The Left's New Class Warfare Push - (how much longer can liberals milk this tired old cow?)

HUMAN EVENTS ONLINE.COM ^ | MAY 17, 2005 | BRUCE BARTLETT

[CHARLITE]

I don’t believe in coincidences in politics. When I see the Wall Street Journal and New York Times both running big front-page stories within two days of each other on a subject that isn’t remotely time sensitive, I know that something is going on. More than likely, it signals the beginning of an organized campaign by the liberal media to gin up an issue for the Democrats.

When a team is on a losing streak, the best thing the coach can do is line up a game with a cream-puff opponent. Even if the victory doesn’t mean much substantively, it can go a long way toward helping restore his players’ confidence and, hopefully, lead to victories against tougher opponents.

When liberals are on a losing steak, two of the issues they come back to time and time again are racism and inequality. In the late 1980s, for example, they all ganged up on South Africa to make its system of Apartheid the Number One issue in American politics. It wasn’t that Apartheid had gotten any worse or that we had anything to do with it. It was just an issue on which the left knew it couldn’t lose because Apartheid was indefensible. In short, Apartheid was the cream-puff opponent that every coach wishes for to give his team that easy victory they so desperately need to turn themselves around.

The left is on another losing streak today and so their intellectual leaders in the liberal media have gone back to the old playbook for an easy win that will get their team out of its slump. This time it is the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, which has been working for them since the days of Karl Marx. But it’s getting harder and harder to milk this cow.

On Friday, May 13, the Wall Street Journal began the first of a series on challenges to the American dream with a page-one piece entitled, “As Rich-Poor Gap Widens in the U.S., Class Mobility Stalls.” The essence of this article was that few people rise above the economic class to which they were born. And compared to the socialist nations of Europe, class mobility is no greater here than there.

On Sunday, May 15, the New York Times began a series saying exactly the same thing, often quoting the same sources and citing the same data. What do you think the odds are of that happening independently? Zero, I think.

Here is what I believe is going on. Class warfare has been the main staple of leftist ideology for hundreds of years. Especially in the 1980s, we heard over and over again in the media about how the top fifth of households was increasing its share of aggregate income. The implication was that the pie was fixed, so that the gains of one group came at the expense of the rest. But conservatives effectively demolished this argument by showing that the pie was getting larger. The real income of all groups was increasing and everyone was better off, even if some were more better off than others.

The left then shifted its argument to imply that those in each income class were essentially the same people year after year. This justified a redistributionist tax policy even if the well being of every income class was rising. It didn’t matter that the data used to justify this policy were before-tax incomes, meaning that even confiscatory tax rates would have no effect on the outcome, or that the data also omitted most welfare benefits, meaning that practically everything government does to equalize incomes was completely ignored.

But the strongest argument conservatives had was data showing significant fluidity of income. Those well off today were often poor tomorrow and those born poor were often able to lift themselves into higher income brackets. In short, the existence of income mobility utterly smashed the liberal premise and forced a withdrawal. In the Clinton years the left simply ignored a continuation of the same trends that it found so objectionable in the 1980s.

Now the left is back flogging the same issue in hopes of getting itself back in the win column. But first it has to cope with the reality of mobility among income classes. Toward this end it is trying to redefine it. Now it is no longer whether or not there is significant mobility—the left concedes that point. The question instead is whether mobility today is greater than it was in the past. This shifts the focus away from the large level of mobility to its change over time, thus obscuring the issue.

In future columns, I will look at specific aspects of this new campaign and what the true facts are. For now, just be aware that the game is afoot.

Mr. Bartlett is a nationally syndicated columnist and a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis.

[boop]

I'm glad someone else noticed this. The WSJ article was a DISGRACE. The only "gap" in America is between those who work hard, and those who don't. Someone who drops out of high school, gets pregnant at 14, destroys themselves with drugs is "surprisingly" going to reap the consequences of what they have done. WTF is the deal with punishing someone who freakin' works his rear off/ gets an education,etc?

[proxy_user]

I would think that the WSJ readers would be more interested in the income dispartiy between a hard-working CPA who only makes $250K, and a CEO who is equally hard-working but makes $25 million.

Especially when that money should be going to the stockholders.

[Flashman_at_the_charge]

I fail to see how the Left can complain about the gap between rich and poor being wider whilst at the same time supporting the influx of illegals who haven’t got any marketable skills or a pot to p*ss in.

[Paleo Conservative]

Yes it's the rich NYT reading elitists and the welfare recipients against the middle class.

[Joe Bonforte]

In my lifetime, I've watched one publication after another slide into leftism. First it was US News and World Report, which was the right-leaning weekly when I was in college. Then the Economist Magazine began to forsake its libertarian roots and endorsed Clinton for president and became shills for HillaryCare.

The WSJ was the last bastion of thought that was not biased so far left that it was worth something. Now, the news pages of the WSJ have succumbed to the same leftist viewpoint, and I suppose it's only a matter of time before the editorial pages do the same.

Why? My best answer is that the "mainstream" journalism schools now turn out only leftists, so that the larger publications, which recruit only from those sources, inevitably end up with staffs that are majority left.

Thank goodness for online sources, and upstarts such as the Washington Times and New York Post. I look forward to seeing most of the old-line publications continue to slide in readership until they become irrelevant. Let those leftists pukes that think they are so smart deal with having no one listen to them, or being released from their jobs because their organizations no longer have a customer base.

[lucysmom]

I fail to see how the Left can complain about the gap between rich and poor being wider whilst at the same time supporting the influx of illegals who haven’t got any marketable skills or a pot to p*ss in.

Let me get this straight, we have our man in the Oval Office, have a majority in the House and Senate but the "influx of illegals who haven’t got any marketable skills" is someone else's fault?

[FreeKeys]

The left is on another losing streak today and so their intellectual leaders in the liberal media have gone back to the old playbook for an easy win that will get their team out of its slump. This time it is the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, which has been working for them since the days of Karl Marx.

CLICK ON THE GRAPH TO SEE A CLEARER VERSION OF IT

  "Never mind the low wages and harsh living conditions of the early years of capitalism.  They were all that the national economies of the time could afford.  Capitalism did not create poverty -- it inherited it.  Compared to the centuries of precapitalist starvation, the living conditions of the poor in the early years of capitalism were the first chance the poor had ever had to survive.  As proof -- the enormous growth of the European population during the nineteenth century, a growth of over 300 percent, as compared to the previous growth of something like 3 percent per century." -- Ayn Rand

And check out the chart on THIS page.  Also see: "The Sweatshop Scam" HERE.

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|  THE FIXED QUANTITY OF WEALTH FALLACY  |  The fixed quantity of resources fallacy  |
| THE FIXED QUANTITY OF RESOURCES FALLACY  |

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As Robert A. Heinlein said, "Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded -- here and there, now and then -- are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty."

In a modern open-market capitalist society, entrepreneurs get rich and the poor get better off as a result -- OF COURSE they're not going to get as rich as fast (duh). So, of course the gap thereby gets wider -- but the top AND BOTTOM of the gap both rise to levels much higher than before. The gap is widening?? Well, hooray for everyone’s sake! ESPECIALLY the poor!

If the rich weren’t free to "get ever richer," developing or investing in ever-increasing productivity, the poor would NEVER have any chance to improve their conditions at all, let alone to obtain their ever-increasing access to the latest tools of that expanding productivity, making every hour of their labor ever-more valuable. And YOU wouldn't EVER have the chance to read this or anything else brought to you by advanced technology. 

Freedom incents the creators to empower YOU and as many other people in the world as possible. There's little an entrepreneur likes better than a bunch of ever-richer loyal customers. Remember, the wealth you see around you didn’t always exist; it was and is CREATED wherever the right CONDITIONS OF FREEDOM (including the rule of natural law evenly applied, with the rigorous protection of individual rights including property rights and respect for contracts, effective prosecution of the perpetrators of force and fraud, and the ease of engaging in trade without the interference or "permissions" of politicians and bureaucrats) are established and guaranteed._

Now recognize the true nature and scope of evil and wherein it really lies. And don't be too limp a wimp to to call viciousness viciousness even if all your friends and neighbors fawn like groupies over any mantle of global "compassion" in which the evil appears to be cloaked.

-.

Find: "Popular understanding of economics is at least two centuries behind economists' understanding of the economy." HERE
And: "Wealth is not a fixed quantity and one person's success does not come at the expense of others ... Economists have understood [that] for over two centuries, but moralists have not caught up." HERE

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"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men together in a society, they create for themselves in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it." -- Frederic Bastiat

   "Wealth, when you get right down to it, is not the cause of poverty." -- Mitchell B. Pearlstein, paraphrasing George Gilder

  "If we want the whole world to be rich, we need to start loving wealth. In the difference between poverty and plenty, the problem is the poverty and not the difference. Wealth is good.  ... wealth is not a world-wide round-robin of purse snatching, and ... the thing that makes you rich doesn't make me poor. ... Without Productivity, there wouldn't be any economics, or any economic thinking, good or bad, or any pizza, or anything else.  We would sit around and stare at rocks, and maybe later have some for dinner. ... Wealth is based on productivity, and productivity is expandable.  In fact, productivity is fabulously expandable."-- P.J. O'Rourke in Eat the Rich
 

(Again)      "Wealth is based on productivity, and productivity is expandable.  In fact, productivity is fabulously expandable." -- P.J. O'Rourke in Eat the Rich

"...evidence abounds that the fundamental cause of Third World poverty is not First World greed ... it is the economic, political and social obstacles that developing nations themselves raise to progress by their aspiring poor." --Katherine Kersten in the Minnesota Star Tribune,March 20, 1996

 "Look around: It just isn't true that countries get rich at each other's expense.Would America be better off now if Europe and Japan had stayed poor after 1945? Did its jobs migrate, its economy stagnate, leaving rising poverty and chronic unemployment? Not exactly: America thrived. One of the things that helped it after 1945 was expanding opportunities for trade with other rich countries. Americans would be worse off today if Europe and Japan had stayed poor. What's changed? Why isn't this still true? In my view: Nothing; it's still true. The faster India grows, the better off every other country will be... I do not regard the prospect of global capitalism as "harrowing." I regard it as the best opportunity for relieving human misery the world has ever seen." -- Clive Crook, deputy editor of The Economist,in the February 25th, 1997 issue of Slate, in a letter to John Judis

   "I observed the talks and was shocked not only by the riotous atmosphere, but also by the protesters' misconceptions about trade, the WTO and the developing world. As an Indian national, I know only too well how lack of trade, investment and freedom keeps the world's developing nations in a state of perpetual poverty and environmental degradation. Sadly, the largely middle-class Americans who trashed Seattle last week had little if any comprehension of this fact." -- Barun Mitra, in a column in the Wall Street Journal 12-9-99. Mitra heads the The Liberty Institute, in New Delhi, India

  "The 'progressive' Left, even while wailing about international poverty, has long decried the Westernization of the 'developing world', the polite term for societies kept poor by socialist governments." -- from The Free Market Means Civilization by Lew Rockwell, President of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, originally published in Spintechmag.com,12-22-2000.

  "Fortunately, political freedom and economic progress are natural partners.  Despite capitalism's lingering reputation as the source of all the world's evils, the fact remains that every single democracy is a capitalist country.  Half a century of economic experimentation proved beyond doubt that tyranny cannot yield prosperity. ... Socialism collapsed because it is a policy of unrestrained intervention.  It tries to fix what is 'wrong' with the spontaneous, self-organizing phenomenon called capitalism.  But, of course, a natural process cannot be 'fixed.' ... Socialism is an ideology. Capitalism is a natural phenomenon." -- Michael Rothschild in BIONOMICS: Economy as Ecosystem

 "Capitalism is not an "ism." It is closer to being the opposite of an "ism," because it is simply the freedom of ordinary people to make whatever economic transactions they can mutually agree to." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell

 "Not understanding the process of a spontaneously-ordered economy goes hand-in-hand with not understanding the creation of resources and wealth." -- Julian Simon

  "The market is not an invention of capitalism.  It has existed for centuries.  It is an invention of civilization." -- Mikhail Gorbachev, June 8, 1990

   "How a conflict-ridden, grossly over-populated place with no resources whatsoever gets rich is simple. The British colonial government turned Hong Kong into an economic miracle by doing nothing." -- P.J. O'Rourke in Eat the Rich

   "In terms of natural resources, Africa is the world's richest continent. It has 50 percent of the world's gold, most of the world's diamonds and chromium, 90 percent of the cobalt, 40 percent of the world's potential hydroelectric power, 65 percent of the manganese, millions of acres of untilled farmland as well as other natural resources.  Despite the natural wealth, Africa is home to the world's most impoverished and abused people. Of the 41 black African nations, only three (Senegal, Botswana and Mauritius) allow their people the right to vote and choose their own leaders. Only two (Botswana and Senegal) permit freedom of expression and criticism of government policies. In countries like Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Mozambique, Sudan, Chad and others, ethnic genocide has taken the lives of untold millions of innocent victims. Slavery is still practiced in the Sudan and Mauritania." -- Dr. Walter E. Williams

  "Another current catch-phrase is the complaint that the nations of the world are divided into 'haves' and the 'have-nots.'  Observe that the 'haves' are those who have freedom, and that it is freedom that the 'have-nots' have not." -- Ayn Rand

"What transformed the world of horse-drawn carriages, sailing ships, and windmills step by step into a world of airplanes and electronics was the laissez-faire principle." -- Ludwig von Mises in The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science

"Capitalism is not just a system for producing wealth. It is, above all else, a system based on the noblest moral principle: the protection of the individual's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Free markets are founded on the individual's right to pursue a career, trade the products of his effort, and enjoy the wealth he has earned without having to seek permission from others or pay ransom for the privilege of living." -- Robert W. Tracinski

"For years, statist development experts had sought top-down solutions, operating under the implicit assumption that poor people in the Third World were largely incapable of entrepreneurship. De Soto utterly rejected that patronizing viewpoint, and, beginning in his native Peru, focused on the lack of formal property rights as the source of poverty in poor countries." -- Gene Healy
.
 "Cuba's poverty is caused by the crackpot Marxist doctrines imposed by its sociopathic ruler and promoted by half the liberal arts professors on American faculties." -- David Horowitz
.
   "Socialism is an ideology. Capitalism is a natural phenomenon." -- Michael Rothschild
.
   "Incessant preoccupation with statistical disparities is one of the luxuries of an affluent and sheltered life.  Do not expect someone who has ever had to go hungry to get upset because some people can only afford pizza while others can afford caviar." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell (who began life hungry)

"Any stray mediocrity rushes into print with plans to control the production of mankind -- and ... no one questions his right to enforce his plans by means of a gun." -- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

  "Bad and discredited ideas, it seems, never die.  Neither do they fade away.  Instead, they keep turning up, like bad pennies or Godzilla in the old Japanese  movies." -- Murray N. Rothbard
.
"One of the most important reasons for studying history is that virtually every stupid idea that is in vogue today has been tried before and proved disastrous before, time and again." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell
.
   "There is no error so monstrous that it fails to find defenders among the ablest men." -- Prof. John E. E. D. Acton
.
   "The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us noble and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false." -- Celebrated Historian Paul Johnson
.
   "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." ~ George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1906
.
   "When Western countries in the past were as poor as Third World countries are today, these Western countries nevertheless had one big advantage: There was no large and influential class of the intelligentsia to impede their progress with unsubstantiated theories and counterproductive propaganda." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell
.
   "It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a 'dismal science.' But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance."--  Murray N. Rothbard

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