Lisa Hanna has written a timely, necessary, and courageous article published in this newspaper on Sunday, October 25, 2026, titled ‘Poverty is not a virtue; wealth is not a vice’. I begin where she began: Her title deserves serious engagement before it is debated. It addresses a profound cultural paradox. Poverty is not something to aspire to, make permanent, or glorify; wealth, when legitimately achieved, is not a moral failing. Once these two propositions are disentangled, the ideological fog clears: We can stop romanticising poverty as though endurance were a policy, and stop treating every fortune as though it were an indictment.

Poverty is a condition and a state — a lack and a narrowing of what a person can do and be. The poor are people, not a demographic category or a static identity. Wealth, broadly, is more than material possession: Think health and well-being, capability, assets, freedom to choose. Riches are narrower: Material accumulation, the Mammon of scripture. The debate confuses them in both directions: Defending riches as though they were wealth, pitying the poor as though pity were a policy. But a metaphor is not yet a solution.

The question is what Hanna’s thesis intends to solve. Her answer is the credibility of promises against fiscal affordability. A Government can declare a service free, but not its cost as non-existent. Teachers must be paid, hospitals stocked, roads maintained. No philosophy, however compassionate its language, can repeal the arithmetic of paying for its promises. And gratis and loan financing usually come with conditions and pressures that make the juice not worth the squeeze.

Sisyphus explains why some promises fail. A politician may genuinely want to fulfil a promise and still miscalculate the real cost of delivery, or the logistical impediments that come with delivering it. That structural friction deserves understanding, but it must not become an excuse. Some are guided by an inherent corruption of conscience; promising the impossible merely to secure power. This is not Sisyphus; it is demagoguery.

Michael Manley’s 1972 slogan, ‘Better Must Come’, was mostly social re-engineering, but also economic inclusion and upliftment — moving people from the periphery of poverty to the centre. His plans met Robert Burns’ verdict: “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley” — on geopolitics, disturbances in the international economic system, and Middle East conflict. Context, not excuse.

I agree, but Manley’s failure asks one step behind the promise: Whose cash? Edward Seaga’s famous aphorism, “It takes cash to care,” is the right starting point, but it opens rather than closes the inquiry. Cash from whom, raised how, and with what leakage on the way?

Hanna notes, subtly, the businessman who praises effort but runs to the State in trouble. She concedes not every fortune reflects productive achievement — wealth often stems from inherited privilege, monopoly power, or political proximity.

When the wealthy evade their fair share, while connected firms extract State resources, social care is funded from the wrong end of the socio-economic spectrum. Fair share is not envy; it is arithmetic, extended to the revenue side of her own ledger. Consider the asymmetry: Poverty spending sits visibly in the national budget, audited dollar by dollar and moralised as dependency, while corporate welfare hides in the tax code — waivers, tax holidays, duty remissions, concessions — never tallied as spending, its firms assumed wealth creators even when they live on arbitrage, State contracts, and rent-seeking rather than innovation or export competitiveness, backed by lobbyists and financiers while poverty programmes have no voice. Scrutiny runs inversely to power.

The two ledgers are symbiotic. Causatively, the hidden ledger of corporate concessions shrinks the revenue for road, water, education, health, and shelter, and monopoly protection with political proximity concentrates wealth — the transfer from poor to rich. Correlatively, both rise from the same structure, where State access is the real currency. And the fixation serves the symbiosis: While attention sits on the small, visible ledger, the large, hidden one works unexamined.

Apply Hanna’s arithmetic to both ledgers and her thesis becomes stronger: The claim that “we cannot afford to care” is exposed as a choice of priorities, and the true, unexamined dependence belongs to subsidised corporations, not the poor. My frame stated plainly: Poverty is generational inequality and disenfranchisement — exclusion laid down in land, schooling, capital, and standing. Scripture is the key to why the title grips, and I use it to explain, not to preach.

Scripture rarely deals in poverty and wealth; it deals in persons, “the poor and the rich”. The camel and the needle, and the question what it profits a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul, make wealth feel like a wager against the soul — so poverty looks the safer wager. People do not glorify poverty because they like suffering; they see the struggle itself as righteousness.

Here is the double edge. Preached as consolation, your reward is in heaven, be content. It acts as an anaesthetic, and in Jamaica the colonial church preached that bargain to the enslaved and the poor. Preached as liberation, theology catalyses resistance. The soothing, not the scripture itself, helps the generational structure hold. The present-day chapter is the prosperity gospel — sowing seeds and reaping harvests — which breaks the old hold but risks the mirror error: Wealth as divine validation, its sowing transactional, not production.

Hanna opens with Jamaica’s “complicated relationship with capitalism” and the phrase deserves the same pressure as her title. What looks strange is a rational response to scarcity and choice: The poor make persistent efforts to extricate themselves, yet are repeatedly defeated, like Sisyphus’s children condemned to an endless uphill struggle, while the wealthy always seem to prosper by means easily read as, or confused with, exploitation. The average poor Jamaican wants to become wealthy, and the inability creates fissure and antagonism toward the owners of capital. The relationship is not strange at all.

It is what scarcity produces when choice is rationed and the climb is impossible. Hence, “capitalisms” — plantation, enclave, mixed varieties, none open to the majority equally. In May 1938, Jamaica burned. Workers rose against mockery wages and scandalous conditions, and the sugar-rich Empire answered with batons and bullets.

The People’s National Party, formed later that year, sought to dismantle these colonial inequities, while the Jamaica Labour Party, formed in 1943 from the unions, pressed the labour market’s case — wages and conditions — and its pressure indirectly improved them, whatever else its politics served. Suffrage came in 1944, but the structure held. The Moyne Commission’s findings documented a post-Emancipation economy designed for extraction rather than domestic enfranchisement.

The 1960s brought bauxite, hotels, six per cent growth, without development. Only 30 per cent saw rising incomes, while that of the poorest 30 per cent fell by 25 per cent between 1958 and 1968. Wealth was created, but for whom, and why more poverty than riches? Not estrangement from capitalism but disenfranchisement within it rationed by birth, land tenure, schooling, capital. Character had little to do with it.

Jamaica’s poverty rate fell to a record low of 7.8 per cent in 2024. But rural poverty stands at 11 per cent against 2.5 per cent in Kingston, and by the US$8.30-a-day upper-middle-income line, one Jamaican in five is still poor.

Hanna recalls the Manley who reconsidered, but there is a Manley she does not mention who belongs here. He talked self-reliance with surplus for exports — production first. And he worked on the Employee Share Ownership Plan (ESOP) Act, enacted in 1994 under P J Patterson, with tax incentives for companies offering shares to employees. His rationale was productivity first. The ESOP model was not merely a mechanism for capital accumulation; it was designed as a vehicle for economic democratisation, seeking to transform workers from mere labour inputs into equity-owning stakeholders with a direct claim on enterprise surplus.

Similarly, Norman Manley’s 1957 introduction of the Common Entrance Examination and expansion of free secondary places was a landmark structural intervention to break the colonial monopoly on human capital and replace birthright with merit. Though class stratification eventually blunted both reforms, they were not programmes of State dependency, but architectural attempts to democratise the means of wealth creation.

I hold a simple view of Government: To do for people what they cannot do for themselves. That principle both disciplines promises — which is Hanna’s concern — and justifies them. Road, water, education, health, and shelter is just the floor. The conversation must extend beyond whether promises are funded to examine who creates wealth, who owns it, who bears the tax burden, and how a condition laid down over generations, soothed into bearability, lives in the mind as in the pocket.

If poverty is neither a virtue nor a permanent verdict, and wealth is not a moral vice, our core objective must be to democratise wealth creation. This requires broad-based asset ownership, equitable taxation, and a focused State that guarantees the social floor. Until we subject the hidden ledger of corporate privilege to the same unforgiving arithmetic we impose on the poor, our fiscal discipline will remain a moral fiction. And, until we dismantle the inherited architecture of exclusion, we have no right to mistake a rigged climb for a lack of ambition. Apply her arithmetic honestly to both ledgers, open the gates of ownership, and let us see which of our certainties survives.