During the 2011 “Occupy Wall Street” protests, far-left populists gave themselves a platform to broadcast some of the worst ideas to ever enter the body politic. The worst part is that these ideas have since become embraced as mainstream, with national lawmakers and presidential candidates emerging as a few of their ideological champions.
If you were to ask one of these protesters to explain what the worst problem affecting the world today is, their answer often includes the phrase that “the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.” This is often followed by some vague excuse for authoritarian socialism — as now seen in places like Venezuela and Cuba.
Let’s actually unpack that phrase for a second, because it is half true. The rich are getting richer. They always have. They’re rich. They tend to do that. The part that’s dangerously wrong is the second half — the poor are also getting richer. Since the industrial revolution, the purchasing power of every socio-economic class has increased. True enough — the gap between the rich and poor has widened, but so what? The poor enjoy more purchasing power than ever before, and things like mass starvation are largely a thing of the past in developed economies.
~ Facts Not Memes
