Third Way walking the walk
Economic Populism Is a Dead-End for Democrats recently appeared in The Wall Street Journal, appropriately enough, and comes from Third Way. A commenter asked why it was important to list who was on the trustee list, which included some Dems and others. I won’t go through the laundry list on taxes, social safety net, and other issues…you will form your own opinions. It is well financed, and hardly ‘centrist’.
Dan:
One Picture depicting membership can say ten thousand words.
False Flag Operation???
Of course Third Way has a lot of Dems. And probably not a single one of them that hates gays, blacks, or jews, and a few of them who might even considering bringing in women at the Partner level in their firms.
But that is the key point: “in their firms”. Third Way’s trustees are overwhelmingly from the investment community and their policy preference is the familar Neo-Liberal one that supports market solutions in everything.
It is a mistake to confuse Plutocrats with haters. I mean some of the biggest philanthropists in history were Gilded Age and just after Monopolists. I mean Carnegie funded a few thousand libraries and J.D Rockefeller funded just about everything. These guys loved people – in the abstract.
They just believed in suppressing wages and eliminating competition in the here and now. That is they loved People but hated Populists. For the most part they were all over and supportive of Social Justice but the whole concept of Economic Justice left them stone cold.
Some of these guys would probably give you the shirt off their back. But fight to the death at any attempt to increase the effective rate of taxation on capital.
Don’t get me wrong, as a Social Democrat I have to see these guys if not as the enemy at least as the source of much of the problem. And my solution to those problems would start precisely where they are most resistant, I would tax gains on capital (over some very modest exemption level for the actual middle class) as regular income and take top rates on regular income back to early Reagan levels of 50%.
So while they are not my enemies, I am certainly from their perspective a deadly enemy indeed. As is Warren, but infinitely more dangerous than me. Because people listen to her.
Maybe someday they will come to understand how fundamentally anti-business their anti-populism is. Businesses need demand. They aren’t getting it. The populists are focused on policies that will result in ordinary people having more money to spend — that is, policies that will increase what businesses need. Yes, as much pain as it requires for the anti-populists to admit it, that even necessarily includes workers having a greater say in how the revenue they help create for the business is to be shared. Yep, that’s collective bargaining. You cannot have adequate demand without a strong and enforced right of collective bargaining.
It’s the progressive economic populists who are the ones who are really pro-business.