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Sometimes, I wish I was rich enough to be a socialist. What a sweet gig: not only do you get to whoop it up on your private yacht or in your gated compound, but you can advocate making wealthy people like you hand over their money, without ever actually meaning a word of it – and the horking seals of left will never, ever, call you out on it.
There’s plenty a working man shouldn’t have to put up with, but one of the most odious is wealthy elites screeching about ‘runaway inequality’ while clutching their billions and demanding the rest of us pay for their virtue. As the great Jim Goad once said, on a related topic, when the elites hand over the keys to their mansions, then maybe we’ll talk about open borders. Until then, shut yer overfed pieholes.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for far higher taxation in a recent blog entry, arguing that current wealth concentration is higher than that of the Gilded Age and is about to get worse globally. The chart-topping singer Billie Eilish implored billionaires to give away their money, while New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani has gone further, opining, “I don’t think we should have billionaires” because we live in “a moment of such inequality.” If anything is having a moment, it is the conviction that inequality has grown urgent enough to justify a muscular policy response.
There’s just one big, fat problem: like nearly everything the chattering ninnies of the left cluck and squawk about, it’s a load of old cobblers. These loons live in a fact-free echo chamber, completely ignorant of everything from basic science to biology. Claims of ‘growing inequality’ are, in many areas, directly counter to all evidence.
Even when the elites gave it the ol’ college try to cement their Versailles-level privilege, during the Covid pandemic, it didn’t work as well as they’d hoped.
But the facts don’t support this. Not only has global income inequality fallen over the long run – contrary to the popular narrative – but inequality has also declined in education, health, and a host of other areas. The world is now more equal across a range of factors, from lifespan and childhood survival to internet access and schooling. The more broadly one examines inequality, the more encouraging the data appear. It turns out that even the shock of Covid-19 failed to erase decades of progress toward a wealthier and more equal world.
Consumption inequality is collapsing too: in 2000 the richest 10 per cent spent 40 times more than the poorest 50 per cent. By 2025, it was down to around 18 times. The poorest half now out-consume the global richest one per cent. Progress in health, education, internet access and child survival has been equally encouraging. The world isn’t drifting into dystopian gaps, the poor are catching up.
None of this suits the narrative, of course. Panic sells. So does power. Calls for global wealth taxes and foreign aid bonanzas ignore the evidence. Decades of aid have often entrenched bad governance rather than fostering genuine development.
Just as socialism has failed everywhere it’s been tried, so have wealth taxes.
Wealth taxes have their own problems, from high administrative costs and enforcement challenges to low revenue production and invasion of financial privacy. These problems help explain why so many of the countries that have implemented wealth taxes in the past – such as France, Germany, and Sweden – later abolished the tax. Perhaps the worst of all, by discouraging risk-taking, wealth taxes suppress investment and growth, effects that would be felt in both rich and poor countries and would likely prove especially damaging to development in the world’s poorest economies.
The one thing you can say for Mamdani is that at least he’s giving us yet another object lesson in socialist failure in record time. He was elected only a couple of months ago and already wealth is fleeing New York City faster than an open-borders celebrity who spots an illegal immigrant who’s not one of their army of wage-slaves in the foliage of their heavily guarded compound can shout, ‘Call ICE!’
The real kicker is the hypocrisy. These same elites demanding higher taxes on ‘the rich’ rarely take the obvious step: voluntarily paying more themselves. The US tax code, just like Australia and New Zealand, already allows anyone to write a bigger cheque to the treasury. How many do? Precious few. It’s far easier, and cheaper, to virtue-signal for compulsory extraction from everyone else.
Take Bernie Sanders, the poster boy for socialist millionaire hypocrisy. For decades he railed against ‘millionaires and billionaires’. Then, proving Harry Truman’s adage about people who become rich from politics, he finagled his way to being a multi-millionaire with three homes. Suddenly the rhetoric quietly shifted to focus on ‘billionaires’. The champion of the underclass, a man so lazy he was kicked out of a hippy commune for Pete’s sake, had joined the class he spent a career demonising.
Do as I say, not as I do – the eternal socialist refrain.
This isn’t about compassion. It’s about control. Alarmist inequality narratives justify sweeping interventions that risk undermining the very market mechanisms and economic freedom that delivered the convergence we’re seeing. Trade, property rights and stable institutions have done more to lift the global poor than any redistribution scheme in history.
The left’s inequality panic rests on a faulty premise and serves a predictable agenda: more state power, more extraction and more excuses for failure. Meanwhile, the stubborn facts show humanity making real, measurable gains toward a more prosperous and, yes, more equal world – all thanks to wicked old capitalism.
Adam Smith was right.
