I really wish that right-wingers would make up their minds about whether the free market is supposed to put wealth in more hands or fewer — they’re making me dizzy trying to figure out whether wealth creation is noble or evil:
“If we’re fighting to reform the tax code and increase exports, the benefits cannot just translate into greater profits and bonuses for those at the top. They have to be shared by American workers, who need to know that opening markets will lift their standard of living as well as your bottom line,” President Obama told the Chamber of Commerce on Monday morning.
Reaction from Jim “Gateway” Hoft — “His answer to everything… Socialism.” Apparently anything that doesn’t support plutocracy is socialism. Hoft’s “insight” was accompanied by that obnoxious “Obama as the Joker” image. I hadn’t realized the Joker was a socialist.
Ed Morrissey informs us that corporations exist to benefit investors and stockholders:
The “must be shared” line misses the point. First, many businesses have profit-sharing and stock-purchase plans in place, and the defined-contribution retirement plans that most private-sector workers have rely on company contributions, which also rely on profitability. But even more so, the purpose of business is to make money for its investors, not to act as full-employment laboratories to make politicians look good. If government makes the cost to hire too high through regulatory expansion, the private sector will respond with fewer jobs and tighter productivity. That’s not a moral failure but simply the consequence of free markets and investor choice.
First, Pres. Obama said nothing about regulations. He said that corporate-friendly tax policies need to yield positive economic results for the Americans who are employed by those corporations, not just the top layer of management, and not just investors or stockholders. If a lax regulatory environment created jobs for Americans, then the financial markets would not have crashed in 2007, and George W. Bush would not have the second worst job creation record since the late 1970s (it would be the worst on record since the Ford administration if not for the fact that Bush père has his son beat by half a million jobs).
Obama does this on a fairly regular basis: he says something that’s perfectly reasonable to a normal human being, but is a negative dog whistle to his haters. The most famous example was his “spread the wealth around” remark to Joe the Plumber on the campaign trail.
This one’s similar. Reasonable people know what he means: that the system has to work in such a way that when there’s a rising tide — increasing corporate profits, stronger GDP — ordinary citizens benefit as well as CEOs and big shareholders. No rational person would object to that. Obama, I suspect, would be perfectly happy if that just happened as a result of the free market’s invisible hand. (So would I.) But it doesn’t — not in the economy as it’s structured today, and as it’s been structured for a long time.
If you think about it, he’s asking for the economy to work the way right-wingers say it should. Right-wingers say that showering wealth on the rich in the form of tax cuts inevitably helps the rest of us. They say they want the rest of us to be helped, which is why they want the tax rates of the wealthy to be reduced. So, see, right-wingers want corporate profits to be “shared” by American workers. Right-wingers want to “spread the wealth around.” […]
Except when they decide that the free market is Communism.
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