July 20, 2012
Actually, he just gives the right-wing caricature of the left, telling readers:
“The argument between left and right is about what you do beyond infrastructure. It’s about transfer payments and redistributionist taxation, about geometrically expanding entitlements, about tax breaks and subsidies to induce actions pleasing to central planners.”
The real difference is not over government intervvention in the market. The right actually supports massive government interventions in the economy. For example, government granted patent monopolies on prescription drugs will transfer more than $4 trillion from consumers to drug makers over the next decade compared to a free market.
The right also supports having the Federal Reserve Board deliberately raise unemployment to put downward pressure on the wages of ordinary workers and thereby keep inflation low. And, it supports having trade agreements that put manufacturing workers in direct competition with low-paid workers in the developing world, while leaving highly paid professionals like doctors and lawyers largely protected. This has the predicted and actual effect of redistributing income upward.
The real argument between left and right has little to do with government intervention in the market. The real issue is whether the goal is to steer the economy in a direction that will allow the benefits of growth to be broadly shared or whether to structure the economy in a way that directs income upward.
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