First, make sure that your country's money is no good. Print money like there's no tomorrow. Hyperinflation is one of the easiest and most popular ways to dismantle an economy. Another popular monetary gambit is to make sure your currency is not convertible. This guarantees that no one will ever want to invest in your country.

To further discourage investment, be sure to nationalize all major Industries. Nationalization has additional poverty-enhancing benefits. For example, it will ensure that the nationalized industries never improve technologically or become more efficient, and it makes workers pathetically dependent on their political masters, namely you.

Of course, you may find it too tiresome to nationalize everything, in which case it is very important that you establish high tariffs that insulate your country's remaining private industries (usually owned by your cronies anyway) from competition.

In addition, your legal system should make it nearly impossible for anyone to license a new business, however small. This will offer opportunities for your bureaucrats to make a living through corruption and will protect your cronies from domestic competition. An added advantage is that most commerce will be made illegal and subject to arbitrary enforcement.

This leads to the point that property is critical. Once people start to own something, they invest in it and improve it, leading inexorably to the creation of wealth. Again, the legal system can help to make it impossible to issue clear titles so that your citizens can't buy, sell, or borrow against their "property." Also, force your farmers to sell their crops to government commodity boards at below-market rates. This will discourage them from investing in anything more advanced than subsistence agriculture, and you will be able to sell whatever crops you do seize at low prices to keep the urban populations quiet.

Arnold Kling makes a very smart point about how moderate inflation may well "grease the wheels of the labor market." If you talk to Bill Dickens of Brookings about the micro evidence for strong nominal wage rigidity--that is, people really don't like having their wages cut, so firms don't do it--or if you read Truman Bewley's big book on why firms don't cut wages in recession, you'll think that Arnold's point is even smarter.

Many pressure groups from the industrialised countries have criticised the drugs companies for the way they use IPP - and they are right to do so. But these groups also object to "parallel imports" - the segmentation of rich and poor countries' markets in order to prevent the importation of lower-priced drugs sold by the drugs companies to poor countries. Yet to end segmentation would be a big mistake: without this mechanism the rich and poor countries would form a single market and the prices charged to poor countries would rise. Segmentation enables poor countries to secure low prices for their drugs.There are often paradoxical ways to help the poor - segmentation is one of them. The lobby groups that try to defend the interests of the poorest countries should take note.

Me? I think this is a place where you have to blame Democratic politicians, so eager to grab for an issue with traction that they have forgotten what their jobs really are.

So who's done more good for more people, Jack Welch or Aaron Feuerstein?

Even in a good economy, capitalists are seen as little more than wealth seekers, go-getters, and empire builders. In a bad economy they're exploitative and ravenous -- ruthless, cold-hearted profiteers. Rarely are corporations and the people who run them seen as humanitarians.

But that's exactly what they are. Because the creation of wealth and the innovation and technological advancement that comes with it - even when motivated by greed - is the clearest and most effective way to better the human condition.

Aaron Feuerstein gave away $25 million of wealth. His charity did little more than help a few thousand people maintain their present standard of living. It didn't create new jobs. It did nothing to better the condition of anyone other than Aaron Feuerstein and the people who got his money.

Jack Welch - driven by profit - laid off 100,000 people 20 years ago. But he's since built enough wealth for GE to employ several times that many people - including, now, the 3,000 who work for Malden Mills. GE today produces not only refrigerators, but energy, electricity, and entertainment. Not only has Jack Welch done more than Aaron Feuerstein for humanity, he's actually done more for the employees of Malden Mills.

For all of them, drugs don't cost nearly enough, since a higher cost would bring forth more and better means of fighting cancer, multiple sclerosis and other diseases. Yet legislators seem dedicated to restricting the availability of such pharmaceuticals.

That's not their intent, of course. But that would be the inevitable result of their proposals.

The benefits of pharmaceuticals are all around us. A new drug, enfuvirtide, or T-20, appears to help AIDS patients for whom other medicines are ineffective. Genentech has produced a new product, 2C4, that combats several cancers, including breast and prostate.

More than 800 medications are under development for elder diseases -- Alzheimer's, osteoarthritis, prostate disease and more. Another 200 for children's conditions are in process.

These drugs are being developed only because pharmaceutical companies can acquire patents and then sell their drugs at a profit. Typically, only one of 5,000 to 10,000 compounds ends up as a marketable drug, and of those only 30% make money. Those few must pay for everything -- research and development, dry holes, overhead, lawsuits.

One can argue about how long patents should run. But drug makers face a special problem: It takes years after a patent has been filed to clear the Food and Drug Administration's regulatory process. Once the patent expires, other companies can compete.

But allowing taxpayers' money to be used to promote the GPL through NASA or the Sandia National Laboratories - both of which have developed software licensed under the GPL - is another story entirely. Building a wall between open-source and commercial software is bad public policy because it artificially reduces the potential return to government investment in research. Imagine where we'd be if pharmaceutical companies had not been allowed to use government research, and the development of drugs based on that research had been left to non-profits or government agencies. Thousands of people would be dead who are now alive, courtesy of some of today's "miracle" drugs.