﻿ How to respond to Thomas Piketty’s inequality alarmism, revisited | protein wisdom
April 25, 2014

How to respond to Thomas Piketty’s inequality alarmism, revisited

Jim Pethokoukis offered his tack; I offered mine.  But Kevin Williamson really went out of his way to parse the chaff from the wheat — not with respect to Piketty himself, but rather to progressive economic fantasies more generally –and it turns out there’s not enough wheat left over in the progressive’s collectivist basket to make a single box of cereal:






Welcome to the paradise of the real.








What is it the poor actually need? In general, they do not have access to very good education. But our problem with education is not that we spend insufficiently on it. Rather, the problem is that our K–12 system is organized as something between a monopoly and a cartel. Medicaid, the health-care program for the poor, is designed similarly, and, no surprise, the poor receive inferior health care. If they are not often materially deprived, they are very often materially insecure, with little in the way of savings or assets. Even after a lifetime of full-time work, many poor people have retirement options far inferior to those enjoyed by wealthier people, despite having their paychecks garnished to the tune of 12 percent or so for — this should start seeming familiar — participation in a government-monopoly retirement program.

None of those problems facing the poor — and they are the key problems — is an economic problem. All of them are political problems. For progressives, the obvious solution to that is less economics and more politics. The possibilities of economic division will always be limited by what there is to divide — so many houses, so many cars, so many apples and oranges, so many SweeTarts. Progressives don’t care what’s in the bag, so long as they get to be in charge of it. It is no accident that they talk about the “distribution” of wealth and income as though those things were literally distributed, like candy out of an Easter basket, by the distribution fairy.


For the conservative, people are an asset — in the coldest economic terms, a potentially productive unit of labor. For the progressive, people are a liability — a mouth to be fed, a problem in need of a solution. Understanding that difference of perspective renders understandable the sometimes wildly different views that conservatives and progressives have about things like employment policy. For the conservative, the value of a job is what the worker produces; for the progressive, the value of a job is what the worker is paid. Politicians on both sides frequently talk about jobs as though they were economic products rather than contributors to economic output, as though they were ends rather than means. The phrase “there aren’t enough jobs” is almost completely meaningless, but it is a common refrain.


But you do not need dollars to eat. You need food to eat. Experiment: Spend six months locked in room with nothing other than a very large pile of dollars; measure subsequent weight loss.

Mr. Carrillo’s intellectual failure is catastrophic, but it is basic to the progressive approach. Mr. Carrillo argues that a guaranteed-job program would “pay for itself,” mitigate deficits, empower women, strengthen communities, liberate us from Walmart and McDonald’s — I half expected him to claim that it would turn a sandwich into a banquet. But the question he never quite gets his head around is: Jobs doing what? Americans in guaranteed government jobs “needn’t construct trains or solar panels,” he writes. Instead, they could be employed in “non-capital intensive” sectors such as “child-care, eldercare, and” — focus in here, kids — “community gardening.” Experiment: Offer for sale at a price of $250 a voucher entitling its bearer to one year’s worth of meals at McDonald’s, one year’s worth of groceries at Walmart, or one year’s worth of produce from your local community garden; compare sales figures.


Mr. Carrillo argues that we “deserve” to participate in society not only as consumers but as producers, but he never considers what it is that people in government-mandated jobs would produce that would not be produced by their working in the private sector. The answer, by definition, is: nothing of economic value. Producing that for which there is no demand is not genuine economic activity; it is performance art. As an economic matter, writing a man a check for that sort of job is indistinguishable from simply sending him a welfare check; the difference is that it inconveniences the beneficiary (which WFB endorsed on moral grounds) and — the always-unspoken corollary — that such a program would create some management jobs for progressives interested in exciting careers in public service rather than in careers earning market wages for producing goods and services that people actually want.

(How do we know what people actually want? They voluntarily pay for it.)

The economics here are thoroughly upside-down, even for The Nation, which is, lest we forget, still a partisan of socialism, the flat-earth, Jesus-rode-a-brontosaurus, turtles-all-the-way-down school of economics. Mr. Carrillo’s prose and analysis get even worse, e.g.: “Because non-JG [that’s ‘job guarantee’] employees could quit for a JG job, their bargaining power would increase. By the same token, businesses could hire JG-trained employees, so employers’ negotiating power would increase as well. Thus, wages wouldn’t spiral. Furthermore, guaranteed employment for low-income individuals would discipline the prices of goods and services they typically buy.” Which is to say, you can strengthen both sides of a negotiating table (relative to whom?) and stabilize the prices of products consumed by low-income people by sending more dollars chasing after an identical supply of goods. This, the product of Harvard and an institution with the word “money” in its name.

The cost of mass unemployment is not only the loss of income and dignity suffered by the jobless. The real cost includes the loss of the economic output of the unemployed. Mr. Carrillo, and the writers of The Nation at large, if you can bear to read them, implicitly believe (and sometimes explicitly argue) that a certain share of Americans have absolutely nothing to offer in economic terms. Every time a progressive decries the so-called race-to-the-bottom economy, what he is saying is that American workers have no advantage relative to the Haitians who labor sweatily in their imaginations. (Strange thing that nobody seems to have clued in BMW or Boeing about that race to the bottom, and that investment in high-wage countries such as the United States and Germany is so high compared with investment in low-wage countries such as Rwanda and Cameroon.) Having no economic value to speak of, the American worker must be dependent upon government trickery — his benevolent betters protecting his job while cleverly disguising the cost of doing so — or else on sentimentality, appeals to “economic patriotism” and the like. Each of those appeals is like offering an American worker a government-guaranteed job in that it is identical to putting a price tag on his forehead reading: “$0.00.”

The farther away we move from the physical economy into the manipulation of symbols through public policy, the more progressive ideas make apparent sense. And symbolism is more comfortable for progressives in general, owing to a disinclination to literally get their hands dirty. There is, for example, no environmentally clean way to produce energy, and the really productive ways of producing energy — like fracking for gas in Pennsylvania — give them the fantods. There is no environmentally clean way to build a man a house, either, or provide him with clean drinking water, or to heat that house, or to grow a crop of wheat, or to make that wheat into bread. If you think you can have health care and electric cars without steel mills and oil refineries, you are mistaken. But actually expanding physical production within our own political boundaries, for instance by building more pipelines to connect petroleum producers with petroleum refiners, scandalizes the progressives. Every smokestack is another Barad-dûr to them — even as they bemoan the loss of “good factory jobs,” the largely mythical former prevalence of which provided their political forebears with a deep bucket of solutions to throw at the problem of potentially bumptious poor people. They detest the economic use of undeveloped lands, whether for energy or timber or grazing cattle — as though beef comes from Trader Joe’s. They refuse to understand that if you want more oranges and apples, you have to plant some trees — maybe even cutting down some other trees to make room for them, or, angels and ministers of grace defend us, harassing a tortoise in the process.

Though there are many exceptions, the closer a man’s occupation takes him to the physical economy, the more skeptical he is of progressive central-planning ambitions. You do not meet a great many left-wing corn farmers, copper-mine operators, oil drillers, or house builders. You do meet a fair number of progressives on Wall Street and Silicon Valley and on the campus of Harvard utterly failing to teach the likes of Mr. Carrillo the fundamentals of economics, prose composition, or anything else. Follow that road to its terminus and you end up at the place in which the secret to national prosperity appears, self-evidently, to be stimulating demand, as though the nation could grow wealthier by wanting more rather than by making more, as though we could consume that which has not been produced.



Ordinarily, here is the place I’d add some further thought, but in this case, there really is no need.  Utopianism is, be it in the realm of “social justice” or practical economics, a chimera, a phantasm, a fairy tale that has grown, power-hungry adults wielding deleterious power over whomever they must in order to justify chasing after rainbows, at the end of which they tell us they will corral the leprechauns whose gold they can then claim and decide how to divide up.  For the betterment of all.

Once they take their cut upfront, of course.

History is, as I pointed out in dealing with Piketty’s inequality alarmism, littered with the bones of such quixotic great leaps.  And as Margaret Thatcher once so powerfully noted, it is also filled with self-serving elites who would rather see everyone less well off than some better off, which is a natural byproduct of liberty.

Radical egalitarianism is a social experiment the ruling class likes to engage in on the proles.  Because in the end, the ruling class never dissolves, the worker’s paradise never evolves, and all that’s left is a system of authoritarianism, tyranny, and cronyism, with no middle class to muddle up the distinctions between who truly deserves their riches and power, and who these people claim the right to lord over.  Out of compassion.

(h/t Tom W)

Posted by Jeff G. @ 1:23pm
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Comments (10)

  1. I’ve been hammering on this “Capital” collectivist rage for days. Lots more to come as well, here. Idiots. All of them. Evil too, for coveting what belongs to others and demonizing those of independent means.

  2. Pingback: Sharp as a Marble - Why do I love capitalism?

  3. For the Progressives, human beings progress — or become free — through the increasing actualization of the various capacities constituting their spiritual natures. While these potentialities include abilities peculiar to individuals, they also, and more essentially, consist in capacities common to all human beings
    For Ely and the Progressives generally, then, “‘true morality consists in the complete surrender of one’s own self, and in self-sacrifice for others.’”
    Self-sacrifice to promote the fullest welfare of all humanity thus lies at the core of the Progressive conception of Freedom
    The problem with limited government, as Charles H. Cooley explained, is that it “does not enlist and discipline the soul of the individual.” By limiting its reach over the individual’s thought and behavior, it merely ensures the dominance of man’s more primitive or “self-regarding” impulses, which, in turn, produces social conditions that retard spiritual development. Promoting spiritual fulfillment more generally would entail recognizing, as Ely put it, that “the state [is] an educational and ethical agency whose positive aid is an indispensable condition of human progress.” Like a stern schoolmaster, government would have to take its pupils in hand and direct them to their proper destiny.
    The Progressives were keen to remove any social condition believed to frustrate the process of spiritual fulfillment, including, first and foremost, the problem of poverty. One of the leading problems with the free-market system, Ely explained, is that “on the one hand, we see those who are injured by a superfluity of economic goods; and, on the other, those who have not the material basis on which to build the best possible superstructure.” From the standpoint of spiritual fulfillment, in other words, the free market results in a mal-distribution of wealth; that is, a few individuals obtain more wealth than is good for them, and most obtain too little. The problem with the latter condition, with poverty, is not that it results in a materially less comfortable existence, but that it causes a host of conditions that restrict or stunt the spiritual progress of those in it. “Freedom of thought in a developed constructive form,” as Dewey and Tufts argued, “is next to impossible for the masses of men so long as their economic conditions are precarious, and their main problem is to keep the wolf from their doors.


    Viewing the bite of necessity merely as a “restriction” on man’s intellectual and moral development — as opposed to a spur to better, more responsible behavior — the Progressives advocated a host of reforms designed to redress poverty and its consequences … Because the promotion of economic security was not an end in itself, but a means of releasing the poor from the poverty-related restrictions upon their higher development, the reformers anticipated that great moral improvement would follow upon the enactment of such reforms.

    What Piketty proposes is in line with this above. Taking from those whose spiritual progress is inhibited by too much wealth and giving it to those whose development, into the joys of progressive “Freedom”, is stunted by poverty. Win-win.

    Unstated and hidden is the inequality that must exist for their historical teleology to advance. The one thing that must not be equal is power. That must remain in the pure hands of the self-annointed progressive saviors of all mankind.

  4. How come we never hear the egalitarianistas talk about the astounding income inequality that exists (or existed) between connected members of the ruling class and the rest of the poor slobs in the socialist, working class, paradises?

    Just like child molesting is only done by Catholic priests, so too I guess income inequality only exists in erstwhile capitalist nations (heavy on the erstwhile, especially lately)…

    And what I find really amusing is how, especially among in the academy and the media, the magnitude of dollars that counts as making too much money is usually just a little greater than their present salaries.

    Gee, I sure am glad they know what’s best for all of us.

  5. [I]ncome inequality that exists (or existed) between connected members of the ruling class and the rest of the poor slobs in the socialist, working class, paradises?

    None of the wealth is an individual’s own. It is all on loan from the State and may be taken back at any moment. Therefore there is no inequality. All have an income of zero, own zero, and so they are all equally zeros.

  6. To admit to “income inequality” is to allow the left to control the narrative. There is no income inequality. There are only people who do not understand economics.


    Indeed. That’s like saying there’s a “talent inequality” between Cindy Sheehan and a Playboy centerfold and something must be done!

    Harrison Bergeron, call your office.

  8. Harrison Bergeron is dead he got shot.

    It was on the news.

  9. I’m appalled that half the people in America earn less than the average. The obvious solution is to ban dihydrogen monoxide.

  10. That’s as good as the less obvious solution of giving everyone 10 million dollars.

    Then taxing everyone a one time 10 million dollar head tax for to retire the national debt. That should do what? Pay off last year’s deficit?

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