Paul C. Campos
October 26, 2008 02:15 am A ridiculous idea that has become a standard part of political talk in America is that politicians shouldn't "redistribute wealth." For example last weekend John McCain went on Fox News and criticized Barack Obama for wanting to, in McCain's words, "spread the wealth around." Fox News anchor Chris Wallace asked helpfully, "Is that socialism?" To which McCain replied, "So is one of the tenets of socialism redistribution of wealth? Not just socialism, a lot of other liberal and left wing philosophies. Redistribution of the wealth, I don't believe in it." What's absurd about this is saying that you don't believe in redistribution of wealth is like saying you don't believe in gravity. All politics that deviate from the economic status quo redistribute wealth, and the present status quo itself always engaged in some redistribution of wealth from a previous arrangement. For example, the last 30 years have featured a massive redistribution of wealth in America from everybody else to the top one percent, and, much more radically, the top one-tenth of one percent (that is, the richest thousandth) of Americans. Consider these figures from the Economic Policy Institute. In 1979, the top one percent of wage earners made 9.4 times as much, on average, as the bottom 90 percent of the populace. This ratio had remained virtually unchanged since the end of World War II. Meanwhile, the top one-tenth of one percent made 21 times as much as the bottom 90 percent — again, a ratio that had barely budged in the postwar period. Since then the income ratio of the top one percent relative to the bottom 90 percent has doubled, thus making it about the same as what the ratio of the top one-tenth of one percent to the bottom 90 percent was for the first 35 years of the postwar period. That's startling enough, but the most radical redistribution of income has been at the very top of the economic pyramid. The top one-tenth of one percent now enjoys a wage ratio approximately 70 times that of the bottom 90 percent — an astounding generational transfer of literally trillions of dollars from nine out of ten Americans to the super-rich. And, contrary to 30 years' worth of propaganda this redistribution of wealth hasn't been an inevitable product of the "laws" of economics, or the Divine Right of Plutocrats, or whatever rationalization the Heritage Institute and the Wall Street Journal are peddling this week. Rather, it's been largely a product of conscious policy changes: changes in the tax code, in the laws that distribute social power between capital and labor, in America's trade relationships, and in a host of other ways that have moved money from everyone else to the extremely rich as surely as Bonnie and Clyde moved money out of Depression-era bank vaults. Of course none of this counts as a "redistribution of wealth" if you take the view that there is a certain natural economic order, and that only deviations from that order count as "redistribution." That, indeed, has been the position of contemporary American conservatism. From the perspective of the defenders of our current plutocracy, the "natural" order of things is that envisioned as natural by J.P. Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt — no taxes on capital, weak or non-existent labor unions, largely unregulated financial markets: in short, an certain extreme vision of laissez faire capitalism. It should be unnecessary to point out that there is nothing in the slightest bit "natural" about this vision. It's simply one ideological view of how society ought to be organized — a vision that can be justified if one believes either that what's best for very rich is automatically best for society as a whole, or that the highest function of the state is to protect the interests of wealthy. John McCain, who had an income of $4.6 million last year, seems to consider these "truths" to be self-evident. ÔÇ¢ÔÇ¢ÔÇ¢ Paul Campos is a law professor at the University of Colorado.
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