re: #197 Gus

National Review is for intellectuals! //

Williamson is a highly educated and articulate moron:

The Left sees inequality as a cause of economic facts, not an effect of them. As EPI sees things, inequality is an independent actor, a motive force in world affairs: It is not only a “determinant” of economic conditions but “by far the most important determinant”; it has, under its own steam, “blocked living standards growth for the vast majority”; and it is “the key driver behind stagnant wages for workers at the bottom.” This is a deeply weird view of how the world actually works: The Left thinks that inequality is not a mere measure of relative incomes or wealth but something that does things in the world, something that acts — and not only acts but acts decisively, determining Americans’ economic prospects. This sort of flatly preposterous analysis is the unfortunate effect of mistaking the map for the territory and the model for the thing modeled, the kind of magical thinking that causes people to believe that Superman could turn back time by reversing the rotation of the Earth.

Oh, we got it all backwards. Inequality is the result of lack of restrained capitalisms. Because.

Similar magical thinking infects the Left’s ideas about unions. Unions are in decline practically everywhere in the private sector, in no small part because the thuggish, corrupt, rapacious leadership of U.S. industrial unions helped to diminish or outright destroy the industries they once were associated with. Unions live on mainly in government work. But that is good enough for EPI to conclude that a renaissance of unionization is desirable: “This policy choice is clear when one looks at the evidence… . Unionization has held up much better in the public sector, where employers have less ability to fight organizing drives.” What else might distinguish public-sector employers from, say, General Motors? The main thing is a complete lack of competitors and, most important, the ability to command revenue from the public at gunpoint via taxation. This is not true of, say, McDonald’s.

And this is where I stopped reading. Unions destroyed their industries and taxation is always at gunpoint, common populist moron talking points.

What passes for intellectualism isn’t: you make a wordy analysis of something, parse some data sets, then make your contrarian case by dropping some talking points, instead of spending the rhetoric to explain in depth your talking points. This is just new words and paragraphs on new information but saying the same thing over and over.