W, maybe I am missing something, but about 40 years ago Milton Friedman and Richard Nixon proposed a perfectly good instant technocratic fix that would make poverty (at least in the US) go away pretty much "poof"-ishly. This was the negative income tax aka the guaranteed annual income. If anyone (or any head of household, details matter but not here) below the poverty line received from the government the money to make up the difference between his or her income and poverty line + one cent, there would be no poverty.
If the poverty line were set at a reasonable level, which today it is not, there would be no desperate need. Obviously there would be residual problems with people who because of incapacity, addiction, inexperience whatever, could not manage the money, but that cannot be a very large proportion of the poor.
On the global level there's no such quick fix because there isn't any reliable global mechanism to distribute the funds, and constructing one would be a vast and politically extremely tricky task.
--- Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:
> Yoshie:
>
> Today, most secular leftists do not propose that
> such absolute poverty
> can, will, or should be abolished or that
> North-South gaps can, will,
> or should be closed, let alone all exploitation and
> oppression be
> ended. (Those who still do have no idea how.) That
> is the reality.
>
> [WS:] Yoshie, while I agree with much of you post
> here, the comments like
> above really throw me off. How on earth do you
> imagine that anyone, let
> alone the tiny and insignificant left can "abolish
> poverty." Like, poof,
> and the poverty goes away?
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