Patrick Colquhoun wrote, “Poverty is that state and condition in society where the individual has no surplus labour… It is the source of wealth, since without poverty there could be no labour…”

-A Treatise on Indigence (1806)

This is proto-capitalist discipline theory. This flawed logic is, poverty is necessary because it forces people to work, and if people were secure, they would not submit to labor on exploitative terms. Therefore, poverty must exist so that the wealthy classes can enjoy comfort, labor remains cheap, compliant, and abundant, and their social hierarchy remains intact. In other words they frame misery as a moral and economic tool. Gross.

This ideology is commonly used by elite capitalist to justify workhouse, poor laws, wage suppression, opposition to social welfare, and the idea that hunger is a tool, not disgraceful problem or neglect of a state.

Joseph Townsend, in his work, A Dissertation on the Poor Laws (1786), explicitly argued that hunger, not law, was the best motivator of labor. This view is now widely objected by educated people because modern economics, sociology, and anthropology overwhelmingly show that, security increases productivity, not laziness, innovation thrives where basic needs are met, extreme inequality harms social stability and economic growth, and that poverty is politically constructed, not inevitable.

Poverty has always functioned as one of civilization’s ways to extract labor without openly calling it slavery. From the earliest agricultural states onward, people did not voluntarily line up to till fields so that elites could accumulate surplus, power, and prestige. For most of human history, hunter-gatherer societies met their needs with far less labor, more autonomy, and greater social equality. The shift to “civilization” required something new: pressure. Debt, enclosure, taxation, hunger, and later mediocre wages all served the same purpose, to separate people from their means of survival and force their dependence on systems that benefited those at the top. It is a common myth, and a carefully maintained lie, that our foraging ancestors lived short, brutal lives with no room for rest or joy, and that civilization is what finally granted humanity leisure and comfort. In truth, they worked less, thrived, and understood time as something to be lived rather than spent. Yet we are taught to believe another story: labor without end, sacrifice without guarantee, the quiet promise that if we give everything, our strength, our health, our years- comfort will someday be handed back to us, just before the grave. What a sad existence really.