The media and academic obsessions with economic "disparities" have gone international. Recent news stories proclaim that most of "the world's wealth" belongs to a small fraction of the world's people.

Let's go back to square one. Just what is "the world's wealth"?

You can check in your local phone book, surf the Internet or do genealogical research: There is no one named "The World." How can a non-existent being own wealth?

Human beings own wealth. Once we put aside lofty poetic nonsense about "the world's wealth," we at least have a fighting chance of talking sense about realities.

Who are these minority of the world's population who own a majority of the world's wealth?

They are the population of the United States, Western Europe, Japan and a few other affluent countries. How did these particular people come to possess so much more wealth than other people?

They did it the old-fashioned way. They produced the wealth that they own. You might as well ask why bees have so much more honey than other creatures.

The rhetoric of clever people can verbally collectivize all the wealth that was produced individually, and then they become aghast at the "disparities" that are magically turned into "inequities" in the distribution of "the world's wealth."

Have all the people in the world had an equal chance to produce wealth? No, nowhere close to an equal chance -- either in the world or within a given society.

Geography alone makes the chances grossly unequal. How were Eskimos supposed to grow pineapples or the bedouins of the desert learn to fish?

How were people in the Balkans supposed to have an industrial revolution like that of Western Europe, when the Balkans had neither the raw materials required by an industrial revolution nor any economically viable way of transporting raw materials from other places?

The geographic handicaps of Africa would fill a book. French historian Fernand Braudel said: "In understanding Black Africa, geography is more important than history."

What are we supposed to do about these disparities? File a class-action lawsuit against God? The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals might accept such a lawsuit but they are unlikely to be able to do much about the situation. Continued...