Chris Christie: Why taxing the rich won't help the poor
What am I thankful for this Thanksgiving? This video from Gov. Christie explaining why you can't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer.
Great stuff - especially when he talks about how individuals acting in a free market expand the economic pie.
As I've written before:
The unstated, underlying economic assumption that many leftists make is that the rich have to pay their "fair share," because the rich are wealthy only because they have taken from society or the poor and that government must right that wrong through taxes or "spreading the wealth around."The rest of that blog post, including proving that you and I are wealthier than John Rockefeller was, is here.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
What's amazing about free-market capitalism is that the way you get rich is by meeting the needs of other people and making their lives better. Generally, rich people are those who've created the most wealth or value for other people. They've grown the economic pie.
This idea of creating wealth is critical. If you think the amount of wealth in the world is limited, it might make sense for government to take from the rich and give to the poor, because the economic pie is finite and if someone has more, than someone else has less.
But that's not the way the world is. The amount of wealth in the world is rapidly increasing.