For the Washington Post’s pollsters and liberal bloggers, it’s pretty black and white: you’re either for helping the wealthy, or you’re for more regulation. That seems to have been the notion behind the Post’s latest poll question:
Greg Sargent, from the Post’s platoon of liberal bloggers, likes this black-and-white framing:
You see the leap made there? The Posties posit that the inequality-generating flaws inherent in our economy are the fruit of the market, not of government. They take as granted that regulation will yield more equality.
Sargent’s description of the majority in this poll involves an even more telling leap. I’ve added labels to his various claims:
The poll could easily suggest [A] and [B] — that the game is “rigged against the middle class,” and I basically agree with this sentiment, too. But nowhere does the poll come even close to suggesting [C] that people support more government. Greg Sargent may believe that, but the pollsters never asked if we had too little regulation. They only asked how big of a problem overregulation was.
If I said turnovers were a bigger problem for the Packers last week than dropped passes, I’m not saying the Packers should have dropped more passes, but by Sargent’s logic I am. Unless, of course, you take a postulate that deregulation yields inequality and regulation yields equality.
That naive-liberal postulate is false, and I suspect many of those polled don’t share it. I think when people say the economy is rigged for the rich, they are pointing, at least in part, at things like bailouts, subsidies, and other murky advantages gained by lobbying and cronyism. I notice that while the Post didn’t give it as an option, still 5 percent said that overregulation and inequality were equally bad.
Off the top of my head I can think of a few overregulations that unfairly favor the wealthy: crackdowns on food trucks in favor of restaurants, regulations blocking people from selling home-baked goods, online gaming regulation favoring big casinos, regulations keeping women from doing hair-braiding for money, and a bunch more. If you expand the notion of “regulation” slightly to include mandates, a skewed tax code, and wealth transfers, there’s plenty of evidence that our inequality stems in part from too much — not too little — government.
