Last week, I shared a TV interview about Obama’s budget, but much of the discussion was routine and didn’t warrant special attention.
But there was one small part of the interview, dealing with the silly claim that America became a rich nation because of socialism, that got me all agitated.
Well, to quote the great Yogi Berra, it’s deja vu all over again. Here’s an interview I did with CNBC about labor unrest. As you might expect, I made the standard libertarian argument that it’s not the job of government to pick sides when labor and management have squabbles.
But if you pay attention at the 3:00 mark of the video, you’ll notice that the discussion shifts to income inequality. And this is what got me agitated. I’m completely baffled that some people think that redistribution is more important than growth.
As I point out in the interview, nobody wins in the long run if you have a stagnant economy and politicians are fixated on re-slicing a shrinking pie.
The goal of everyone – including unions and leftist politicians – should begrowth. If we get robust growth, that will mean tight labor markets, and that’s a big cause of rising wages.
But here’s my hypothesis to explain why statists don’t support good policies. Simply stated, I think they hate the rich more than they like the poor.
That sounds like a rather bold claim, but is there any other explanation for why they reject the types of tax policies (such as lower corporate rates, reduced double taxation, and expensing) that will increase investment, thus boosting productivity and wages?
Heck, look at this chart showing the relationship between capital formation and labor compensation.
Any decent person, after looking at the link between capital and wages, should be clamoring for the flat tax.
Yet Obama wants to move the tax code in the opposite direction!
I confess that I have no idea if this is because of malice or ignorance, but I do know that no nation has ever generated faster growth with class warfare.
I realize I’m ranting, but the more I think about this topic, the more upset I get. Politicians and their allies are making life harder for workers, and I hope I never stop being outraged when that happens.
