However, this kind of poverty is neither inevitable nor the result of some kind of immutable natural law that applies to all human societies. Just as shooting you with a gun is not inevitable, and just as polluting your water supply is not inevitable, so it is that the worst kinds of poverty are not inevitable (as low poverty rates in Scandinavia prove). The ever more divided class system we endure today is part and parcel of the hyperconsumption-hyperproduction treadmill system, and it CAN be greatly reduced, along with the two "holocausts" occurring every year because of it. This may not have been true in the past, but it is definitely true today, given our modern technological capacity to create such an unprecedented abundance of basic goods and services for everyone, along with the incomes necessary for everyone to be able to purchase their fair share of this abundance.
The fact is, low socioeconomic status and the consequent lack of money necessary to buy basic goods and services, is the leading cause of death on planet earth.
Extreme economic inequality and the inevitable poverty that stems from it, is actually unnecessary and merely a structural outcome of the hyperconsumption-hyperproduction treadmill economy itself. In other words, this kind of system is itself the leading cause of unnecessary death on the planet today. Why? Because it necessarily leaves so many people out, for the reasons already provided.
So back to our original question
In an economic system which inherently generates ever more class stratification and overall inequity (as we see happening in the US today), how can the effects of "Structural Violence" -- a phenomenon noted by public health researchers to kill well over 18 million people a year, by generating a vast range of systemic detriments such as behavioral, emotional and physical disorders -- be minimized or even eliminated?
The answer, of course, is that it cannot be eliminated as long as we remain captured by the hyperproduction-hyperconsumption treadmill system, the continuance of which will guarantee that the two "holocausts" occurring every year will eventually turn into 3 or 4, and so on, as population increases along with the rise in extreme economic inequality that is continually being generated, and which shows no sign of slowing.
As far as economic inequality being minimized (as many in the world today are trying to help achieve), this could occur short term with wealth reallocation, though taxation and the like. But even if this reallocation was accomplished, its effect would be minimal, as it would still do nothing to address the true, structural source of the problem. It would be a mere temporary patch. Not to mention that the odds of this wealth reallocation occurring at all, are quite small, since any such direct action, and any legal or state imposition on free-market business enterprise, is widely considered to be unacceptable.
If you are one of those people who says we don't any longer have a free-market today -- and that instead we have state coercion and crony capitalism only -- please watch Peter Joseph's lecture ,"Origins and Adaptations Part II" from the University of Toronto, delivered in 2014, along with his Berlin Lecture, "Economic Calculation in a Natural Law, Resource-based Economy. Here he counters the nonsense that what we have today is NOT a pure, free-market-based economy (in which the fundamental principle is the freedom of some to generate vast profits by means of the hyperproduction-hyperconsumption treadmill and the concomitant restriction of the freedom of others, by way of the excessive amounts of unnecessary work that the 'treadmill' requires. -- It takes a lot of work to produce, distribute and sell all that stuff!)
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