What Conservatives Don't Understand About Economic Inequality

            George Will’s column in Sunday’s Washington Post epitomizes the way conservatives are looking at the issue of income inequality.  It’s discouraging to see that conservatives don’t understand what the problem is and why we have such a long way to go in addressing it.

            Will thinks that when Bernie Sanders and others decry economic inequality, they are whining on behalf of “the discontent of those who are comfortable but envious.”  For Will, economic inequality is the inevitable consequence of free markets, big government, artificially low interest rates and broken (African-American and Hispanic) families.

            Citing Harry G. Frankfort’s On Inequality,” Will argues that “it is misguided to endorse economic egalitarianism as an authentic moral ideal.”  Instead of focusing on equality, Will thinks we ought to be guided by Frankfurt’s  “doctrine of sufficiency,” which “is the moral imperative that everyone [should] have enough.”

            This is a strawman argument, and it’s frustrating that Will and his fellow conservatives are willing to trot it out again and again.  Nobody, not even Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), is agitating for economic egalitarianism. Nobody is trying to take anyone’s mansion or yacht away.  Nobody thinks that the Soviet style of bleak equality is appropriate.  The argument liberals are making is that, as Frankfurt writes, economic inequality is unacceptable “on account of its almost irresistible tendency to generate unacceptable inequalities of other kinds.” 

            Economic inequality makes it hard for average families to make ends meet.  Economic inequality strains families and makes it more likely that they’ll break up.  Economic inequality degrades the social trust that holds societies together and makes it possible for people to make sacrifices for the greater good.  And economic inequality distorts our democracy so that government institutions respond more readily to the demands of the rich than to the needs of everyone else.   

            Will, as do many conservatives, begins with the belief that an impartial “free market” determines what things will be rewarded.  But “free markets” are human constructs that depend on rules made by people acting through their governments.  Governments define such basic things as what counts as private property, which provisions of which private contracts will be enforced and even what counts as money.

            If you can control the rules of the market, you can give yourself a huge advantage in generating wealth.  That is why businesses and wealthy people are willing to invest significant amounts of their time and money in politics.  Their goal is to become “rent collectors” who get rich, not by producing needed or desired things, but by getting the state to allow them to have monopolies or oligopolies. 

            If you succeed in becoming a rent collector, you can begin a cycle that allows you to invest even more in the government to protect and enhance your position.  That’s one reason that almost half of the money donated to political campaigns in 2015, amounting to over $176 million, has come from just 158 American families.

            The remainder of Wills argument recycles rightwing claptrap.  Will can’t resist the opportunity to blame (African-American and Hispanic) women who are faced with having to bring up children on their own for increasing economic inequality.  In a perfect world, nobody disagrees with the proposition that children should have the benefit of two parents guiding them toward adulthood.  Children who have two literate parents, stable living arrangements and food security generally do better in life than children who don’t have these things.  But the world isn’t perfect outside of the conservative bubble. Will never bothers to ask why there are so many single parent homes.  Could it be that the dearth of good-paying jobs has placed impossible demands on people, demands that ultimately devastate families?

            Are you willing to do anything about it, George?

            I thought not.

            Will complains about Social Security.  For him it is a program designed to “transfer wealth regressively from the working-age population to the retired elderly.”  True, but so what? Under Social Security, each generation receives financial protection from the one that follows it.  Without it, adult children would have continued to take their elderly parents in when they got too old to work, just as children have always done throughout history.  Either way, present day workers have less to spend on themselves and their children. 

            Will correctly points out that the Fed’s zero interest rate policy has been a windfall to the “10 percent of Americans who own 80% of the directly owned stocks,” has increased economic inequality.  What he doesn’t acknowledge is that the Fed’s policy exists because, since 2010, Republicans in Congress have refused to let Democrats use spending programs to energize the economy.  Without fiscal policy tools, the Fed’s zero interest rate policy was the only thing standing between the U.S. and the same double-dip recession Will’s preferred policies brought to the Eurozone.

            He also complains about the size and power of government because it “inevitably serves the strong.”  This is exactly backwards.  Governments exist because the strong cannot always be trusted to do the right thing. Governments grow in proportion to the complexity and scope of the evils they are organized to prevent.  Governments serve the strong when the strong are able to seize power by force or bamboozle the masses into giving it to them through democratic processes.  I’d agree that our current government has been captured by the strong. But that’s an argument for reducing economic inequality—and thus, the power of the strong, and for making our democracy more responsive, not for emasculating it.

            Without a large, powerful regulatory state, just how does Will think that Frankfurt’s “doctrine of sufficiency” can come into play? Surely Will doesn’t think that all of those people who receive public assistance would have “what is needed for the kind of life a person would most sensibly and appropriately seek” without that assistance.  Or, maybe he does.

            For everyone to have “enough,” you have to break the cycle that enables the wealthy to continue to consolidate wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands.  And the easiest way to do that is to insist on policies that make a fairer distribution of the economy’s rewards.