Everybody is jumping up and down about the stream of videos
on which Jonathan Gruber, the “Obamacare Architect,” is caught saying that
Americans are stupid, and other words to that effect. What they seem to be missing is that this
attitude is nothing unique. Do an
internet search using the words “Americans are stupid,” and you’ll be amazed at
how many matches pop up.
Now, that’s pretty bad.
What’s worse, however, is when people distort things in other ways, such
as saying things in ways that give the wrong impression, answering questions in
ways that don’t answer the question, use of straw man arguments, insertion of
non sequiturs, or even going outside the parameters of the issue or the
question entirely.
We’ve mentioned several times on this blog the way some
people have of attacking “the rich” or anyone else who excites their
considerable ire, i.e., who dares to
disagree with them, or any other reason, including they’re ugly and their
mothers dress them funny. That is, to
make an accusation and then demand that their chosen target(s) prove him-, her,
or themselves not guilty of whatever heinous offense they have allegedly
committed.
Did you catch the trick there?
They make accusations, shift the burden of proof from the
accuser, to the accused, then sit back and smirk at their own cleverness.
Or, take this instance from last week’s Wall Street Journal. In an
op-ed piece by Phil Gramm and Michael Solon, “How to Distort Income Inequality”
(11/12/14, A15), the authors declared,
“Rich
people don’t ‘take’ a large share of national income, they ‘bring’ it. The beauty of our system is that everybody
benefits from the value they bring.
“Yes,
income is 24% less equally distributed here than in the average of the other 34
member countries of the OECD. But OECD
figures show that U.S. per capita GDP is 42% higher, household wealth is 210%
higher and median disposable income is 42% higher. How many Americans would give up 42% of their
income to see the rich get less?”
Did you catch the trick there?
Oh, not the disproved assumption garnered from a misreading
of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, i.e., the idea that the rich benefit
society by hiring the poor to meet their needs, so that wealth ends up as
equitably distributed as if ownership of capital had been widely
distributed. No, the rich today can
satisfy virtually any want by employing technology, not human labor, so the
wealth stays concentrated.
That’s not what we’re talking about here, though. It’s the deceptive shift from collectivism to
individualism and back again. By
focusing on per capita — average — GDP and household wealth (net or gross, by
the way? It makes a difference. . . .)
we get a very distorted figure. A few
incredibly rich individuals with a great deal of wealth can badly distort that
average figure. For example —
Let’s say you have a country, Wealthia, with ten people, and
total GDP of $1 million. What’s the per
capita GDP? Why, $100,000, of course.
“Zowie!” you say. At first glance, everybody in that country is almost twice as rich — in per capita terms
— as the average American in 2013, when per capita U.S. GDP was $53,143.
Uh, huh. That’s until
you find out that Wealthia’s population consists of one guy who gets $1 million
every year from leasing his oil field, the country’s sole resource, and does
his shopping down the street in the neighboring country, Poorovia. The other nine inhabitants of Wealthia have
nothing. The only way they even survive
is to sneak across the border into Poorovia every day to beg for food and
clothing from the Poorovians.
What’s the solution?
Gramm and Solon could — and do — deny that there’s even a problem. Jean-Paul Marat, French revolutionary and champion of the poor, would say the other nine
citizens of Wealthia have the right to kill and eat the oil field owner. People who think that “social justice” and
“socialism” are the same thing would say the oil field owner must have gotten his or her ownership in
a criminal manner.
Rather than go through all the justifications for doing
nothing or for stealing, we’ll cut to the chase. Wealthia should form a Citizens Land Bank to
purchase the oil field at a fair price, issue everyone a single no-cost
non-transferable lifetime voting fully participating share, and start paying
out dividends after using, say, half the annual profits to service the
debt. Once the oil field is paid for,
all the citizens of Wealthia will have an actual — not just a per capita —
share of GDP of $100,000.
#30#