Dean Baker for the Center for Economic and Policy Research: There is a commonly held view that the winners in the economy got there through a combination of luck, skill and hard work. The losers scored less well in these categories. The central question from the standpoint of public policy then ends up being whether we should feel sorry for the losers, or at least sorry enough to take something away from the winners. Conservatives are mostly comfortable leaving distribution where it is, while liberals have guilty consciences so they feel we should help out the people at the bottom.

Rejecting loser liberalism means not accepting this framing. The winners did not win just by luck, skill and hard work, but also by rigging the deck. For example, they construct trade deals to make U.S. manufacturing workers compete with low-paid workers in the developing world. … Meanwhile, they maintain or increase the protections that make it difficult for people from developing (or developed) countries to train to U.S. standards and work as doctors, lawyers and other highly paid professions in the United States.