Posted on 02/01/2009 6:42:12 PM PST by Lorianne
From the pulpit of a lecture hall in the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, Robert Reich is preaching about the perils of the wealth gap. "We haven't experienced inequality on this scale since the 1920s," Reich says, eyes flaring. "How much inequality are we willing to accept?"
Everyone knows where Reich stands. He's the guy on the Left. The wry optimist. As secretary of labor in the Clinton administration from 1992 to 1997, he implemented the Family and Medical Leave Act and helped raise the minimum wage. His proudest achievement during that time was "running a tight labor market," he says. "Income inequality actually started to reduce."
To Reich, it's not enough to identify a problem; solutions can and must be found. He aims for both in his many books about the intersection of economics and politics, including his latest, "Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy and Everyday Life," published this month by Knopf.
Meanwhile, in California, the wealth gap has expanded even more rapidly than in the rest of the country. According to the Public Policy Institute, this was "not because the rich have grown richer in California than in the rest of the nation, but because, as a group, the poor have become poorer."
Reich calls corporate deal making that depletes jobs or harms the environment a natural response to competition. "This doesn't make them right," he writes, "but the only way to make them wrong . . . is to make them illegal. If we want them to play differently, we have to change the rules."
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Also, why is the wealth gap expanding more rapidly in California? I thought CA was the epicenter of leftist largess?
This wealth gap is a myth, based on faulty statistics. Even the authors of one of the most-cited reports from 2003 on income inequality in America admitted this shortcoming (too technical to go into here but search “income inequality myth” and you’ll get plenty of papers).
This ignores the larger issue of income inequality itself, which is always treated as a bad thing, something we need less of, rather than simply a natural outcome of any given economy. It relies on the zero-sum fallacy. Even Nobel-winning economists have fallen for this bunk.
The seeds for today's income gap were sown, Reich believes, during Ronald Reagan's two terms as president. That was the birth of what he calls the "rad con" or radical conservative movement, to which he attributes the loss of middle-class jobs and government-championed tax cuts that gutted education and social services.
So the problem is that Government hasn't kept up with what citizens want, but capitalism has... And the solution is more Government?
Reich=Goebbels
A major factor in the “gap” is the increase in high-earning two-income households. Naturally when you have more and more of such couples instead of the 50s model of one breadwinner, it widens the gap with single parent households.
And who created all these single parent households? Not capitalism. The RAT party.
Reich should put that in his pipe and smoke it. He and his buddies are at the root of the problem. We didn’t have 70% single mother black families when I was a kid.
If that guy was in Europe in the 30s and 40s, he would have helped the Nazis...
Wanna take bets on how long a republican would have a job if he said this, substituting black for white?
All socialist states have an elite class: DDR, Soviet Union, China........
The difference is that “the common man” now has a safe and secure world where he has to make no decisions, where from cradle to grave a nanny states provides. Listen to the rhetoric. It is the socialist that is a fear monger, and what they preach amounts to “stability and security” at the expense of liberty.
Why do I mention this? Of course you see an elite class forming in socialist states. They are everything they say they are not. Socialism is exactly everything it accuses capitalism of being in colloquial thought. From Honiker’s fleet of Volvo's and mansions, to Khrushchevs elaborate Swiss shopping escapades, the only difference is that you see no social mobility anymore. Those on the bottom stay on the bottom. Those on top stay on top. Take a look at the regime in Cuba, or what's now forming in Venezuela. In socialism ultimately the state organs serve to maintain the establishment and status quo. That's why these places end up becoming a police state, or close to it. That's why they most of the times oppose the right of citizens to own firearms..............
Those on the bottom are led to believe that they have something better, that they have it good, because they get mediocre health care, a poor college education, they might even get a cheap government car like a Trabant, Skoda, or Lada. The key to success in such a system, or to convince people to move towards such a system is to play on peoples fears, because the fear of uncertainty is a powerful one. In capitalism may it be who's in power, your job, or even your health care, everything is uncertain. The key is to convince people that they have it better when a bureaucrat and centralized government manages their life for them. And ultimately that's even what you now see in the US. The American liberal by in large is arguing that a state or federal run program can make limited resources become unlimited. They argue that when it's national/universal (AKA: socialized) that the distribution is more equitable. What they fail to mention is that human nature and the most basic principals in economics works against this idea.
Socialism is ALWAYS condemned to fail. The driving forces of human nature and the basic principals behind an economy are always there, the socialist simply chooses to ignore them, so these forces over time grind such an economy into mush. That's why "long term in the macro" these systems fail.
bump
The dwarf with the midget brain and -—— envy is at it again. Napoleon complex!
Think of electric current. When there is a potential difference, meaning voltage difference, current will flow from a higher potential to a lower potential and a flowing current will do work in the process -- turn a motor, generate heat, etc.
A Toulouse-Lautrec wannabe.
At least Toulouse-Lautrec could paint.
California’s poor are being imported in from third world countries; there is no mystery behind this. It’s not the same group of people that are over time becoming progressively poorer, it’s the that ‘poor’ category is constantly being augmented by foreigners coming in from an even poorer situation.
So? Why isn’t California, the ‘progressive’ capital of the USA, making sure that ‘income disparity’ is not increasing in their state?
Good points.
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