What He Said

I’ve witnessed a certain number of dim-witted right-wing blog commenters making arguments along the lines of “if you think inequality is so bad, the you must love the current global recession.” Naturally, Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson decided to hop on that bandwagon. Brad DeLong replies:

Making the rich poorer by deregulating financial markets so that a bunch of overleveraged Wall Street firms fail at risk management and cause a financial crisis doesn’t make anybody richer. Making the rich poorer by taxing them more and devoting the money to debt reduction, infrastructure, and education does make everybody else richer–as we learned in the 1990s. [...]

The income and wealth of Wall Street has vanished not because the “rich” of Wall Street have stopped doing what they do, but because the too many of the “rich” of Wall Street did do what they do: it is their failures of risk management that have made everybody poorer.

Every column of Robert Samuelson that Newsweek and the Washington Post publish hastens their demise–and harms the reputation of all their reporters.

Meanwhile, yes, global financial crisis does show that some things are worse than US domestic inequality — we don’t want incomes worldwide to converge to zero. But what Brad said.

On top of which, removing barriers to advancement by ensuring that everyone grows receiving adequate levels of nutrition, intellectual stimulation, health care, etc. reduces inequality and boosts overall growth.