Former Bush Advisor Greg Mankiw Wants Even More Wealth Inequality

[Donnachaidh]

http://firedoglake.com/2011/01/02/former-bush-advisor-greg-mankiw-wants-even-more-wealth-inequality/

On Friday, Hugh Hewitt provided a useful reminder of just how radical the right has become by attacking cap-and-trade and the EPA — both conceived by Republicans — as sinister socialist plots.

As if on cue, Greg Mankiw offers this bit of wingnutty advice to President Obama.

STOP TRYING TO SPREAD THE WEALTH Ever since your famous exchange with Joe the Plumber, it has been clear that you believe that the redistribution of income is a crucial function of government. A long philosophical tradition supports your view. It includes John Rawls’s treatise “A Theory of Justice,” which concludes that the main goal of public policy should be to transfer resources to those at the bottom of the economic ladder.

Many Republicans, however, reject this view of the state. From their perspective, it is not the proper role of government to fix the income distribution in an attempt to achieve some utopian vision of fairness. They believe, instead, that in a free society, people make money when they produce goods and services that others value, and that, as a result, what they earn is rightfully theirs.

First things first. This notion that Obama somehow dreamed up progressive taxation is as stupid as Joe the Plumber. These “many Republicans” Mankiw mentions doesn’t include Teddy Roosevelt, one of the earliest champions of the progressive tax.


More at the link --

[muntrv]

1. Republickers heart feudalism.

[Rage for Order]

2. Hugh Hewitt is a particularly vile strain of dogshit

His radio talk show is one long republican campaign commercial

[leveymg]

3. Will lower wages than China and less democracy than Dubai satisfy them?

Probably not. We'll probably also have to let the Taliban clean the immoral decay out of America.

Then, America will be safe for capitalism and the Republican Party, again.

[Enrique]

4. equality is not an American value

it's a "European value," sez radio RWer Dennis Prager, to applause...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQs8ZG9hrdc

[malaise]

5. Feigning ignorance is a well known

ReTHUG strategy. No one plays the inversion of reality meme better than ReTHUGS. Fugg Greg Mankiw.

[salin]

6. isn't this the same loon - who tried to reclassify jobs in fastfood restaurants as "manufacturing"

to boost skilled jobs numbers? IIRC the rationale was that manufacturing jobs were defined as using two or more goods to create a new good - and that technically, taking the burger and bun, putting them together and adding a pickle fits the description! Voila how to create better jobs in bushland.

[brentspeak]

7. Greg Mankiw is on the Harvard econ staff because Harvard's billionaire alumni need mouthpieces

like him and Larry Summers to indoctrinate future generations of the ruling elite.

Funny, but neither of these two "gifted" Harvard economists were aware of the impending housing market collapse, let alone the corresponding Wall St meltdown.