Wrap it up, guys, the Telegraph has proved socialism is wrong

Look at this post. Just look at it.

The Telegraph is hosting a truly marvellous piece of trolling from Tim Worstall, in which he proves socialism is wrong because there isn’t enough money in the world to satisfy a 13-year-old’s definition of what it entails.

The whole piece is probably worth reading; I’ve heard it described as “Brick-esque“, which can only be a compliment.

Worstall starts with an insult:

As anyone who has ever met or been a teenager knows, there’s this idea floating around that we’d all be so much richer in a very real sense if everything was just shared equally. Most of us grow out of this and some become socialists.

Then he “runs the numbers”:

If we average out global GDP we get to a figure of about $8,000 per head, something like that. That’s a tad over £5,000 each. So if we share everything around the world equally with everyone around the world then that’s what each of us, at maximum, can possibly have each year.

One might think that given 95 per cent of the world live on less than $10 a day, more than doubling that would be a huge achievement. But Tim is right, it would hit hard in the UK. Because an insurance company ran a survey:

A survey of over 2,000 adults by the insurance company found that Britons need extra pre-tax income of £7,236 a year to make them feel financially secure.

This is when his connection to reality goes a bit (more) wobbly. If Britons need an average of £7,000 extra to feel financially secure, then they can never get that by redistributing money within themselves. As he says, “that’s what an average means.” So it’s strange that the next four paragraphs are spent demonstrating that yes, you couldn’t find that extra money within Britain.

Especially since he doesn’t even get his straw-man argument right:

If we wander over to the ONS we can work out how much those rich have been unrighteously keeping from us too. Household expenditure by income decile group would be a good one. A decile is 10 per cent of all households in this instance and when we download the .xls file we can see that the top 10 per cent of all households spend £1,000 a week. Yes, this includes their food, their mortgages, all their spending.

That’s not what redistribution of wealth means. The clue is in the name: Tim has looked at income, when he should be focusing on wealth. Actually, not even income, but expenditure, which means that he must think the rich aren’t taxed and don’t save. He clearly thinks he is looking at wealth too:

To make all households financially secure we’ve got to find £180 billion, but even if we take all the cash off the top 10 per cent, all the food, ponies, labradors and croquet lawns they have, we’ve only got £130 billion.

Unless you need to buy a new croquet lawn every week (you might; I’ve never owned one), then it isn’t going to show up in a survey of household expenditure. But it’s a pretty good indicator of household wealth.

Socialists don’t believe any of this, of course. It’s been a very long time indeed since you would find someone on the left advocating the “everyone put their money in a pot and share it out equally” model of socialism. But if for some reason you were going to publish on a major newspaper’s website a debunking of an economic theory no-one holds, you would think you would do a better job of it.