Sarah Hoyt: "The Left Believes in Trickle-Up Poverty"

How many decades now has the left been screaming about “trickle-down economics” and how the idea that a rising tide lifts all boats, or that giving tax breaks allows people to invest and thereby creates more jobs. is just “wrong, wrong, wrong, miles and miles of wrongitude?”

Thirty or so?

In fact, their mad infatuation with "democratic socialism" is part of this shrieking and this mindset. (Hello Occasio-Cortex Occasional Cortex.) And it's mind-bogglingly stupid as well as evil.

I didn't realize how much of both it is until a recent Facebook discussion in which a leftist got... vocal and defended trickle-up poverty.

Okay, they’re – probably, though I wouldn’t bet on all of them – not aware that this is their preferred pathway and end result. But it is.

The discussion was about charter schools funded by government, i.e., tax money.

The argument against them was the same it’s always been: it privileges a few kids, while the rest remain mired in failing government schools. I’d heard it a million times. I’d just never actually stepped back and taken a look at how ridiculous that is.

Look, there is no comment about the charters costing more (they usually don’t) and no argument about the fact that government schools are failing.

There is just this outraged screeching that not every kid can get the same thing. Which is kind of amazing when you think about it. Presented with a dysfunctional school system that has resisted every attempt at reform and that turns out increasingly worse-educated children every year, the outrage is not that we aren’t coming up with enough ways for children to escape it, but that one of the pathways for escape should be blocked because not every child can leave.

The same arguments are adduced against homeschooling (when the advocates of government scholastic prisons aren’t shrieking that homeschooled children are maladjusted and ignorant) because – and this is almost a verbatim quote from that Facebook discussion – a divorced mother of two who is making minimum wage can’t give them an appropriate education at home.

Uh? What?

So, what you’re saying is that if you can’t rescue everyone from, say, a house fire or the path of a hurricane, you should shoot those trying to escape so that everyone can die?

Thinking about it, I realized this is exactly how the left thinks about everything, even – or perhaps particularly – economics. ...

Or to put it another way, the left would rather we all starve in the dark than that someone light a stove and make some food.