← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Happy Hacker
Thread ID: 12253 | Posts: 3 | Started: 2004-02-10
2004-02-10 20:39 | User Profile
Free market doesn't mean pro-business Bruce Bartlett
One of the biggest beefs that liberals have against conservatives is that the latter are reflexively pro-business. That is, whatever the business community wants, conservatives will bend over backward to give them. This is untrue for principled conservatives. But, sadly, the Bush administration and the Republican Congress keep giving liberals ample reason to believe that the stereotype is fact. [[URL=http://www.townhall.com/columnists/brucebartlett/bb20040210.shtml]more[/URL]
Bruce Bartlett illustrates his point by using Bush's drug program. It's worth reading his article for that alone. But, I have a few examples of my own.
Bush is pro-big business. He hardly hides the fact that he supports unlimited immigration so the big business will have cheap labor, that you and me have to subsidize through taxes that pay for social services they receive but do not pay for themselves because of their low incomes, assuming we can still earn a decent living. There is nothing about Capitalism and the Free Market that requires us to open our borders and subsidize immigrants.
Free Trade is another example of raw pro-big business bias. I disagree with protectionist trade. But, as long as the government is going to exist and levy taxes, nothing except the special interests of big business makes trade an inferior source of government income. Indeed, our Founding Father rightly thought that trade taxes were a superior source of income over federal taxing of citizen earnings. There is nothing about Capitalism and the Free Market that requires the government to use the tax structure to favor foreign and international business.
Bush's tax cuts are all aimed at the rich and their big businesses. Bush's success in reducing, and eventually eliminating taxes on unearned income, is something that only benefits the rich. Working people don't have significant unearned income. Other than being pro-big business, there is no principle to tax unearned income at lower rates than earned income. Meanwhile, Bush has never expressed the smallest desire to reduce the huge payroll taxes which the working class pays rather than the rich. There is nothing about Capitalism and the Free Market that requires the government to heavily tax the working people but only lightly tax rich people.
2004-02-11 08:00 | User Profile
HH-
The Daily Mis-Lead caught this confusion well in the below piece. What is Dubya's policy at any given time? Global finance appears to be [B]vastly[/B] more important to him than American well-being. As useless as government job creation is, why do they work so heard to destroy the jobs we already had here?
[B]Bush Endorses US Jobs Moving Overseas[/B]
The Daily Mis-Lead
[url]http://www.misleader.org/daily_mislead/Read.asp?fn=df02102004.html[/url]
On Labor Day, President Bush said, "I want people to understand that when somebody wants to work and can't find a job, it says we've got a problem in America that we're going to deal with. We want everybody in this country working."
But yesterday, President Bush directly contradicted himself, releasing a report which "supports the shift of U.S. jobs overseas." When asked about the report and how it contradicts the president's supposed concern about job losses, the president's top economic adviser said, "Outsourcing is just a new way of doing international trade."
With more than two million jobs lost since President Bush took office, newspaper headlines across the country told readers of the White House's new support for the practice of wealthy corporations eliminating U.S. jobs and shipping them to lower-wage countries. The Seattle Times headline read, "Bush report: Sending jobs overseas helps U.S." The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette said, "Bush Economic Report Praises 'Outsourcing' Jobs" and the Arizona Republic said, "Bush Report Lauds 'Outsourcing' Jobs."
And while this may be troubling to the millions in the United States who are out of work and suffering from stagnating wages, it was celebrated in India, where thousands of good paying, white-collar U.S. jobs have moved. The headlines in India read, "Bush Aides: Outsourcing win-win for India." The story said the Administration believes exporting jobs to India and other lower-wage countries "is a win-win for both exporter and importer" - failing to explain how this is a win for American workers who the president just months ago purported to care about.
2004-02-11 08:28 | User Profile
Happy,
Reading that column almost makes me forgive Bartlett for some of the other stuff that he has written. Funny how when it comes to illegal immigration and the effect it has on wages we hear about the law of supply and demand from ersatz "conservatives", but when it comes to profits these same folks don't seem to think it applies there. I can remember Greenspan testifying on the need for cheap labor to damp down inflation during the Clinton years, so alot of folks in the bldg trades not only saw their wages stagnant, but in some case decline. Greenspan, needless to say, didn't say that the way to insure cheap labor was to not enforce the immigration laws.