The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy handed its capitalism entry to the system’s fiercest critics.

Few slogans travel through modern politics with as much confidence and as little scrutiny as the claim that inequality is a social ill to be corrected at nearly any cost. Yet a fair reading of the evidence suggests the opposite conclusion. Inequality is not a defect in the system. It is the primary mechanism by which human achievement compounds, wealth spreads, and living standards rise for the great majority of people who never come close to the top of the distribution.

Consider what a world without inequality of talent and reward would actually look like. Strip away the possibility that some minds could rise far above the rest, and Newton never isolates the laws of motion, Einstein never reconceives space and time, and the intellectual scaffolding of modern physics simply does not exist. Glaring mediocrity, not shared flourishing, is what awaits a society that refuses to let exceptional minds pursue exceptional outcomes. The same logic extends from the laboratory to the marketplace. Had the founders of Amazon and Google possessed only ordinary ambition and ordinary intelligence, neither company would have grown into the infrastructure of daily life that it is today. Millions of people rely on Amazon to have packages delivered to their door within two days, sometimes in a matter of hours, while billions of search queries flow through Google each year because someone was allowed to become exceptionally rich by building something extraordinarily useful. The founders of these companies did not become billionaires by extracting value from society. They became billionaires by creating it, and the rest of us have been made better off in the bargain.

It is worth pausing on where that kind of wealth actually comes from, since so much of the case against inequality rests on the assumption that fortunes are inherited or simply extracted from others. According to one estimate that explored the wealth of the 10 richest men in 2024, none built his fortune through inheritance, and most grew up in middle- or upper-middle-class households before building companies worth hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars. Nor does that wealth sit idle. Among that same group, a median of about 89% of net worth was concentrated in the companies they built, which means that their fortunes rise and fall with the performance of the businesses they created rather than sitting in a cash hoard or a stockpile of assets. The economy, in fact, depends on some people having more wealth than they need to consume, because it is precisely that surplus, channeled into capital markets, that funds business operations, research, inventories, payrolls, and private lending across the country. Strip that surplus away, and the machinery that finances new enterprises loses its fuel.

That machinery has a name, and it happens to be one of America’s most underappreciated advantages. The United States possesses the deepest and most dynamic venture capital ecosystem in the world, and it is no accident that this ecosystem has produced companies like Facebook and Oracle. These enterprises began as ideas funded by investors willing to risk capital on unproven ventures and now anchor entire sectors of the global economy. Without a surplus of wealthy individuals willing to deploy their capital into early-stage companies, private credit, and long-shot ventures, the American entrepreneurial system would be starved of the very funding that allows a garage startup to become a Fortune 500 company. Every dollar of wealth a billionaire earns from a company he built typically generates seven or more dollars for other investors, whether active traders or ordinary Americans whose retirement accounts track a rising stock market, which means that the surplus wealth concentrated at the top does not sit apart from the rest of the economy, but continuously reinvests itself into it.

This same confusion between enrichment and impoverishment runs through the popular narrative about the American middle class. Politicians on both sides of the aisle have insisted for years that the middle class is disappearing, hollowed out by decades of stagnation and elite capture. Turning to the data tells a different story, and a more encouraging one. The share of American families in the “core” middle class did fall, from 36% in 1979 to 31% in 2024, but that decline was not the product of families sliding into hardship. It was the product of families experiencing social advancement. The upper middle class, home to just 10% of families in 1979, grew to 22% by 2001 and then to 31% by 2024, a tripling that left it as large as the core middle-class itself and nearly as large as the two downscale groups combined. By 2024, America achieved a milestone: more families sat above the core middle class threshold than below it, and the combined share of families in the lower, core, and upper middle classes rose from 70% to 78% since 1979. Whichever way the numbers are sliced, the story is the same. Families are not falling out of the middle class. They are graduating out of it and into a tier of prosperity that scarcely existed a half-century ago.

The gains show up just as clearly in the share of the nation’s income each group commands. The upper middle class alone now receives half of all family income, and its share of the total nearly doubled between 1979 and 2024. Combined with the richest Americans, the upper middle class and the rich together saw their share of income rise from 28% in 1979 to 68% in 2024. Even families near the bottom of the distribution shared in this progress, with those at the 10th percentile ending up approximately 30% better off than their peers a generation earlier. That is not a portrait of stagnation. It is a portrait of an economy that has manufactured upward mobility on a scale large enough to reshape the entire class structure of the country. Nor is the richer classes’ larger share of the pie evidence of a stalled economy. Wealthy Americans tend to work longer hours than their peers, and the innovations they have driven have made the broader economy more productive, which means that their growing share of income reflects a growing pie rather than a shrinking one for everyone else. What critics label a shrinking middle class is, more accurately, a booming upper middle class, and it is difficult to see how a nation becoming more prosperous at that pace constitutes a crisis.

Given this record, it is worth asking why calls for a wealth tax have grown louder on the political left, culminating in proposals such as California’s billionaire tax, arguably the most direct assault yet on accumulated wealth itself. The trouble is that the empirical case for such a tax is thin at best, and where evidence does exist, it points toward harm rather than benefit. A study using data from 20 OECD countries between 1980 and 1999 found that wealth taxes dampen economic growth in a manner that is remarkably consistent across statistical methods, estimating that a one-percentage-point increase in the wealth tax rate reduces economic growth by roughly 0.035 percentage points. That relationship held up under a battery of robustness checks, with estimated effects ranging narrowly between 0.026 and 0.042 percentage points regardless of which variables were treated as endogenous or which instruments were used. Wealth taxes, in other words, do not merely fail to help growth. They actively work against it.

Spain offers perhaps the clearest illustration of just how little a wealth tax accomplishes relative to the damage it inflicts. In 2002, despite levying rates as high as 2.5% on net wealth exceeding roughly €10.7 million ($12.2 million), Spain’s wealth tax generated a mere 0.002% of GDP in revenue, a figure so small that it barely registers against the country’s overall tax base. Compare that with countries like Switzerland and Luxembourg, which collected far more relative to GDP despite far lower rates, and the disconnect between statutory ambition and actual collection becomes impossible to ignore.

More recent research on Spain only deepens the case against the tax. After Spain reintroduced its wealth tax in 2011 in the wake of the Great Recession, researchers found that taxpayers responded aggressively to avoid it. A 0.1 percentage point increase in the average wealth tax rate led to a 3.21% reduction in taxable wealth over four years, driven largely by taxpayers shifting assets into exempt categories, particularly business-related exemptions. Taxpayers also restructured their income and asset portfolios to take advantage of the limit on total tax liability, a maneuver that accounted for 92.6% of the impact on revenue reduction. The cumulative effect was staggering. Between 2012 and 2015, revenue losses attributable to these avoidance strategies amounted to 2.75 times the wealth tax revenue collected in 2011.

Norway supplies a third case study, and it confirms just how mobile wealth becomes the moment it is taxed. When the small northern municipality of Bø cut its marginal wealth tax rate from 0.85% to 0.35% in 2021, average taxable wealth in the municipality rose by 60% for every one percentage point cut in the rate, and by 68.7% among those actually subject to the tax. The mechanism behind that surge was migration. In the year before the reform took effect, 68% of the net wealth held in Bø belonged to people who had just moved there, and wealthy individuals with a net worth above NOK 10 million ($1 million) became more than three times as likely to relocate to the municipality once its wealth tax fell. If a single town of fewer than 3,000 residents can pull in dozens of wealthy taxpayers simply by cutting its rate, it should surprise no one that wealth flees jurisdictions that raise theirs. A tax base that is this responsive to rate changes is not a reliable source of revenue. It is a reminder that capital, unlike labor, can simply get up and leave.

Similarly, Jamaica presents a cautionary tale for anyone eager to punish the wealthy through the tax code. In the 1970s, Jamaica experimented with democratic socialism under Prime Minister Michael Manley, who was bold enough to tell his critics that they were free to leave for Miami if they disliked his policies. Many of the country’s elite families took him up on the offer. Without their financial and human capital, the economy contracted, and Jamaica’s real GDP per capita, adjusted for inflation, was 20% lower in 2022 than it had been in 1970. Half a century later, similar rhetoric has resurfaced in American politics, with democratic socialists once again berating the wealthy for having too much. And just as in 1970s Jamaica, the elites targeted by that rhetoric are not staying to absorb the blow. They are leaving states like California and New York for Miami, taking their capital and their businesses with them.

Wherever it has been tested, punishing wealth does not redistribute prosperity so much as drive prosperity elsewhere, and the closer a society comes to Jamaica’s experiment, the more of its own future it forfeits in the process. Inequality of talent, ambition, and reward is not the disease afflicting American life. It is the engine that has driven scientific discovery, built the companies that define modern convenience, financed the venture capital ecosystem responsible for firms like Facebook and Oracle, and lifted millions of families into the upper middle class over the past half-century. Attempting to legislate that inequality away through instruments like the wealth tax or statist policies will not narrow the gap between rich and poor so much as slow the very growth that has allowed so many Americans to climb the ladder in the first place, all while failing, as Spain, Norway, and Jamaica each demonstrate in their own way, to deliver the revenue and fairness its advocates promise.

A biological need to steal: Look, I took A.P. biology, and while I wouldn't say I was the greatest student, I am pretty sure there was not a section on the biological urge to steal. Yet that is what New York Assemblywoman Emily Gallagher claimed recently in a rant outside the Manhattan Criminal Court. 

"Most of what we saw were crimes of poverty—people who are stealing things like toothpaste, people who were stealing things like, you know, soap. And that means if you're stealing those things, you need them," said Gallagher, according to The Daily Wire. 

"We are choosing to protect billion-dollar companies, like CVS and Walgreens, over the people who are struggling to get by," Gallagher reportedly said. "So I would say that the true crime is that there is such incredible wealth disparity in this city that there are people who can be thrown in jail simply for having a biological need."

I will give the leftists this: There are legitimate arguments and discussions to be had about overpolicing, about excessive and draconian sentencing, and about prison and jail conditions and how society should treat offenders. Those are arguments that some on the right prefer to ignore. Criminal justice policy is genuinely complicated.  

But the question of stealing isn't. Theft is wrong. Even small thefts. Even small thefts from big corporations.

Anyone who has been to an urban drug store in the last several years and found empty shelves and locked cabinets knows there are wider societal consequences, that the people who don't steal end up paying the price for widespread, flagrant property crimes. It isn't kindness or benevolence to bless this sort of anti-social behavior, or to defend it as something like a natural right. 

The way to address the genuinely difficult and complex questions of criminal justice is to address the complex and difficult questions of policy, not grandstand about how stealing is a biological need. 

Even if it's just a small, fringe faction, it's disturbing that progressive provocateurs are coming out as objectively pro-theft. But it makes sense, in a way, given the recent trajectory of America's political left. 

A worldview that sometimes cashes out into affirmative justifications of theft (or, for that matter, looting) is a worldview that makes it easier to support massive expropriation of wealth and absurd, practically Soviet levels of taxation and government control of the economy. Which, according to at least one recent estimate, is essentially what the Democratic Socialists of America are calling for.

Speaking of socialists… 

---

Sunshine State socialism: Florida is holding primary elections today. It's a Republican stronghold, with nearly every major statewide office held by the GOP. 

But a trio of what The New York Times calls "underdog democratic socialist candidates" are trying to make inroads in Democratic primaries. (Notably, DSA luminaries like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) are staying out of the state.) 

Like so many of this summer's leftist insurgents, Florida's socialist upstarts support rent control and Medicare for All. Do they have a plausible plan to pay for it? How do other countries manage government-funded healthcare, and if they can, why can't the United States? 

Those questions, and more, were the subject of much of yesterday's Reason Roundtable podcast. Reason's Katherine Mangu-Ward, Reem Ibrahim, Matt Welch, and I had a wide-ranging discussion about the enormous cost of Medicare for All and the expensive, unserious agenda now being pushed by the DSA.

We also touched on a few other topics, including a listener question about government policies we actually like.  

Watch and listen below: 

---

Oh man, Oman: On the one hand, it is pretty clear that Donald Trump wants out of the Iran war. It has caused him nothing but irritation, depleting the country's supply of munitions, closing the Strait of Hormuz, making inflation and international relations worse. And, after all, he was the Republican who campaigned against prolonged, pointless wars in the Middle East. He's stuck, with no obvious way out. 

On the other hand, usually the way to end a war is to stop bombing, and he keeps threatening to bomb the Middle East. His latest threat was directed not at Iran but at Oman, which has reportedly been conducting negotiations with Iran about managing traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. Trump sees this as a threat to ending the war he started. So he's threatening more war. "If Oman gets in the way, we'll bomb the shit out of them," he told Fox News' Trey Yingst. 

Can Trump bomb his way out of a foolish war? Unfortunately, we might find out. 

---

Scenes from the Greater Boston area: You know what city isn't cracking down on booze? Boston. The city allowed limited outdoor drinking this summer during the World Cup. And now city lawmakers are debating extending bar hours to 3 a.m. Nearby Cambridge also rejected a proposal to limit bars to serving no more than one drink every 30 minutes to any individual customer. 

---

QUICK HITS

• Britain has some real problems: Slow growth, bureaucratic inertia, police crackdowns on speech. But as two different Brits have pointed out to me recently, they have one thing the United States doesn't: a widespread expectation that it's legal and socially acceptable to drink outside—on city sidewalks and even in public areas like parks. This presumably includes standing around in spaces just outside of pubs, especially during the summer, when the weather is nice. However, according to The Wall Street Journal, some U.K. lawmakers are trying to crack down on such boozy festivities: "Some venues would be subject to strict table-to-chair ratios and only be able to serve drinks as a table service. Venues could also be barred from serving alcohol to anyone not sitting down with a substantial meal."  
• In 2024, I wrote about how everyone, including and especially Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), hates prices. This was back when Warren was warning about the potential for dynamic pricing at fast food chains like Wendy's. Well, now Warren is worried about dynamic pricing for ice cream.

We should all be worried about "dynamic pricing."

That's when companies change their prices in real time.

If it's hot out, the cost of ice cream could go up.
If it's cold, tea bags could go up.

It's a way for giant companies to squeeze you even more.

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) August 16, 2026

Prices are good, actually!

• Sarah Ditum on the damage done by Jason Arday, the Cambridge scholar who became the subject of scrutiny after revelations of professional plagiarism and biographical fabulism: "Arday's self-mythologising was not harmless. He hurt the academics whose work he plagiarised. He hurt the discipline he belonged to. He hurt the early career lecturers who were competing with him for jobs, but couldn't match his fantastical legend. He hurt the families of non-verbal children who believed the story of his unprecedented late acquisition of language, and either blamed themselves for lacking the patience and love of Arday's mother, or blamed their children for their failure to blossom."
• Predictably, some people are blaming journalists for Arday's death and demanding that laws be changed to further restrict the rights of the press:
  

  This is a great piece from Sarah. The backlash against the reporting about Arday is a reminder that the attachment to free speech (even reporting quite clearly in the public interest) is worryingly thin in the UK, including among people who think of themselves as liberals. https://t.co/zyqR2n2cyO

  — Mike Bird (@Birdyword) August 17, 2026

• Meta, the company behind Facebook, is headed to federal court today in what looks to be a major child safety case, with 29 states charging that the company promoted its product despite knowing that it resulted in anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and other mental health problems, reports Politico. This sort of consumer safety case increasingly looks to be the line of legal attack that states and other Big Tech critics see as giving them leverage to take down large tech companies. Read Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown for some informed skepticism of this legal maneuver.  
• This summer's overperforming Spider-Man movie aside, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been flagging recently. But MCU chief Kevin Feige has a plan to keep it going: The X-Men, which are slowly being integrated into the movie's sprawling narrative. He recently said there could be "100 more" movies featuring X-Men characters. Who's excited for an entire spinoff franchise devoted to Alpha Flight? 

The post A Biological Need To Steal? appeared first on Reason.com.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — In the wake of mass confusion arising from President Donald Trump lashing out at longtime ally South Korea, Trump admitted that both Koreas look exactly the same to him.

“I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary, and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re 15 and 35 is new and exciting and […]

The post The sanctification of Jason Arday appeared first on spiked.