Real wealth has increased enormously

Reader comment on: Barone on Income Inequality

Submitted by Harry Binswanger (United States), Feb 28, 2011 19:08

The left is always trying to say we're not progressing. It's only the socialist nations that progress.

Real wealth has increased dramatically since '73. Look at what even poorer people have today that no one, or none but the wealthiest, had in '73: personal computers, mobile phones, flat-screen high def TV, cheap cameras that need no film but whose pictures you can send, without developing, to 100 friends in an instant, email, Google, netflix, the internet, Mexican food (who ate that in '73?), jet travel across the continent for about 10 hours' wages, cholesterol lowering medicine, artificial hips, knees, corneas, lasik vision correction, lasers of any kind--even for cat toys, bar codes, swipe-able credit cards, ATM machines, cheap printers for your computer, so you can print out postage rather than dying in line at the P.O., Easy-Pass for tolls, stents, comfortable, disposable contact lenses, ebook readers, Wii, DVDs, DVRs, cable TV, life online (and the very term "online").

These things were not brought to you by socialism. It wasn't the Ministry of People's True Needs or the Bureau of Permitted Progress that created the iPad. It was capitalist innovators.

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