Republicans Need to Get to Know Their Enemies on Income Inequality

“Know thine enemy.” Uttered most famously a millennia and a half ago by famed warrior/philosopher Sun Tzu, the advice holds up well, even, and especially, when the battles are ideological. So what is the thinking behind the right’s utter refusal to actually engage with the left’s actual position on inequality?

The Federalist’s Ben Domenech wants us to know that in reality, inequality doesn’t matter. Of course what “matters” is entirely subjective. It would make more sense for Ben to try to persuade those who think it does why they shouldn’t. But that would require that Ben understood why inequality matters to people.

In fact, Googleing “income inequality” brings up a host of non-jealousy related reasons to care about it. One reason is that it hurts economic growth when the rich see their incomes rise but the poor don’t. The reason? The poor spend their extra wages, unlike the wealthy. Another reason is that income inequality hurts class mobility by making it more difficult for kids to go to college.

It may be that saving and investing are just as good, if not better, for economic growth than spending. And I tend to believe that college is generally extremely overrated as a tool for mobility.

According to Pew Research, “Americans in the upper fifth of the income distribution earn 16.7 times as much as those in the lowest fifth — by far the widest such gap among the 10 advanced countries in the Pew Research Center’s 2013 global attitudes survey.”

Here’s where the Republican messaging machine could go Sun Tzu on the Democrats and win converts. Forty-five percent of Republicans and the vast majority of Democrats and independents said the economic system “favors the wealthy.” This is true! From licensure requirements to tax breaks to onerous regulations to the incredibly regressive payroll tax, which takes a huge chunk out of your first dollar earned and actually has a cap, like it or not, government economic policies shape our economy and many of these policies absolutely favor the wealthy.

Republicans get trapped into thinking that because some level of inequality is a feature of capitalism, we shouldn’t care about it. And I sympathize with the view that a rising tide lifts all boats, so the focus should be on growing the pie, not making sure it’s divided evenly.

But it’s no disavowal of capitalism to admit that the current levels of inequality aren’t right, fair, or the result of the free-market at work. For example, if creative destruction weren’t thwarted by bailouts, we’d probably wouldn’t see CEOs paid many multiples of worker compensation to preside over failing firms.

It’s the defense the free market deserves to point this stuff out, instead of misrepresenting why people care about it in the first place. Maybe, in a truly free market, inequality wouldn’t matter to most people. We’re not in one. Admitting that fact is the first step to getting on the same page.

I contend that I was as successful as I was during most of my working life because:

I DID the homework in grade school & high school.

I TOOK the tests and got good grades.

I ATTENDED school, with very few absences.

I worked HARD at whatever job I had, even those which were boring, or not my first choice.

I DID EXTRA ASSIGNMENTS when my employer asked.

I went back to college AT NIGHT, after working more than 40 hours a week and took accounting classes.

I put my SOCIAL LIFE ON HOLD for over 4 years to take all the accounting classes the college offered.

I got a 4.0 grade average—all 4 years.

All of this enabled me to be self-employed before I was 40 and to choose my clients.

I often worked MORE THAN 60 HOURS a week to keep clients happy. None of this was “Overtime”.

I bought my first house when I was 26. I owned 4 houses in the years, and own this one free & clear.

Attendance—effort—doing extra....all these things are what it takes to be successful.

Those who don’t ant to do any of the above will never be a decent employee.

Oligarchy in the Twenty-First Century Column: Think rich conservatives rule the world? Think again.

The world of unequal incomes that liberals self-righteously lament, the world of concentrated, inherited wealth, of politics dominated by the concerns of a few, is a world constructed by liberal methods according to liberal ideals. “The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class,” Marx and Engels wrote in 1848. And there can be no denying that the ruling ideas of our age—diversity, multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, gun control, free trade, unrestricted migration, sexual autonomy, feminism, environmentalism—are liberal ones.

The popular rhetoric of income inequality, the attacks on Charles and David Koch, the assertion that the system is rigged against the common man, the accusations that a vast right-wing conspiracy has despoiled the American landscape and society and polity—these are the means by which the ruling class masks its true position and justifies its continued agglomeration of power and of wealth.

The campaign against inequality and the call for higher taxes and the regulatory burdens placed on extractive industries further the self-interest of the liberals who rule our world partly because those liberals are already established in society and have already made their money, partly because like David Cohen or Tom Steyer or George Soros or Elon Musk or Warren Buffett they stand to benefit financially from their preferred outcomes, but also because there are fortunes to be made, there is status to be gained, in justifying the continued expansion of the welfare state, in designing plans for the redistribution of tax dollars, in demonizing those sections of the elite, and that minority of Americans, which dissent from the ruling ideas.

Seven of the 10 richest counties in the country voted for Barack Obama in 2012, many of them by huge margins. Six of the 10 are in the Washington, D.C., metro area, which has benefited from government employment and payment regulations, from government contracting, and from consulting, lobbying, and lawyering for clients petitioning the government. The median income of Falls Church City, Va., is $121,250 dollars. In 2012, Falls Church City voted for Obama 70 percent to 30 percent.

Democrats represent eight of the ten richest congressional districts in the country. Democrat Carolyn Maloney represents the district with the highest per capita income of $75,479. Outgoing congressman Henry Waxman represents the district with the second-highest per capita income of $61,273. The only two Republicans on the list are Rep. Leonard Lance, whose New Jersey district ranks seventh, and outgoing Rep. Frank Wolf, whose Virginia district ranks tenth. The average per capita income of Democratic House districts is $1,000 more than Republican ones.

Indeed, the partisan makeup of the super-rich is less interesting, and less important, than their ideological unity. The issues that the richest Americans care most passionately about, from gay marriage to comprehensive immigration reform to gun control to drug legalization to foreign aid, are liberal issues. Only the Kochs and Adelson are famous for making defiant and public stands against the spirit of the age.

The campaign of Barack Obama outraised the campaign of Mitt Romney. Overall, in 2012, the “red team” slightly outspent the “blue team” by a little more than $100 million. It made no difference. Not a single one of the top “all-time” institutional donors between 1989 and 2014 tilted Republican, according to a list compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. Senate Democrats are winning the 2014 money race. Even as they denounce Supreme Court rulings that loosen restrictions on political speech, liberal billionaires pledge gifts of $100 million and $50 million to Democrats in the 2014 election, and meet anonymously and in secret to coordinate giving to the multitude of organizations that make up the professional left. So effective has been the fundraising of hedge-fund billionaire Tom Steyer that President Obama, having delayed the Keystone pipeline yet again, is likely to kill it.

“It’s very difficult to make a democratic system work when you have such extreme inequality,” Piketty told the Times last Sunday, “and such extreme inequality in terms of political influence and the production of knowledge and information.” In fact the mechanisms of democracy seem to be working precisely as the capitalist and petty-bourgeois liberals would like them to work: the question among Democrats these days is just how permanent their majority is likely to be.

What we are in danger of losing because of the “extreme inequality in terms of political influence and the production of knowledge and information” are the classical liberal values of negative freedom, of religious liberty, of equality before the law, of free markets. The inequality of income our bipartisan ruling class sanctimoniously condemns is the very tool it uses to shore up the inequalities of power and communication from which it benefits. Affluent, self-righteous, self-seeking, self-possessed, triumphalist, out of touch, hostile to dissent—this is what oligarchy looks like in the twenty-first century. And it is all in front of one’s nose.

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