Writer John Tamny here gives an excellent analysis of the silly populist campaign for increased “fairness” in the economy that just about every Democratic candidate embraced in the election.
One big contention of all those interventionists is that something has to be done to reduce the frightening wealth gap. Tamny points out that the prescription of increasing taxes on the wealthy will accomplish that, not by making the poor any better off, but by taking away wealth that higher income people would have invested to increase the GDP. Of course, there will always be a wealth gap for demagogues to exploit. It takes a bit of intelligence to understand that the wealth of the rich produces enormous benefits for the non-rich.
Tamny quotes the late Warren Brookes: “envy is the single most impoverishing attitude of thought.” Right. John Edwards and his kind want to exploit that human weakness all the way to the White House. The populist demagoguery will just get louder and louder over the next two years.
