"The difference between our rich and poor grows greater every year. Our distribution of wealth is getting more uneven all the time. A man can make a million and he is on every page in the morning. But it never tells who gave up the million he got. You can't get money without taking it from somebody."
Will Rogers

The quote above was spoken six decades ago and still the differences grow larger, not at a predictable arithmetic rate, but at the geometric scale of our computer-generated modern society. The two most wealthy Americans have made their fortunes in businesses not even defined when Rogers spoke those words.

And so it goes and so it cannot much longer go, before we are faced with something akin to full-scale class warfare. Citizens of this country will not eat cake. We call them disadvantaged, a word more comforting than poor, a word that makes us somehow not responsible, able to discuss their plight or more often not-discuss it, dispassionately. They are not disadvantaged, marked somehow by forces beyond our control. They are poor as they have always been poor, but never in such numbers, never as so many are becoming rich.

For the most part and out of all proportion to their percentage in the population, our poor citizens are black and Hispanic and Appalachian white. The disparity in their income is awesome to behold and endemic, a matter of spiraling causes rooted in welfare dependence, lack of education and much more importantly, generational hopelessness. It has been a long time in the incubation and is absolutely without possibility of quick-fix and immune to federal intervention. Well-meant legislation fails, Great Societies perish and both sides become more bitter and resentful.

Income redistribution won't cure poverty. Welfare holds it back from progress, although welfare properly supports a bare minimum standard. But it is a mean-spirited standard, hated by those who receive as well as those who provide.

It is evident to me that a great deal of money is spent by the have-nots of our country and more evident yet that the drain of that money is persistently out of their communities and their control. Money enough for fortunes to be made, at the very least for prosperity and yet the tide of that money is always away, always to other pockets already full. Conceive of the groceries bought, the rents and mortgages paid, the automobiles purchased and repaired and then look to the ownership of most purchase points. Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink.

When a disaster such as the Los Angeles riot occurs, the wreckage if it is rebuilt at all, is largely done by contractors from outside the area. Insurance doesn't cover civil disobedience, so various governments pick up the bill and when it's over the community is left no better off than before, usually less well.

Would it not make sense for these same contractors to be hired as construction managers, teaching jobless residents those management skills and to learn the building trade as electricians, carpenters, drywallers and plumbers? Is it Pollyanna to think that wages earned and skills learned might bring some useful result out of all that rage and frustration? Perhaps, but there is a great deal beyond riot damage to be built and improved in our poorest neighborhoods. Bootstrap firms that might emerge from this process could find profitable work for the foreseeable future and the wage-rates and skills learned are real, they are lasting.

Is it not possible that a Pontiac dealer in the inner city might be owned by a member of the society that sustains it? General Motors has training programs, is it not possible that a group of blacks or Hispanics or poor whites might actually qualify for such training? The same for Wal-Mart or the large food and drug chains. A chance at the economic life of their own community would be a huge help in dollars retained, self respect and hope for the better lives we all claim to cherish. No one would have to take a financial bath, there is financing available from within these communities, if the training and marketing expertise of already successful businesses were made available.

As a society, within these pockets of poverty we are currently jailing the cream of the crop insofar as the will to succeed, the will to better themselves is concerned. I'm speaking specifically about the worst illegal element, the drug dealers. These are young people who will not settle for what is offered and by education or upbringing or whatever evil haunts their youth, see no viable alternative other than a minimum-wage job flipping hamburgers. They are making tools of an illegal trade where no other tools exist, breaking rules where there are no role models. There is desire in their lawlessness, the will to claw their way up in a society that offers no realistic alternatives.

So, I would make Pontiac dealers out of drug dealers, is that it? Obviously not and I can already hear the murmur from the "haves" that the have-not who wants to get ahead can fight his way upward as well through the schools, arriving on scholarship to Harvard and from there to an illustrious career. Yes, one or two can and one or two do, but they don't stay in the neighborhood and they don't contribute to the quality of life or hope for those they leave behind. A cycle of ambivalence can only be broken by those who stay, those who prove there's a chance within the neighborhood culture, those who care about the schools and the streets and their kids and their neighbors.

Economic participation is the well-head of American pride and opportunity and business is the method by which we participate, local business, neighborhood business. If the poor are ever to pull the brightest of their kids away from the only game in town, the drug business, there have to be attractive and achievable alternatives.

The worst possible solution would be another government program, another attempt to legislate control over human resources and aspirations. The best possible solution would be small, private, business led pilot programs to instill those values and opportunities in areas where they have no hope of originating under their own steam. And the best of reasons for business to become involved is not altruism or moralistic judgment, but profit.

Three quarters of a century ago, Henry Ford put the industrial world on its head by introducing the five-dollar day. He didn't do it to improve the condition of his employees or out of charity, he did it realizing that a man who earned five dollars a day was a possible customer for a Ford automobile.

The business world turns its head toward China as a huge potential market for consumer goods. Emerging nations are coveted by Coca-Cola and others, who see the profit to be made. Perhaps we can find within our own society the potential for explosive growth as the have-nots take a place according to their drive and ability along side the haves.

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