January 16, 2012
Thomas Edsall does the classic caricature of the debate between liberals and conservatives telling readers:
“Looked at another way, the two sides are fighting over what the role of government in redistributing resources from the affluent to the needy should and shouldn’t be.”
This is absolutely not true. The government decides how to structure the market. Its decisions in this area swamp the impact of the redistributive policies that liberals and conservatives often fight over.
For example, patent protection for prescription drugs redistributes more than five times as much money to the holders of patent monopolies as the Bush tax cuts did for the richest two percent of the population. Similarly, the protectionist barriers that limit the competition that doctors, lawyers and other highly paid professionals face from foreign competition are comparable to giving them a welfare check that averages in the neighborhood of $100,000 a year.
There are many other ways in which government policy on structuring the market have enormous impact on the distribution of income. It is understandable that conservatives would like to divert the public’s attention from the ways in which the government structures the market to redistribute income upward. It is hard to understand why liberals would ever accept this “loser liberalism” framework which reduces the policy debate to the extent to which government should redistribute money from the winners in the market to the losers.
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