Max Borders‘ latest Ideas Matter update highlights former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher‘s thoughts on the progressive world-view.
Margaret Thatcher is right: They would rather the poor were poorer, provided the rich were less rich. This is the essence of the progressive worldview. And it’s time we purged our society of class warfare politics. What matters, after all, is not how much the rich have, but that conditions of the poorest are steadily improving.
That doesn’t mean we should tolerate government transfers from poor and middle class to the wealthy. And these are going on all the time — from regressive local sales taxes to bank bailouts/corporate welfare to Medicare. But if we take the marketplace and disentangle the government, we should be prepared to say that there is a causal relationship between the rich getting richer and the poor being better off. In the positive-sum game of economic growth — “a rising tide lifts all boats.”
