‘They’d Rather Have the Poor Poorer’

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Wednesday, July 02, 2025

 

Rich writes:

 

Another fallacy is Mamdani’s assumption that the very existence of billionaires is bad for everyone else, especially the poor. The fact is that New York’s estimated 120 billionaires could vaporize and move somewhere else, and New York’s neighborhoods wouldn’t be any safer or more affordable for ordinary New Yorkers.

 

This is true, of course. But it’s also true that, for a lot of people on the left, none of that matters. Why? Because, to them, the size of the gap between the richest person and the poorest person is the “problem” to be solved. Margaret Thatcher explained the stupidity of this approach well in 1990, just before she left the political scene: