This E.J. Dionne piece is truly remarkable washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/… He seems to have completely missed all the economic debates in Washington for the last three decades (thread)
He writes as though the economy is just some autonomous entity that creates inequality, which then can be at least partly offset by tax and transfer policy.
He seems to have missed the fact that the extent to which the economy generates inequality is determined by policy.
For example, Bill Gates would still be working for a living, if the government did not give Microsoft patent and copyright monopolies on its software. (okay, he might be collecting his Social Security now)
Doctors would earn half as much money (as they do in Europe) if our trade negotiators had worked as hard to have free trade in professional services as they did to have free trade in steel and clothes.
And, most of the Wall Street banks would be out of business if we let the market work its magic in the wake of the collapse of the housing bubble in 2008-09.
It is pretty incredible that a columnist with a major news outlet could be so totally oblivious to all the ways that government policy affects the distribution of income, but hey, it's the Washington Post
All this is covered in my book Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer [it's free] deanbaker.net/books/rigged.h…
