"gaslighting on an industrial scale"

Finally, a commentator who doesn't think inequality is morally wrong, or oppressive, or otherwise harmful: Sherelle Jacobs, writing in Thursday's Telegraph.

The thesis that inequality is bad, and only justifiable (if at all) for the sake of incentives, has become so standard in intellectual circles that it's usually taken for granted these days, at least by the kind of people who read the Guardian. Many who've been to college, and got exposed to the politics of humanities professors, have been brainwashed to believe that inequality is immoral. But these days you don't need to go to college to pick up the ideology: it's all around us.
   As so often, the original source of the negative attitude seems to be intellectuals' own preferences, not the general public. Sure, everyone resents, at least a little, others who look like they've got more. But that doesn't necessarily translate into wanting to abolish inequality – at least, not without stirring up and fomenting by intellectuals.
    Anyway, we know what happens when you try to eliminate economic inequality: you get a whole class of government apparatchiks responsible for eliminating it. This leads to social inequality that's worse than the inequality that's supposedly been eliminated.

Ms Jacobs gives the Conservatives a well-deserved telling off. Some of her sentences should be turned into motivational posters, and stuck up in Conservative offices across the country.

• A wealth tax ... is a moral abomination.

• The Right must stop implicitly apologising for ... the benefits of capitalism.

• The notion that private property cannot be justifiably raided by the state ought to be sacrosanct.

• A wealth tax denigrates the kind of values society should be encouraging – prudence, ambition, delayed gratification.

I especially like this one:

• The Left are gaslighting us on an industrial scale.

Britain has come a long way from the Victorian work ethic which produced the Clifton Suspension Bridge and other amazing construction projects, and a level of success and efficiency that Germans of the time could only dream about. By now,

we don't see success as something to aspire to, but rather to be torn down.

No wonder Britain is falling down the league tables.
Ms Jacobs rightly argues that Britain needs

politicians who are unafraid to declare that the rich benefit us all and wealth inequality is an inevitable outcome of a well functioning economy.

If Ms Jacobs ever decides to stand for Parliament, or to lead the Tory Party, I'd certainly vote for her.

Why don't the Tories get it? The electorate loved Boris Johnson. David Cameron and Rishi Sunak, not so much. Read the runes: if you want to win, be more like Boris, less like 'Dave' or Rishi. But perhaps the Conservatives don't really want to win.
("Don’t support us, we are not worthy" – Mediocracy p.58.)