February 21, 2018
It is amazing how frequently we hear people asserting that the massive inequality we are now seeing in the United States is the result of an unfettered market. I realize that this is a convenient view for those who are on the upside of things, but it also happens to be nonsense.
Today’s highlighted nonsense pusher is Amy Chua, who warns in an NYT column about the destructive path the United States is now on where a disaffected white population takes out its wrath on economic elites and racial minorities. The key part missing from the story is that disaffected masses really do have a legitimate gripe.
We didn’t have to make patent and copyright monopolies ever longer and stronger, allowing folks like Bill Gates to get incredibly rich. We could have made Amazon pay the same sales tax as their mom and pop competitors, which would mean Jeff Bezos would not be incredibly rich. We could subject Wall Street financial transactions to the same sort of sales taxes as people pay on shoes and clothes, hugely downsizing the high incomes earned in this sector. And, we could have rules of corporate governance that make it easier for shareholders to rein in CEO pay.
None of the rules we have in place that redistribute upward were given to us by the market. They were the result of deliberate economic policy. (Yes, this is the topic of my [free] book Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer.) It is understandable that the losers from this upward redistribution would be resentful and they likely are even more resentful when the beneficiaries of the rigging just pretend that it was just a natural outcome of the market.
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