We now have a name: Gibbon’s Law
We agree with Marc Andreessen here.
Gibbon's Law: the definition of "basic needs" expands to maintain a fixed level of commie-posting
We’ve made much the same point over the years ourselves but not quite as pithily. Therefore Gibbon’s Law it is.
This oddity of free market capitalism produces indoor bathtubs for the poor to keep their coal in and this is just assumed as the baseline for the next demand. That the system which has been making things better must be overturned is the only constant. Never even a marvel at how far we’ve come.
We even institutionalise this in our own poverty statistics:
Relative poverty is not, in fact, poverty, it’s inequality. It’s living in a household on less than 60% of median household income (adjusted for household size, before or after housing costs to taste). So, some think that absolute poverty is a better measure. But that means the $2 and change a day that the World Bank uses to measure global and historical poverty. That’s obviously not going to work in the UK as we’ve not had any of that for near a century. Quite literally not one single sane person has been on that little. But if we go around shouting that we’ve solved poverty then where is the justification for overturning free market capitalism - the thing which abolished absolute poverty - and expropriating the rich?
You know, given that so many simply do want to overturn free market capitalism and expropriate the rich. Why can’t they have a justification?
So, absolute poverty becomes the measure of what relative poverty was at some point in the past. And as free market capitalism keeps diminishing that poverty to the level of good enough for government work it is updated. The gains are banked and the new definition used to show how appalling free market capitalim is and therefore let us expropriate the rich.
They are, in short, lying about the past in order to win the argument in the present. We actually employ, on our taxes, an army of Winston Smiths that is. Super, eh?
What joy that we’re ruled by those taking 1984 as a guide rather than a warning.
Tim Worstall