The goal of helping poor people is not to make them more comfortable in their poverty or to help them adopt a Stoic apátheia—indifference or impassive resignation—toward it. Nor is the goal to make them dependent on the help of others. Nor, finally, is the goal simply to assuage the consciences of wealthy people by doing something, anything. The goal, rather, is to enable the poor to become independent and themselves wealthy. This is the only goal that is consistent with respecting their personhood and, I would add, with common human decency. So the central remaining question is: How do we do it? How do we help the poor while respecting personhood?

I made what I called a “principled” case for the classical liberal state in chapters 2 and 3, and I argued in chapter 4 that the influential argument of the Singerians does not defeat it. In this chapter let us ask the “consequentialist” question of what exactly are the actual effects on life under such a state. This is an empirical question, after all, so, is there evidence out there that can recommend a course of action? It turns out that economics and history do have something to contribute to the discussion—quite a lot, in fact. For not only has history yielded some fairly definitive recommendations, but economics has in addition gone a considerable way toward explaining why what worked in the past did so.