Quote of the day—Margaret Thatcher

And what a policy!

Yes! He would rather have the poor be poorer provided the rich were less rich. That is the liberal policy!

Yes it came out! He didn’t intend it to but it did.

Margaret Thatcher
November 22, 1990
From 1:15 in this video:

[H/T to Phssthpok from this comment.

As pointed out at the end of the video as soon as someone talks about “the gap” between the rich and the poor they have revealed themselves and their true nature.

It was over 20 years a friend of mine, Susan K., told me essentially the same thing as part of a pitch about her love of Ayn Rand’s work. I read Atlas Shrugged years earlier when I was in my late teens. I really liked it but I hadn’t really followed up with her other works. Susan got me started again. Susan’s explanation of the preference of the left for poorer people as long as the gap was less was effective on me but it wasn’t as simple and as forceful as the way Ms. Thatcher expressed it.

For a different and more rigorous approach read Thomas Sowell’s book Black Rednecks and White Liberals or one of his many of his other works. The gist is that a critical item overlooked by those that complain about “the gap” is that different people are in the category of “poor” and “rich” over time. Of course someone in their first job is going to be earning far less than someone who has been working and learning about their area of expertise for 40 years. And over larger time spans it is pointed out there used to be complaints about the “railroad barons” and the super rich oil tycoons and others in steel and automobile industries. Those have been replaced by people in new industries and many of those older industries are essentially dead in this country. And even within an industry those with a seemingly invincible grip in one decade can be struggling or gone the next.

Economics is about the optimal allocation of scarce recourses. Optimal allocation obviously increases the total wealth of society. But what the statists don’t realize, or perhaps don’t want you to know so they can obtain personal power or wealth, is that something much closer to optimal allocation occurs when markets and minds are free rather than when dictated by the central committee with their decisions backed up by guns.

Don’t ever be at a loss for words when someone whines about the rich getting richer. Don’t try to explain that it doesn’t or shouldn’t matter if some people get rich or that it means there is opportunity for others to get rich. Handle it as Ms. Thatcher did. Follow it up by forcefully making the case that if the gap between the rich and the poor is a valid cause for government and/or social action then they will never be satisfied until full equality is achieved. And there are those that admit what they demand is full equality in just those words. But what they cannot seem to comprehend is that full equality can only be approximated by everyone being in extreme poverty. Full equality comes with death. And it should come as no surprise the political left is well acquainted with death on a very large scale.—Joe]

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2 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Margaret Thatcher

  1. Being created equal, i.e., with the same individual rights as all others, does not guarantee equality of a completely different kind, economic equality, either at birth nor at any other time over one’s lifetime.

    It is not an individual right to succeed in life. If it were, there would be a lot more people angry at government’s infringement of our rights, than there are already.

  2. Joe; you’ve done an excellent job making the ” tweaker”* argument in favor of a free market, but the primary argument centers around right and wrong– around human rights verses coercion. The U.S. was founded on the notion of protecting the unalienable rights of Man. That such principles naturally result in a more prosperous society is a side benefit.

    *A tweaker is one who focuses on the mechanics of government– if ” we” impose such and such a policy, then “we” can produce such and such a result.

    I submit that making the right decisions is much simpler than studying the macro mechanics of society and the economy, that simply doing the right thing, protecting basic peoperty rights i.e. avoiding coercion, is all it takes. The rest of it is simply none of government’s business. Our lives are ours, not government’s.

    That ” liberty and justice for all” seems not to be good enough for some people simply and literally means that slavery and injustice are favored by them. Right there. It’s that simple. What might result from slavery and injustice are rather beside the point. They’re a violation of basic rights and must be rejected on that basis alone. The moment we start listening to the tweakers’ grand reasoning we’re doomed.
    Because it doesn’t matter what someone says after it’s clear they advocate coercion.

    We’re being sold slavery and injustice on the promise that it will make for a better “tweak” somehow. It is of course always a lie.

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