If you’ve been paying attention in the past 150
years, you’ll know that as a ratio of total beliefs to correct ones, the left
gets most things wrong when it comes to economics, capitalism, socialism,
labour, wealth, inequality, and the like. To see why, let’s construct a
caricature of a leftist - an extreme one who believes all the false things they
are told, and campaigns for a so-called fairer world. Let’s call him Torquil.
Torquil believes the system is grossly unfair; that the workers are producing all
the wealth for the rich capitalists; that the poorest people in the UK are poor
because they have been unjustly disadvantaged; that if we had complete equality
of opportunity then almost everyone would do about as well as each other; that
there is a ‘fair’ hourly wage based on how hard people work and how much we
symbolically value those roles; and so on. Every single one of those
propositions is almost entirely wrong - and where it is fractionally right, it
is nearly always the fault of political interference.
The reality is this: except for the aforementioned political interference, nearly all jobs make important contributions to society - and in accordance with market power, bargaining, sensible regulation, and alongside fluid information, each individual is paid according to their marginal product (that is, for the value they create) in a supply and demand economy. Except for illegal or unsavoury activity, the money you have demonstrates how much productivity has been created. Low income individuals are on low incomes due to lower productivity, which is usually due to lack of useful skills or knowledge, or a lack of motivation, ingenuity and responsibility. And there is an inequality of talent, effort, good choices, industriousness, luck, ambition, intelligence, creativity, conscientiousness, health, positive influences, and good life circumstances.
In a nutshell, the economic right is largely correct about these matters, and the economic left is largely incorrect.
No worker can do what they do on their own - they rely on the ingenuity, risk and investment of the company owners, and the teams around them. And the more productive the worker, the harder it is to replace them - which means at an individual level each one of them is more valuable than each individual worker they employ. If, for example, a chief executive can make his 2500 employees just 0.5% more productive, he is 12.5 times as productive as a single employee. You might find this statement uncomfortable (though it is true), but in most cases in the labour market, if someone is on a low hourly income they are either unwilling to work hard enough to earn more (sometimes for good reason), unable to earn more, or at the start or end of their career, where they will go on to earn more, or used to earn more but are now winding down. There are practically zero cases where individuals wholly unjustly earn a low hourly income. There are one or two exceptions - but the rule of thumb is that people are paid according to their marginal product, and most people in the private sector (and indirectly, the public sector too) earn their marginal product because of those richer than them making capital investments.
And the rich pay for the majority of the public services too, and the lowest quintile pay for a small fraction of them. Last time I checked, the top 1% of earners in the UK paid a whopping 28% of all income tax; the top 10% paid 60% of all income tax; and the top 50% paid about 90% of all income tax. It’s also true that those on low incomes contribute less in absolute terms, but proportionally more of their income, as the poorest 20% pay about 38–48% of their income in taxes. But that is more to do with ratios and arithmetic scaling than unfairness. And any sociological focus on data, causes, and impacts would show that crime rates are higher in poorer areas, the poor require more public services in health, education, housing, social services and welfare, have lower civic participation, and so forth.
Let me be crystal clear, I am not making any accusations here or looking to blame anyone for being poor or on a low income - there are countless circumstances at play. This post is simply to show the utter absurdity of this constant narrative by the left that the poor should be aggrieved at the rich, or feel hard done by them. It’s almost the opposite of the truth. Modern prosperity depends on both entrepreneurs who take risks and workers who provide the effort and skill to make those risks pay off, sure. But the ratio of wealth creation, productivity, and increased living standards falls so heavily in favour of the rich’s influence, that the poor, far from resenting them, should be thanking them in recognition that much of modern prosperity - the jobs, technology, and material comfort we enjoy - exists because of their innovation and risk-taking.