Fall Into The Gap

Columnist Niall Ferguson in the LA Times writes about the leftward trend in worldwide politics. He believes the main cause is inequality. He may be right, but, disappointingly, he never says if this is a good reason to move left, much less a sufficient one. All he can do is rehearse tiresome stats on how wide the economic gap is.

When you have a free market with people creating great value, you will have a wide difference between the top and the bottom. In fact, the only large societies with economic equality are those where it's enforced by a strong central government, and since no government can force everyone to be rich, such governments generally make their people very poor.

What we should worry about is how wealthy the country is, how well the average citizen is doing, and how well the poorest are doing--questions which have little or nothing to do with the differential between the most and least successful. In capitalism, the pie grows and what was once only for the rich can soon become available to the middle class and even poor. Few things will slow down the pie's growth faster than demanding everyone have everything at once.

If what you care about above all else is the gap, then you'd be happy if the top third lost a large portion of their wealth and nothing else happened. Or if I said "in the next twenty years, the poor will do twice as well and the rich will do four times as well," you'd rather have things stay as they are.

Ferguson may be right in believing this political trend will continue. To bad he doesn't explain it's based on fallacious reasoning.