Wealth & Money Quote by L. Neil Smith

There is a deliberately explosive neatness to L. Neil Smith's claim: poverty isn’t tragic, complex, or politically intractable; it’s bureaucratic sabotage. The sentence is engineered like a libertarian mic drop, swapping the usual moral language of deprivation for the language of constraint. “Solved problem” is the provocation: it implies that anyone still treating poverty as hard is either stupid or, more pointedly, invested in keeping it unsolved.

The subtext is a romantic view of the market as an almost natural ecosystem, one that will self-correct the moment government stops interfering. Notice the flattering cast list: “intelligent, capable, and responsible men and women.” Poverty here isn’t framed as a condition people endure so much as collateral damage inflicted on the virtuous producers who would otherwise lift everyone. That move isn’t accidental; it shifts sympathy away from the poor as primary subjects and toward the allegedly muzzled strivers as the true victims. It also smuggles in a moral hierarchy: success signals responsibility, and responsibility deserves freedom; regulation becomes an attack on merit.

Context matters because Smith is a science fiction writer steeped in anti-statist, pro-individualist traditions (think Heinlein-adjacent), where society’s problems are often traced to centralized authority and solved through unleashed autonomy. The rhetoric relies on absolutes and a cinematic sequence: abolish, stand back, boom. It’s persuasion by simplification, a confident story that feels satisfying precisely because it erases trade-offs, power imbalances, and the messy fact that “productive capacity” isn’t distributed evenly - and neither are the benefits of a boom.