Thomas Frank on why academic language and charts won’t do a damned thing about the rigged economic game. I do urge you to go finish the whole thing:
The one thing that just about everyone knows about inequality is that it’s a complex, highly technical problem, with many confusing causes and expressions. “Inequality is a complicated, complicated thing,” as a puzzled writer declared in the Atlantic a few weeks ago. “What exactly is income inequality?” wondered NPR’s Audie Cornish in January. “Ask six economists and you’re likely to get six different answers.” (That it’s economists you’re supposed to ask was simply taken for granted.)
I admit that the issue is complicated in its details, but it’s also — in its basic, brutal thrust — something dead simple: Inequality happened because our leaders set out to make it happen. On the first page of Kevin Phillips’ 1990 (!) bestseller on the subject, “The Politics of Rich and Poor,” he stated this obvious truth. “The 1980s were the triumph of upper America,” he wrote.
But while money, greed and luxury had become the stuff of popular culture, hardly anyone asked why such great wealth had concentrated at the top, and whether this was a result of public policy. Despite the armies of homeless sleeping on grates, political leaders—even those who professed to care about the homeless—had little to say about the Republican party’s historical role, which has been not simply to revitalize U.S. capitalism but to tilt power, policy, wealth and income toward the richest portions of the population. (emphasis added)
The rich got so goddamn rich, in other words, because the signature policies of the Great Right Turn were designed to make them rich. And, as the world knows, these policies weren’t limited to Republicans; Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama—plus, of course, their resident economists and cabinet members—all more or less endorsed the basic tenets of the free-market faith. They are all implicated.
So inequality, now that we’re having a “conversation” about it, must of course turn out to be massively complicated, something no one could possibly have seen coming — sort of like the 2008 financial crisis, come to think of it. Furthermore, it must be seen as another technical problem, a matter for the experts to solve, like the budget deficit or entitlement spending.
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Then again, why do I quibble? Most of the experts I refer to here aren’t actually wrong. I have quoted them myself on occasion; I have shown PowerPoint slides of Piketty-Saez graphs to audiences of unbelieving college students. Many of the essays in the Times’ “Great Divide” series have been admirable, as will surely be much of the “cutting-edge analysis” scheduled to be produced by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. What difference does it make if it’s a Nobel laureate who tells us what’s happened to the middle class or the leader of a local union somewhere?My suspicion is that it makes an enormous difference. “Inequality” is not some minor technical glitch for the experts to solve; this is the Big One. This is the very substance of American populism; this is what has brought together movements of average people throughout our history. Offering instruction on the subject in a classroom at Berkeley may be enlightening for the kids in attendance but it is fundamentally the wrong way to take on the problem, almost as misguided as it would be if we turned the matter over to the 1 percent themselves and got a bunch of billionaires together at Davos to offer pointers on how to stop them from beating us over and over again in the game of life. (Oops — that actually happened.)
“Inequality” is the most basic issue of them all, the very reason for liberalism’s existence. It is about who we are and how we live. Virtually every other liberal cause pales by comparison. This is the World War II of political subjects, and if we are going to win it must be a people’s war, not a Combat of the Thirty between the plumèd knights of the Beltway. We owe the economists thanks for making the situation plain, but now matters must of necessity pass into other hands. If the destruction of the middle class is ever to be addressed and solved, the impetus must come from below, not from above. This is a job we have to do ourselves.
If we could eliminate one myth, the myth that “income redistribution” only happens when the wealthy get less and the poor and middle class get more, we’d be a long way towards addressing inequality honestly. Underlying the idea that redistribution from the wealthy to the poor is “unfair” is the belief that the wealthy earned thier wealth.
Any action by government, any transaction by businesses or consumers, is a redistribution of wealth. The defense bill redistributes wealth, from taxpayers to defense conractor shareholders and CEOs. Right-to-work laws redistribute wealth, from workers to shareholders and CEOs. Lax environmental regulations and worker safety laws redistribute wealth, from people who become or injured, to corporate shareholders and CEOs.
It’s ALL redistribution. The one percent knows this, which is why they invest so heavily in controlling Congress. Once the rest of us understand this, the question we should be focusing on is “what’s fair?” If we look at our chosen economic system, and the results we’re getting, it is abundantly clear that our system is unfair. Very. We should fix it.
The classic “can’t-see-the-forest-from-the-trees” scenario is so evident. Those in authority spend so much time discussing the nuances of the inequality scenario, it looks like they painfully try to ignore the obvious: That money did not disappear into thin air. It is hoarded away in other countries by those entrusted to invest it here in America, and protected legislatively and legally by those we interested to do the bidding of their constituents, and not their own pockets. The fact that the political discourse is about social issues is a thin veil paid for by capitalists whose only interest is to advance their material wealth by duping less than enlightened and educated masses. In the process the followers of the proverbial economic pied pipers ‘shoot themselves in the foot’ and will pay to distribute misinformation about who provided the shoot, rather than who paid them to put the foot in the wrong place…..