Krugman Explains Right-Wingers

Redistribution destroys freedom and liberty. Just take a look at all of the failed redistributionist societies of the 20th century. It has nothing to do with racism and it is shameful for the left to try to demonize people for cherishing freedom and liberty. Is it really so bad to actually want the “Land of the Free” to survive beyond this century?

I don’t see how infringing the liberties of minority groups helps promote the Land of the Free.

FYI: Hawke was Jesse Helms’ campaign manager when he ran against Gantt. Then like today, Hawke promoted voter suppression as a method of securing political power.

pirate: doesn’t the gas tax (if it goes to build and maintain roads, say) count as redistribution? you seem to approve of that.

Wow. More self-parody.

So are Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Deroy Murdock, Thomas Stith (close friend of Jack Hawke whom you’re curiously smearing here), and many, many other liberty-loving, economically literate black people also racist or whatever you’re insinuating here?

(And while you’re at it with the FDR books Steve, try Amity Shlaes latest book on the FDR years. Hell, you might learn something. In fact, I’ll read the whole Naomi Klein book if you read the Schlaes — deal?)

http://redclaycitizen.typepad.com/redclay/2007/11/xenophobia-chil.html

Pirate said:

“Redistribution destroys freedom and liberty…Is it really so bad to actually want the ‘Land of the Free’ to survive beyond this century?”

I can find nothing in his statement to quarrel with. The sad consequences of the redistribution of wealth to the top 1% over the past 30 years is all too apparent!

It is time for us to call in the economic justice system. Arrest the “invisible hand” from using its diversions to pick our pockets and require that it pay RESTITUTION.

Pop Quiz: What is more racist:

1) Believing that all people are created equal and should be at liberty to pursue their dreams and keep the fruits of their labor; or

2) Believing that minorities are incapable of achieving success unless “White America” gives them a helping hand?

sturner, what does the “third answer” have to do with racism? This post is about racism and ideology, is it not? There are more poor white people in America than there are poor minorities. The second answer is clearly the most racist position to take and it is the position of the American Left.

“The American Left has been creating a dependent underclass in America for the past 100 years because you guys think minorities are incapable of achieving success unless “White America” gives them a helping hand.”

100 years ago voting was restricted across much of the US by race and, let us not forget, income. this was done both officially by government institutions and unofficially by ‘citizens’ acting on their own initiative. by the latter, i mean lynching. African-Americans were regularly tortured to death in public by white mobs–this was technically illegal, but more or less commonly accepted practice. LEGAL means for excluding certain classes of citizens from their right to vote (poll taxes and grandfather clauses, for instance) ended fewer than 50 years ago. this is not so long ago.

No one had, or has, a monopoly on racism. nor on exploiting the poor, whatever their color. the question is whether, today, one party or the other is more interested in alleviating poverty, more interested in inquiring into why americans with certain skin colors are disproportionately likely to be poor. perhaps neither party is really all that interested in the question.

I think it’s pretty hard to assert real similarity between the reconstruction era republicans and democrats and the present-day parties.

Still, go back and look at the party politics of reconstruction in the 1860s and 1870s more carefully. There were republican reconstruction governments in plenty of southern states. The process whereby northern republicans decided to give up on radical reconstruction and leave politically active black southerners to their fate at the hands of a bitter, defeated white population is tragic, but also pretty well documented. the democrats certainly became, over the 1870s, the dominant political party again in the south, and certainly enforced the existence of a black–but also white–share-cropping underclass.

the civil rights movement happened in spite of, not as a result of, southern elected officials of either party.

i guess the main point here isn’t all this historical debating, though it is important.

the main point is that state intervention in the economy does not equal socialism or communism, neither of which is the same thing as the soviet union. if you want to be philosophical about it, i’d say that the free market is an abstraction that could never exist in a world that always already has inequalities of material and position to overcome–this is the weight of history. given that the world isn’t fair, how do we reduce human suffering within it? sometimes we do it by allowing private enterprise to do its thing, and sometimes we don’t. but there’s a real decision there to make, always depending on circumstance.

Krugman does not have it right, and has made egregious errors one would not expect from a respected economist. While it’s true of course that a reliably democratic block of voters (southern whites) have switched parties, Krugman does not explain why whites in every part of the country have more often than not voted Republican in presidential elections.

Chief among Krugman’s problems is his (strange) reliance upon a political scientist (Bartels) who represents a minority opinion pertaining to the voting habits of “working-class” whites. Among other errors, Bartels confuses the working-class with the (mostly non-working or under-employed) poor, and then proceeds to build an argument from this shaky foundation. As the poorest members of society continue to vote Democratic, Bartels rejects the argument that working-class voters throughout the nation have abandoned the democratic party, and Krugman has improbably signed on.

But as any number of research studies have shown, in almost every part of the country whites (except the very poor) have trended Republican for many years — with the exception of Clinton’s re-election victory. One could argue that wealthy whites have started voting more Republican, except they haven’t (their voting patterns seem to be pretty consistently Republican over the years) and there are not enough of them to explain why Republicans keep winning.

The established and majority opinion of political scientists is that an increasing number of non-union working-class whites have trended Republican since the 60′s. For whatever reason Krugman wants to propose a mono-causal explanation (southern whites are racist) that is simplistic, unscientific, and politically damaging to the Democratic Party.