It’s an almost intractable myth among liberals and journalists that the wealthy and big business align with limited government while big government at least tries to give the little guys a boost.
Liberal blogger Matt Yglesias calls on this myth today in a blog post making a potentially valid point: our media and politicians put too much stake in the economic pronouncements of businessmen.
Here’s the Yglesias line that caught my eye:
This echoes the conventional wisdom, but it is demonstrably false.
Let’s start with the assertion, for which Yglesias offers zero evidence, that “rich businessmen inevitably wind up reaching the view that lower taxes on rich businessmen.”
Who’s the richest businessman in America? Bill Gates of Microsoft. Gates has supported a ballot initiative to raise taxes on the rich. Gates also has spent money to preserve the estate tax.
The second richest man in America is Warren Buffett. Buffett loves taxes on rich businessmen so much that Barack Obama has named a tax on rich businessmen after Warren Buffett. He’s with Gates on keeping the death tax.
Third place is Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle. I can’t find his statements on taxes, but his political giving of the last 20 months — all to Democrats, including Harry Reid — doesn’t suggest someone desperately trying to lower taxes.
Numbers 4, 5, and 8 — Charles and David Koch and Sheldon Adelson — seem to hold the views on taxes and regulation Yglesias attributes to all rich businessmen. But the rest of the top 10 haven’t been reading enough Yglesias to know where they’re supposed to “inevitably” end up.
The Waltons of Wal-Mart wealth are generally conservative, but their company is hardly hammering away for “less regulation of their business.” Yglesias knows this, too, because when Wal-Mart called for a mandate on employers like Wal-Mart, requiring them to provide health-care for employees, the announcement was made in conjunction with Yglesias’s employer CAP, and Yglesias touted it as “an important sign that change is in the air.” Wal-Mart has also lobbied for a higher minimum wage.
Oh, and the only really rich businessman in the Forbes Top 10 I haven’t named yet?
George Soros.
I don’t really have to touch that one, do I?
The bottom line: really rich businessmen often favor higher taxes for reasons either ideological, personal, or even professional. They also favor more regulation, even of their own businesses, for competitive advantage, a government stamp of approval, or simply because they think it’s good.
What Yglesias finds “inevitable,” and most of the media find too self-evident to check — that the rich and Big Business will, by default, oppose bigger government — doesn’t quite stand up to a review of the facts.
