothing and its consequences (poverty and ultimately death).
That's not to say that poverty isn't engineered among men. It certainly is.
To correct myself, that's why humans have the ability to reason. Animals rely upon instincts. I don't have an inate instinct to survive. I had to learn skills and choose to apply them to survive. Prosperity doesn't just happen. We have to manipulate our world to suit our needs. That doesn't just happen. Food doesn't just appear on my table.
Put me into the natural environment and I will build my own home and grow my own food(assuming I know how to)
Poverty is created through the seperation of man from nature.
Instincts against a natural state is an oxymoron.
We have instincts to work, to create, to connect with other human beings, to share, to fight(within reason the fear of dying is another natural instinct that regulates some of the others)
We're social creatures that work together to benefit ourselves collectively.
A handful of people are straight up parasites and add nothing, produce no value, but instead extract the value and wealth from others. That's where poverty comes from.
The industrial revolution created poverty in the same way that the agricultural revolution created slavery.
A hunter gather or forest gardener tribe could have kept slaves but the slaves would have been useless to them.
An agricultural society can have one guy watching over 50 people chained together working in a field.
A non industrial society can have times of poverty caused by a drought or natural disaster, but an industrial society can sustain a whole segment of society living in constant prolonged poverty.
Humans didn't just come into existence knowing how to build houses and grow food. It's completely natural for a human to just sit there and die if he doesn't use his mind to survive. Birds don't do that. That's why we have a term that separates us from animals. We aren't the same.
dogs are very close to us in this way, they seek outside validation for everything, and compete for the right to be the one making the rules and issuing the commands
this is the downside of being intelligent, you have to form a model in your brain for everything in order to interact with it, it's not preordained in your DNA
Yes, poverty is the Natural state of Man. That's why the Father, in His wisdom, gave men private property, so that they could provide for themselves and their families, and maybe eventually produce a surplus, and drag them and theirs out of poverty. If the surplus was large enough, they could drag entire communities out of poverty, even.
Simply giving men property doesn't end poverty, is the thing, as it's his industrious and clever application of the property, that ends his poverty. And people differ in their industriousness and cleverness.
That's why Communism is a modern heresy: it denies men the Natural Right to private property, steadily destroys property through inefficiency, and drags entire communities into poverty and even mass-starvation.
One of my favorite economic passages is from Rerum Novarum, and it wraps up my opinion on this succinctly.
"That right to property, therefore, which has been proved to belong naturally to individual persons, must in like wise belong to a man in his capacity of head of a family; nay, that right is all the stronger in proportion as the human person receives a wider extension in the family group. It is a most sacred law of nature that a father should provide food and all necessaries for those whom he has begotten; and, similarly, it is natural that he should wish that his children, who carry on, so to speak, and continue his personality, should be by him provided with all that is needful to enable them to keep themselves decently from want and misery amid the uncertainties of this mortal life. Now, in no other way can a father effect this except by the ownership of productive property, which he can transmit to his children by inheritance. A family, no less than a State, is, as We have said, a true society, governed by an authority peculiar to itself, that is to say, by the authority of the father. Provided, therefore, the limits which are prescribed by the very purposes for which it exists be not transgressed, the family has at least equal rights with the State in the choice and pursuit of the things needful to its preservation and its just liberty. We say, "at least equal rights"; for, inasmuch as the domestic household is antecedent, as well in idea as in fact, to the gathering of men into a community, the family must necessarily have rights and duties which are prior to those of the community, and founded more immediately in nature. If the citizens, if the families on entering into association and fellowship, were to experience hindrance in a commonwealth instead of help, and were to find their rights attacked instead of being upheld, society would rightly be an object of detestation rather than of desire. "
