Saturday, September 5, 2020

Adding Up

This is the second post in a row in which I link to an article from National Review, so I am sure there are many who are now convinced my knuckles drag the ground when I walk. Oh well.

Writer Brian Reidl casts his piece as a way of understanding why socialism can't work but I think his point is more basic than that. Even people who would not consider themselves socialists but simply good old-fashioned the-government-must-help statists sometimes don't do the math, as he describes. Claims that, simply by taxing rich people, we could fund extravagant social safety net programs -- let alone the full-blown nationalization of major sectors of the economy -- undercount 1) the number of rich people and 2) how much money they actually have.

Of course I sympathize with those folks. Math got me, too.

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