Democracy and Markets

My old-man political fantasy is simple: No one takes you seriously as a politician if you think markets and their ability to make people rich are evil—or if you think governments and their ability to tax and regulate are evil.

Markets can make people absurdly rich. That's actually very cool.

Governments can tax the rich to mitigate poverty and regulate markets so that getting rich doesn't come at the expense of everyone else. That, too, is very cool.

There is no best possible world that doesn't include both the opportunity to become rich and the commitment to care for the poor.

And one measure of a government's success should be its demonstrated ability to increase the number of rich people while reducing the number of poor people—without treating either wealth or poverty as evidence of virtue or a character flaw.

The goal isn't to make the rich less rich or the poor more virtuous. It's to make prosperity more common and poverty less punishing.