Barack Obama enthusiastically supports punishing the most productive members of society in order to put capital to less efficient uses. Put more simply, he wants to take money from the “rich” and give it to the “poor.”
I’m no fan of Obama’s tax plan, but what on earth justifies the assumption that the richest members of society are the most productive, or that their uses of capital are the most efficient?
No doubt that would tend to be true in a freed market, but in a system like the one we live under – a system of government-granted privilege to the corporate elite – it seems extraordinarily unlikely to be true; and indeed the evidence is pretty overwhelmingly to the contrary.
Maybe someone should buy Bothwell a copy of Kevin’s book?
Tags: Conflation Debate, Labortarian, Left and Right, Left-Libertarian
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I can see your issue with the “…most productive” claim simply because of the superlative “most.” As you noted, the government intervention in free market has prevented us from being able to measure productivity in terms of earnings (at least accurately). However, the original quote claimed that the Gov interference will result in a less efficient use of capital. You implied that the author believed the pre-G.W.Obama structure to be the most efficient use of capital. I don’t think that was his claim.
I am fairly certain that you agree that further government meddling and manipulating is highly unlikely to result in a more efficient use of capital than what existed pre-bailout and certainly not more efficient than purely free market.
If I misread the spirit of your post and got caught up in semantics then I do sincerely apologize.
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I grant your point that Bothwell didn’t explicitly say that the wealthiest folks’ use of capital is most efficient. Whether it’s more or less efficient than what Obama’s proposed use, though, I really have no idea. It’s the old question of which is more efficient (or less inefficient) — the fascist or the state-socialist mode of intervention. Well, it depends on the details and the degree; each one screws up some things more badly than others. Bothwell’s confidence that a slight move toward the state-socialist end of the interventionist spectrum and away from the fascist end of that spectrum will clearly be a move in the direction of lesser efficiency seems to me unwarranted, and reinforces my suspicion that he is mistaking the status quo for a reasonable facsimile of a free market.
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What would lead us to believe that Obama, like his professed role-model – beloved of left and right-statists alike – FDR, will do anything other than transfer wealth from less politically-favored rich people to more politically-favored rich people? Especially since, following Dumbya’s lead, he’s been doing exactly that, by pumping trillions of dollars to plutocrats via the Fed?
Why would we expect all the vaunted new regulations and subsidies to do anything other than they always have: transfer wealth to the connected wealthy?
Government exists to socialize costs and concentrate benefits – in other words, to extract money and freedom from the masses and turn them into plunder and power for the elite. Why should it ever behave differently?
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Right — as I always say, the contrast between mainstream left and mainstream right isn’t between state-socialism and corporatism, it’s between two different flavours of corporatism (with the left-wing one usually, though not always, being slightly closer to state socialism than the right-wing one, just as a penguin is closer to being a seal than a robin is). The difference is sometimes real, but not huge, and not very important. The big difference is between left-wing rhetoric (corporatism disguised as social democracy) and right-wing rhetoric (corporatism disguised as laissez-faire); see the graphic representation here.
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A most neat summation!
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About Roderick T. Long
The Empirical Me
I’m Roderick T. Long, Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University. I’m an Aristotelean/Wittgensteinian in philosophy and a left-libertarian market anarchist in social theory. (More about me here.) This blog, Austro-Athenian Empire, is a continuation of my earlier blog, archived here.
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