From The New Wasps by Kevin Williamson at National Review

In fact, the opposite is closer to the truth: When you have a thriving free-market economy throwing off great gushing rivers of profit, the most successful people begin to look for satisfaction in something other than 22-bedroom beachfront estates. Donald Trump and his gold-plated bathroom fixtures are a relic of a dead culture — and good riddance to it.

Pope Francis, who as an economist is one hell of a theologian, insists that we can have capitalism if we will care for the people, which gets it exactly backward: We can care for the poor if we have capitalism. The mandate that we feed the poor presupposes that we have something to feed them. Production necessarily precedes consumption, which means that it necessarily precedes redistribution.

It is strange, and more than a little perverse, that this part of California is one of the nation’s great hotbeds of progressive anti-capitalism, and that is remains in thrall to the superstition that a society in which markets are allowed to operate freely and capital is permitted (and encouraged!) to find its best use must also be a society that is cruel, callous, indifferent to the poor and the vulnerable, selfish, and vulgar. The good people of the San Francisco area live smack dab in the middle of what must surely be the world’s greatest living example that the truth is exactly the opposite.

 Class war? That is so five decades ago.


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