Why are so many liberals obsessing about inequality? Why
does the president keep talking about rich people as part of his re-election
campaign?
Two things to remember about the pundits: (1) the
chattering class has to chatter about something and (2) the worst thing for a
professional chatterer is to be ignored. One thing to remember about the
president: he desperately wants to be re-elected.
Here’s the overall
problem: The political left has no solutions to our most pressing problems.
Whether the issue is economic growth or runaway entitlement spending or
non-performing public schools, left-of-center solutions were tried and found
wanting here and abroad during the last century. Further, the only solutions that seem to work
today are right-of-center — requiring privatization, individual empowerment and
free markets.
For Barack Obama
the problem is even worse. If the election is about the economy or government
regulation of the economy, or whether bigger government or smaller government
is the solution to what ails the economy, the president is almost certain to
lose.
So what to do?
Make up a problem whose only solution appears to be higher taxes and bigger
government. That’s where inequality comes in. It’s a way to change the subject.
It’s a way to find a scapegoat to blame (explicitly or implicitly) for the
problems at hand. It’s a way to distract attention away from the fact that the
president is not solving our problems (and even making them worse!) toward
people who are not generally loved. It’s also a way to justify a more active
role for government.
There is nothing
new about any of this. The tactic of finding a scapegoat to blame for our
problems and using the argument to justify more government power is as old as
politics itself.
During the Great
Depression, people were in misery everywhere and political leaders had no idea
what to do about it. In Germany, Hitler made a scapegoat of the Jews and blamed
them for Germany’s economic problems. In the United States, racist politicians
in the South and Midwest blamed economic bad times on blacks, other minorities
and immigrants. At the national level, Franklin Roosevelt did the same thing
with the wealthy. In fact, his administration launched an attack on 60 wealthy
families — calling them “plutocrats” and blaming them for prolonging the
Depression and preventing economic recovery.
Granted, Roosevelt
didn’t put wealthy individuals in concentration camps. He didn’t burn crosses
on anyone’s front lawn. But he definitely violated the civil liberties of our
most successful citizens and their families, and he skillfully used the
politics of division and envy to distract voters from real problems and real
solutions. As Amity Shlaes reports in The Forgotten Man, Roosevelt got the IRS
to delve into their tax returns; he got the Justice Department to pursue criminal
investigations and prosecutions — even when there was no obvious crime; and he
got the Securities and Exchange Commission to publish the salaries of utility
executives in order to publicly shame them.
Roosevelt had tax
commissioner Guy Helvering give out the names of 67 “large wealthy taxpayers
(Pierre du Pont included), who by taking assets out of their personal boxes and
transferring them to incorporated pocketbooks have avoided paying their full
share of taxes.” He referred to the wealthy as “princes of property,” even
though he was wealthy himself. His Interior Secretary, Harold Ickes, railed
about an “irreconcilable conflict” that “must be fought — until plutocracy or
democracy, until America’s 60 families or America’s 120,000,000 people — win.”
Barack Obama has obviously learned from that experience.
High gasoline prices are a political problem? Blame the oil companies. Families
are hurting? Blame the rich. People are not successful finding a job? Blame the
most successful 1%.
What is surprising
about the current era is the willingness of respectable economists to become
pawns in this scheme. On “Morning Joe,” Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs
complains about rich people “sucking up all the income.” Paul Krugman
frequently implies that the gains of the rich have come at the expense of the
non-rich. But no economist has actually come out and said that the top 1% are
the cause of our failure to recover from the Great Recession.
Until now. In
yesterday’s New York Times column Paul Krugman finally goes over the top.
Resurrecting the Roosevelt term “plutocracy,” he blames the failure of economic
recovery on the country’s billionaires. “Money buys power,” he writes, “and the
increasing wealth of a tiny minority has effectively bought the allegiance of one
of our two major political parties [guess which one?], in the process
destroying any prospect for cooperation.”
There’s more:
And the takeover
of half our political spectrum by the 0.01 percent is, I’d argue, also
responsible for the degradation of our economic discourse, which has made any
sensible discussion of what we should be doing impossible.
You have to
wonder, who does Krugman think is attending those $35,000-a-person dinners to
support the president’s re-election campaign? Is he really unaware that Obama
receives far more funding than any Republican from Hollywood, Silicon Valley
and Wall Street? Does he really not know that almost all of the largest
foundations have fallen into the hands of liberals? Or that worthless heirs are
hugely in the Obama camp?
Go figure.
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