Comment

White House Floats Gun Control Proposals

387
Dark_Falcon1/07/2013 7:13:11 am PST

re: #378 Obdicut

Actually, income inequality is being addressed on NR:

But at a certain level of national affluence, relative status starts to matter to people. Think of the American economy in terms of the Mercedes-Benz lineup: If you are struggling to get by, your thinking about owning a car is going to be mostly utilitarian — you need something inexpensive and reliable to get you to work, to take the kids to school, etc. You’ll care a great deal about fuel economy, insurance expenses, and other factors in the total cost of ownership. But if you’re in the market for a new Mercedes, basic performance, quality, and reliability are going to be assumed, and the differences between models are not for the most part utilitarian: A $36,000 C-Class will get you to work just as effectively as a $90,000 S-Class, and it’s a great deal more utilitarian and convenient than a $200,000 SLS. But those gull-wing doors must speak to somebody’s soul, otherwise Mercedes would not be able to sell the SLS for $200,000. And if a C-Class driver feels a little pang of desire when he pulls up next to an S-Class, that is not a sign of a character defect on his part: Aspiration is not the same thing as envy. But from an absolute point of view, figuring out how to move from an entry-level Mercedes to a high-end Mercedes is a pretty high-class problem to have.

Likewise, figuring out how to move up in one of the richest countries in the world is a problem that most of the people walking the earth today would love to have. Our appreciation of that fact sometimes encourages conservatives to in effect tell voters to eat their vegetables, because don’t you know kids are starving in China. At the same time, our celebration of capitalist successes and our appreciation of the vital role played by what we now call “job creators” (unfortunate phrase) blinds us to some important facts. Bill Buckley was no practitioner of class warfare, but he detected that there was something distasteful going on in a great many corporate boardrooms, and that in many cases those gigantic executive paychecks were utterly unrelated to business performance: “What dismays is the utter lack of class in such businesses and businessmen here parading their skills in distortion,” he wrote. “What is going on is phony. It is shoddy, it is contemptible, and it is philosophically blasphemous.” Such facts sting all the more when the middle class and the poor are facing diminished prospects and net worths savaged by the housing collapse.

The poor aren’t poor because the rich are rich, and conservatives of course have to keep reiterating this fact. But neither is it universally the case that the poor are poor because they are lazy or lack ambition, and while the position of the American middle class is the envy of much of the world, that position is tenuous for many Americans, and their anxiety is not to be dismissed lightly. There is of course a very large dose of unhealthy envy in our national discussion about inequality, but nobody who has seriously examined the relationship between politics and the economy (or real-world corporate governance, for that matter) could believe that merit and merit alone accounts for the diverging prospects of the very well off and the rest.