A Sober Look at the New Year for Obama
1st February 2009
The Democratic Party is of the intellectual rich, not of the worker, and not very inclined to deep change. The most critical political story of the election was the 12 to 15 percent shift of the rich, educated and suburban to the Democrats, offsetting the shift of about 6 percent of the less educated or professional, but more religious and rural to the Republicans.
A sharp observation. Unfortunately, as with many academics opining outside of their field, it is followed by a stupid conclusion:
By far the greatest issue before us, one barely on anyone’s agenda, is the astounding degree of economic inequality, perhaps approaching the levels of 1929 or even 1913. This obscene outcome, an astounding concentration of wealth by the super-rich, is a consequence of market failure – the capacity of those at the top to exercise monopoly power over the economy, and whose tax cuts and deregulation contributed to the current financial crisis and deepening recession.
1. “barely on anyone’s agenda”? The left has been whining about this for as long as I’ve been reading newspapers.
2. Economic inequality is “obscene” only if you’re reasoning from the a priori position that there is some mandate either in morality or natural law for economic equality.
3. The “astounding concentration of wealth by the super-rich” is a result of modern technological progress that produces a “winner take all” culture (why, there’s even a book by that name that explains it very well) as markets widen and there is more room for good products and services to drive out less good products and services.
4. None of this is a “market failure” unless you consider the market to be a mechanism to produce the result you want rather than the result that it actually produces. Hint: The market doesn’t care what you want. It works when willing buyers and sellers get together; the only “market failure” is when nannyists in government use their coercive power to meddle, and that’s not the fault of the market.
5. The “capacity of those at the top to exercise monopoly power” is soley the fault of the government; only the government can produce a true monopoly, and it does so by interfering with the market. That’s why lobbyists make the riches that they do — when legislators and bureaucrats determine what can be bought and sold, the first thing to be bought and sold will be legislators.
6. “Tax cuts and deregulation” didn’t contribute at all to the current economic crisis, as anybody who has been paying attention and has two brain cells to rub together would realize. It was produced by governmental agencies and quasi-agencies meddling in the housing and financial markets in a vain attempt to achieve politically fashionable ends. The market works whether you want it to or not; try to mess with it, and it will bite you in the ass every time.