The essay excerpt is an on-point narrative of the current right-wing Neocon conservative economic position in the real world; the history of it is layered - - wiki bulletin points of the PROGENITORS.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_school_of_economics
Chicago School of Economic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Strauss
Leo Strauss
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman
Milton Friedman
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Hayek
Friedrich Hayek
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand
Ayn Rand
Poor people running out of money ~ by Dante Atkins
A few years before she became Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher famously said that socialist governments make a financial mess because they run out of other people's money. This quote has been turned into an aphorism that is particularly popular with fiscal conservatives and disciples of Ayn Rand who feel that social safety nets constitute theft by the undeserving masses of the hard-earned wealth of producers like themselves.
These conservatives prefer the unregulated Chicago-school economic model advocated by Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, wherein the industrious are supposedly free to maximize their wealth as much as they deserve through their own ingenuity and hard work, unfettered by the iron hand of Keynesian government interference.
The problem with unfettered laissez-faire Friedmanism, however, is that eventually the rich run out of poor people's money. And major advocates of the model are beginning to feel the pinch.
Case in point? Wal-Mart, which is in the midst of a sales slump during which it has experienced eight consecutive quarters of falling sales at U.S. stores that have been open for at least a year. This is an often-used model because it measures a company's sustained profitability without the distorted effect of sales from new store openings. The reason? Poor people just don't have the money they used to. As Numerian at Agonist writes:
http://agonist.org/numerian/20110714/wal_mart_the_latest_victim_of_global_labor_arbitrage
http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=102953