Lately there’s been a lot of chatter from midterm-campaign-theme-starved liberals about the scourge of income inequality.
In an entry in their “Poverty in America” series, a National Public Radio reporter recently bemoaned that 95 percent of the wealth recovered since the 2008 recession has gone to the top 1 percent of income earners, and that the U.S.’s middle class is no longer the wealthiest in the world.
Adding fuel to the fire, French economist Thomas Piketty recently published the English translation of his anti-capitalist exposé Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Piketty argues that unbridled capitalism is bad for society: according to economic data he’s reanalyzed, wealth concentration accelerates at a faster rate than economic growth, so that even if society’s doing well, disproportionately more wealth goes to a small percentage of the population. The solution to this ‘problem’ is government regulation, he argues, including higher taxes on the wealthy.
But wealth generation isn’t a zero-sum game; it can expand infinitely. The existence of more billionaires doesn’t squeeze the middle class out of their chance to become billionaires. Before there were hundreds of billionaires, there were only a few billionaires; yet no one claimed that letting these few billionaires get richer would prevent other people from becoming billionaires.
In fact, NPR itself ran a story just last week on Americans’ surprising mobility in and out of the 1 percent. According to the authors of the book Is it just the One Percent, or is Affluence a Normal Life Course Event?, a whopping one out of five members of the U.S. population make it into the top two percent at some point in their lives.
Liberals don’t see the good life as an aspiration. They see it as the default, and if some don’t have it — well, that’s a problem the government needs to fix. The good life doesn’t need to be painstakingly created and built via planning and hard work. It just comes into existence, is owed to everyone as a birthright, and is absent only when it’s been stolen by greedy oligarchs.
The government has a genuine, minimal responsibility to protect the populace from fraud and theft. But the left capitalizes on this legitimate, tiny role for government regulation by passing legislation like the 14,000-page Dodd-Frank Bill, which uses vague language to allow future regulators to impose all kinds of restrictions on business and doesn’t even address the problem it was designed to solve.
The default throughout human history hasn’t been the good life. It’s been an epic, bloody struggle for survival, in which successive generations have tried to pass on a better way of life for their children. Miraculously, this has happened in recent times in the West as a result of capitalism, and is happening in developing nations as they adopt the Western model.
Capitalism didn’t take away the good life, because the good life didn’t exist until capitalism. But the more of capitalism that liberals chip away at, the less of the good life there will be for everyone.
