Bruce Thornton
The Occupy Wall Street protesters are looking more and more like the shock troops of the Democratic Party’s electoral tactic of class warfare. Responding to a question about the protesters, the President gave an oblique endorsement when he said, “The American people understand that not everybody has been following the rules; that Wall Street is an example of that.” That would be the same rule-bending Wall Street from which his 2008 campaign received more money than any other politician in history. Forgetting that largess as he demonizes the rich, the President now wants a 5.6% surtax on millionaires, which would include not just Wall Street fat cats, but small businesses on Main Street. Certainly organized labor also thinks they can use the protesters, which is why some labor groups––particularly public employee unions hooked up to diminishing taxpayer-funded life support––are marching alongside them, in the hopes that they can exploit this movement to protect their Cadillac benefits. he protesters themselves comprise the usual suspects: badly educated young people (“Students loans=indentured servitude,” read one sign), aging hippies, leftover leftists (“Marx Was Right,” read another), and the purveyors of various wacky conspiracy theories, like the guy whose sign links the Federal Reserve to the pyramid on the dollar bill. This mélange explains the profound ignorance of economic reality that lies behind the protesters’ complaints about the “greed and corruption of the 1%.” In this melodrama, “Wall Street” and “corporations” have rigged the system so that they enrich themselves at the expense of everybody else. “Growing income inequality” is the proof of this nefarious behavior, as the left-wing magazine Mother Jones reports: “A huge share of the nation’s economic growth over the past 30 years has gone to the top one-hundredth of one percent, who now make an average of $27 million per household. The average income for the bottom 90 percent of us? $31,244.” Q.E.D.
What Mother Jones leaves out, of course, is some facts I’ve brought up before about the same period. In 1981, the top 1% paid 17.58% of all federal income taxes; in 2005, this same cohort paid 39.38%. In 1981 the top 1% paid $94.84 billion (in 2005 dollars); in 2005 they paid $368.13, an increase of 288%. In the most progressive tax system among OECD economies, today the top 10% of American taxpayers pay 70% of all revenues, while the bottom 47% pay nothing. In other words, this increasing “income inequality” has led to the rich footing most of the tax bill for all the goodies the federal government dispenses. Contrary to the current class-warfare rhetoric, “If you want to get more tax revenues from the rich,” economist Arthur Laffer points out, “you’ve got to make the rich richer, and to make the rich richer, you’ve got to lower tax rates.” If the “anarchists for Big Government,” as Mark Steyn calls them, really want more federal money for their demands like “free college education,” “a $20 minimum wage,” and a trillion dollars for “ecological restoration,” they should be endorsing supply-side economics.
But the Wall Street Occupiers and their sympathizers in the Democratic Party can’t seem to grasp these wealth-creating powers of a free-market economy. They’re stuck in a pre-modern notion of wealth as something limited, like land or gold, so that if someone has more, someone else must have less. But two centuries of capitalism have demonstrated that wealth can be continually created and thus distributed to more and more people, which accounts for the astonishing rise in living standards of the past two hundred years. What is historically miraculous is not the volume of wealth the top 1% possesses, but the amount enjoyed by everybody else.
A consequence of this success is that the one in seven Americans the government categorizes as poor in the United States enjoys nutrition, leisure, entertainment, and health care superior to those available to the king of Spain in the 16th century. As The Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield write, “In 2005, the typical household defined as poor by the government had a car and air conditioning. For entertainment, the household had two color televisions, cable or satellite TV, a DVD player, and a VCR. If there were children, especially boys, in the home, the family had a game system, such as an Xbox or a PlayStation. In the kitchen, the household had a refrigerator, an oven and stove, and a microwave. Other household conveniences included a clothes washer, clothes dryer, ceiling fans, a cordless phone, and a coffee maker.” Indeed, so successful has capitalism been at raising living standards that obesity, once a sign of wealth, is now a disease of the poor. And let’s not forget that the protesters themselves have the leisure to protest and the cell-phones to record their antics only because capitalism has created the surplus wealth that has freed them from backbreaking drudgery and abject poverty.
The supposed malign effects of “income inequality” on well-being, then, aren’t really the issue for the left. The faux-populist rhetoric of income inequality is the camouflage for the true goal. As one protester instructed another: “It’s about taking down systems, it doesn’t matter what you’re protesting.” Capitalism must go in order to redistribute wealth as a means for advancing ideological preferences and goals, and achieving the radical egalitarianism that the left considers to be “social justice”––the same old socialist dream that littered the 20th century with corpses, and whose milder yet still pernicious forms have brought several European countries to the brink of insolvency. In the end, what the protesters are really angry about is that the world of reality does not live up to the world of their utopian dreams.
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