The nineteenth-century liberals believed that abstinence was the key to wealth accumulation and thus economic development. Having acquired the fruits of their labour, people need to abstain from instant gratification and invest it, if they were to accumulate wealth. In this world view, the poor were poor because the did not have the character to exercise such abstinence. Therefore, if you gave the poor voting rights, they would want to maximize their current consumption, rather than investment, by imposing taxes on the rich and spending them. This might make the poor better off in the short run, but it would make them worse off in the long run by reducing investment and thus growth.

[...] Before the Golden Age, per capita income in the rich capitalist economies used to grow at 1-1.5 per cent per year. During the Golden Age, it grew at 2-3 per cent in the US and Britain, 4-5 per cent in Western Europe, and 8 per cent in Japan. Since then, these countries have never managed to grow faster than that.