Libertarian Think Tank Conducts Welfare Study, Publishes Highly Misleading And Illogical Results

 

Libertarian Think Tank Conducts Welfare Study, Publishes Highly Misleading And Illogical Results

 

 

Author: Justin Acuff August 25, 2013 6:26 am

The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank founded as the “Charles Koch Foundation” in 1974 (source: PDF), recently released a study (PDF) that had the internet abuzz, because it seemed to indicate welfare pays better than a minimum wage job, and as such, needs to be cut so that people have incentive to work again. Not only is that extremely misleading, but it’s telling of the anarcho-capitalist lobby within the libertarian community — especially the Koch-funded part. Benefits are intended to keep people housed and from starving. When that’s more than minimum wage does, it’s time to raise the wage, not cut benefits and let them starve.

To start with, the study is a lie. Although the information isn’t completely false, the presentation of it is so misleading that it erases any real use of the data. As Raw Story explains,

Taken at face value, the study is actually a stinging indictment of America’s low-wage economy. Only two of the 33 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)devote a smaller share of their economic output to programs that help poor families make ends meet than the United States – Mexico and South Korea. If those relatively stingy benefits provide more than one can earn working a minimum wage job – the authors say that’s true of 35 states – then the minimum wage is obviously not enough to get by on. (…) 

They also acknowledge the central flaw in their conclusion: in real life the “typical” family in their study doesn’t come close to receiving the maximum benefit from every single program for which they’re eligible. But here the authors’ caveat doesn’t go far enough. Due largely to the fact that eligibility requirements have already become harder to overcome, these programs are helping fewer poor families get by. In 2009, around three out of four poor families with kids weren’t getting any TANF benefits. At the height of the economic crash, about 25 percent of those eligible for food stamps weren’t receiving them; during better times, that number hovers around 40 percent. And as the CATO study concedes, six out of seven poor families aren’t getting housing assistance. 

So a study that claims to tell us about the “typical” poor family is really describing a rarity — the equivalent of a four-leaf clover. But the purpose of these studies isn’t to inform good policymaking. They feed a narrative that the poor are lazy and undeserving, and provide wonky cover for further weakening our social safety net. When studies like this one are picked up by the conservative media, all of the authors’ caveats tend to be stripped away, and they become straightforward claims that poor families sit back enjoying a good life, forcing overburdened tax-payers to pick up the tab.

Also, they admit that most of the poor express a desire to work. In fact, low wage employees are likely to be on assistance as well as working, simply because their employers don’t pay enough for them to pay their bills and eat. Meanwhile, the richest Americans get ever richer. Want to make some bets about where that money is coming from?

What libertarians and Republicans fail to understand is that the free market cannot be left in charge of poverty. Here’s why, explained in several easy-to-understand steps:

• It costs a minimum amount of money to live in the United States, in order to pay for housing, food, etc., at the very least.
• That amount of money can be determined, and is the poverty level.
• The cost-to-live, or money needed to stay above poverty level, can come from one of two sources: private (usually a job), or public (government assistance).
• If working full-time at minimum wage does not pay enough to keep people out of poverty, benefits are necessary to ensure that Americans aren’t dying for lack of money (you know, like those third-world countries we look down on).

And yet, the people opposed to welfare benefits are generally against a minimum wage increase as well, showing that their concern is not for the people, but for the money.


Read the case for an $11 minimum wage (want more? Let’s get this done first) here.

House GOP Didn't Get Pope’s Memo On Poor Before Slashing Food Stamps

           

  Tea Party and the Right  

AlterNet / By Steven Rosenfeld

House GOP Didn't Get Pope’s Memo On Poor Before Slashing Food Stamps

The GOP war on poor can now seen in new and harsher light.

 

 

 

September 20, 2013  |  

 

 

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There’s nothing new about the House GOP’s war on America’s poor. They want people to go hungry. They want to deny people healthcare. Those were the bottom lines in votes on Thursday and Friday.

The first vote cut $40 billion from food stamps over the next decade, which today assist one in seven households. The second vote cut funding for implementing the Affordable Care Act, including outreach to the poor.

Now the GOP’s critics don’t just include progressives and Democrats, they include Pope Francis, who called on people to help the poor after his election in March, and in a just-published interview, decried those with “dogmatic” and “obsessed” views inside the church, especially over human sexuality.

The papel interview, which surfaced within hours of the Republican-led House voting to cut billions from food stamps and then from healthcare, underscored just how extreme the GOP’s obsessions have become. There are 61 Republicans who are Catholic in the House; only 15 Republicans opposed the food stamp cuts; only one opposed cutting Obamacare.

“This church with which we should be thinking is the home of all, not a small chapel that can hold only a small group of selected people,” the Pope said, chastizing idealogues. “I often associate sanctity with patience... as a constancy in going forward, day by day.”

There was little that was patient or inclusive in the House Republican’s ongoing tirade against the poor. If anything, their speeches calling for food stamp cuts were notable for their lack of understanding. They ignored the impact on the poor and presuppose that America is filled with people who don’t want to work and are waiting for government handouts. 

“There are workfare programs, there are options under the bill for community service,” said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, speaking of the bill's language cutting off food stamps after several months until the recipient has a job. “This bill that points to the dignity of a job—to help people when they need it most with what they want most, which is a job.”

Cantor never mentioned the Congressional Budget Office analysis finding that the bill would cause 3 million people to lose benefits while another 850,000 would see their benefits cut. Nor did he mention that millions of Americans remain unemployed after the 2008 recession.

More impersonal, ideological language came from Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-IN, who led the push for bigger food stamp cuts.

“Mr. Speaker, this bill eliminates loopholes, ensures work requirements, and puts us on a fiscally responsible path,” he blared. “In the real world, we measure success by results. It’s time for Washington to measure success by how many families are lifted out of poverty and helped back on their feet, not by how much Washington bureaucrats spend year after year.”   

The democratic process breaks down when politicians love their ideals more than the real world impact of those ideas on people. That distinction was not lost on some Democrats, whose floor speeches noted the bill’s mean-spirited and vindictive nature.
“You say to the states, ‘If you cut more people off your rolls, we’ll let you keep half the money, and you can do with it whatever you want.’ That is immoral,” said Rep. Bill Pascrell, D-New Jersey. “We’re talking about kids. We are talking about veterans. And we are talking about the disabled.”

Washington’s pundits quickly noted that neither of the House GOP bills—cutting food stamps and defunding Obamacare—were going anywhere. The White House said it would veto the food stamp bill. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said that Democrats would delete the Obamacare cuts, which even Tea Party Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas admitted was all but inevitable.

Americans have been living with the House GOP’s posturing for years. But their pontificating and actions punishing the poor are being cast in a harsh new light that many people did not expect after new statements from the Pope about what it means to serve the public.

“The thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. I see the church as a field hospital after battle,” Pope Francis said in his most extensive remarks yet.  

One wonders how many of the 61 Republican House members who are Catholic are paying attention to the Pope, especially after their latest efforts to make life harder for the neediest Americans.

Steven Rosenfeld covers democracy issues for AlterNet and is the author of "Count My Vote: A Citizen's Guide to Voting" (AlterNet Books, 2008).

The Rich Shall Overwhelm

THE AMERICAN PROSPECT

We Shall Overwhelm

David Cay Johnston

 

September 18, 2013

 

A new book explores when and why America’s rich protest. 

 

AP Images/J. Scott Applewhite

Four years ago, the modern Tea Party seemed to emerge from nowhere, leaving journalists bewildered and the public with few reference points to understand seemingly spontaneous rallies by middle-class people seeking lower tax rates. A search for the phrase “tea party” in connection with “politics” in major newspapers yielded fewer than 100 mentions in 2008—and when the words did appear linked together, they suggested studied formality and decorum. The next year, they appeared more than 1,500 times, often connected to “protest demonstration.”

But little was spontaneous about the new party. “Social movements that explicitly defend the interests of the rich and the almost-rich have been a recurring feature of American politics,” Isaac William Martin, a sociologist at the University of California, San Diego, reminds us in his new book, Rich People’s Movements: Grassroots Campaigns to Untax the One Percent. “Such movements shook the American polity before the Obama era, before the Reagan era, and before Barry Goldwater ran for president—before, even, the New Deal.”

With meticulous research, Martin shows how the modern Tea Party grew from decades of efforts by American oligarchs to de-tax themselves. They relied on cranks, rogues, and a few scholars to polish the most effective ideological marketing pitches. Their goal was selling the notion that if the rich bear less of the burden of government, all of us will somehow end up better off. These pitches have worked best when some newly proposed government initiative—like President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act—arrives to pose the threat of major policy change. They have depended on diverting attention from obvious questions, such as just how does a smaller tax bill for the Koch brothers benefit us?

Spanning decades, the residue of relationships, movement-building skills, and organizations from past enlistments of the affluent many to agitate for the interests of the super-elite few could be seen merely as an example of what Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab called “cultural baggage” in their 1971 book The Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing Extremism in America, 1790-1970. Instead, Martin says, these movements bequeathed to us “not just a suitcase we drag along behind us” but “a toolkit” to remake American public policy. Martin also concurs with historian Richard Hofstadter, who pointed out a half-century ago how many practitioners of his famous theory—the paranoid style in American politics—found their roots in the arrival, in 1913, of the 16th Amendment. That amendment, ratified on the eve of World War I, resolved disputes over the meaning of the phrase “direct taxes shall be apportioned,” and in doing so ushered in the modern income tax.

By the 1920s, Martin writes, corporate boardrooms were rife with “rich men who were scared of progressive taxation, but did not know how to fight it.” Along came J.A. Arnold, a semi–con man who told them he knew what to do. Arnold grew up in central Illinois, near the birthplace of rabble-rousing William Jennings Bryan and a few years behind him. Populist movements fueled by abuses of railroads and their underwriters surrounded him in his youth. Arnold saw opportunity—not in fighting the railroads but in fighting the progressives. By age 34, he had discovered what Martin calls “a talent for flattering rich and powerful men.” Again and again, Arnold would “seek out a rich patron, turn the conversation to politics, profit.”

Arnold, allied with traditional bankers, fought the Texas land banks that helped small farmers prosper. Then he hit the big time, organizing “tax clubs” that, like the Tea Party, seemed to emerge from nowhere. In just 33 days, as 1924 became 1925, Texas tax clubs held an astonishing 216 gatherings. The clubs “were in the pure image of the Texas Farmers’ Union and the Farmers’ Alliance,” Martin writes. “The participants in the tax clubs, however, were not farmers: They were overwhelmingly bankers.” Indeed, all but 7 percent of conference chairs were bankers, the great majority of them bank presidents. Their pitch was that lowered taxes would encourage productive investments, an idea that resonates with today’s economic and tax debates. (Knowing this kind of backstory makes it less surprising when today’s Heritage Foundation professionals describe their employer as a leading advocate for the poor.)

               

Arnold found his greatest support in the Old South, where he had organized the Southern Tariff Association to promote tariffs over income taxes. Delta plantation owners and their economic peers “worried that federal spending threatened their political power” because broader economic opportunity would “endanger the willingness of the black poor to work for low wages.” Martin notes that Mississippi had been among the first states to ratify the 16th Amendment, because Mississippians had so little income to tax. But by 1940, the legislature voted to repeal it—even though fewer than 300 Mississippi residents owed enough income tax to expect any income tax cut.

Martin also shows how adept tax opponents have been at using sleight-of-hand arguments. Back in the 1920s, for example, the brothers Pierre and Irénée DuPont attacked the federal enforcement of Prohibition—“a particularly sore point to pious rich.” In the elite view, the federal government unfairly made up for its lost revenue with higher income taxes, “thereby letting the sinners off scot-free while shifting the costs of their sins onto the rich.” But one rich people’s organization found that its appeal met greater success after abandoning the narrow argument that legalizing and taxing liquor sales would ease the burden on the teetotaling wealthy. The new idea was that ending Prohibition would “provide additional revenue to state and federal governments in crisis.” Thus it was that in the early days of the Great Depression, ending Prohibition gained early favor with lawmakers “in states that were increasingly stressed to pay for basic public services.” Pennsylvania led the way in stopping the funding of enforcement. This kind of shift in rhetoric remains relevant today as congressional Republicans push a 25 percent cut in the IRS budget just as more states ponder legalizing—and taxing—the sale of marijuana.

In time, J.A. Arnold lost favor, partly because he prospered even as his movements faltered. But others came along eager to pick up the slack. Edward Aloysius Rumely, a onetime Progressive turned right-winger by Franklin Roosevelt’s 1936 effort to pack the Supreme Court, and a specialist in direct-mail publicity, “would do the most to transform the movement to untax the rich.” Among Rumely’s successors was Connecticut manufacturer Vivien Kellems—a veteran of the fight for women’s suffrage (the civil--disobedience techniques of which she brought into the anti-tax movement) and a standout in the man’s world of 1930s big business who grew much richer thanks to New Deal and World War II government contracts. Still, she compared IRS agents to Hitler’s enforcers. She insisted that small business was “marked for liquidation,” and in one jeremiad warned that “we are one step removed in this country from the Firing Squad and the Concentration camp.” In a 1948 Los Angeles speech, Kellems announced she would cease withholding income taxes from her employees’ checks. The gesture made her a hero to this day to the virulent, sometimes violent cliques that claim the paying of taxes is voluntary and the federal government is a criminal organization.

Martin also examines more sophisticated anti-tax advocates, like Robert Dresser, a New England textile heir, Harvard-educated lawyer, and union opponent who led the way in what Martin calls “clever policy crafting,” an essential feature of rich people’s movements. Dresser’s work toward a constitutional amendment limiting the federal government’s power to tax helped make the once-fringe cause “increasingly palatable” to mainstream conservatives starting in the 1940s, almost four decades before Californians enacted Proposition 13.

In his dotage, at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, Dresser embraced John Bircher conspiracy theories. It’s but one thread in a taut fabric Martin weaves from many connections among Southern racists, anti-communist crazies, corporate welfare queens, and rich people’s de-tax movements. Another thread is the little-known story of the young organizer Grover Norquist’s many trips in the early 1980s to Angola. He went there to learn tactics from the Marxist turned anti-communist revolutionary Jonas Savimbi, who had the support of many of the right-wingers around President Ronald Reagan; Norquist would soon put what he learned into practice as he transformed a new organization, Americans for Tax Reform, from a “short-term lobbying project” into the vehicle for a “war of attrition against the American welfare state.”

A recurring dream of the century-long effort Martin chronicles is getting the top tax rate down to 25 percent or even 15 percent. Reagan got tantalizingly close with the 28 percent top rate in the 1986 Tax Reform Act, enacted with bipartisan support. George W. Bush won the number that matters most—long-term capital gains and dividend rates down to 15 percent—from 2003 to 2012. More than 30 percent of America’s capital gains now flow to the fewer than 8,300 households with annual incomes of $10 million or more, while the nearly two-thirds of U.S. households making less than $50,000 collect just 3 percent.

Martin’s title is an homage to Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward’s seminal 1978 book Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. Piven and Cloward showed that the poor get heard when they stop being docile. Or, as Frederick Douglass put it, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” Mass demonstrations, strikes, and even riots scare the oligarchs into paying attention.

The problem with disruption as a strategy is that the wealthy, having smart advisers and plenty of money, co-opt threatening movements. We can see this in the 1971 memo that Lewis Powell, later a Supreme Court justice, wrote for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as it tried to understand and undercut the burgeoning consumer movement. Powell’s proposed strategies included creating subtly anti-consumer institutions modeled superficially on the work of consumer advocates like Ralph Nader, adding a patina of concern for public interest to obscure their agenda.

In the case of the modern Tea Party, we now know that a good chunk of the money to stage events came from the Koch brothers, inheritors of wealth who are no strangers to the benefits of government-granted corporate monopolies as well as to laws that let them avoid, defer, and even escape taxes. That the mainstream news gives so little attention to the Kochs’ behind-the-scenes manipulations is a tragedy. The Tea Party’s very name sows confusion: The original 1773 Tea Party opposed tax favors for the wealthy owners of the British East India Company. Contrast this with modern Tea Party demands that a congress and president—elected by the people—lack legitimacy and must reduce taxes, especially on business and owners of capital.

Rich people’s movements waxed and waned over much of the last century, going dormant only to reappear when roused by a new policy threat. They have yet to achieve many of their goals. But thanks to decades of well-funded organizing, favorable laws in Washington and state capitals that passed while few noticed, and now the dark-money opportunities of Citizens United, they are here to stay. Martin’s book is useful in understanding a forgotten history that preceded the seemingly sudden assaults on consumers, unions, and workers by legislatures and governors in Michigan, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Texas, Wisconsin, and other states where extremists are currently in power. While the actions are indeed abrupt, contemptuous, and cruel, they grow from a neglected but by now lengthy tradition of lessons the rich and their advisers learned from failures past.

The Republican De-Evolution: From Political Party to Cult

Forward Progressives

The Republican De-Evolution: From Political Party to Cult

April 24, 2013 By Allen Clifton

For a while now, I’ve called the Republican Party a cult more often than I have a political party or ideology.  The emergence of the Tea Party only solidified this belief.
Scientific research (not that science means much of anything to many Republicans) distinguishes 5 characteristics of a cult:

1. People are put in physical or emotionally distressing situations
2. Their problems are reduced to one simple explanation, which is repeatedly emphasized
3. They receive what seems to be unconditional love, acceptance and attention from a charismatic leader or group
4. They get a new identity based on the group
5. They are subject to entrapment and their access to information is severely controlled

I’ll tackle these one by one.

1)  Any rational person who’s subjected themselves to a decent amount of right-wing media (I have, it comes with the job) would find it hard to deny that these individuals often thrive on fear, paranoia and anger.  Anyone who has ever objectively watched Fox News, listened to Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh, has probably lost count of the references to apocalyptic destruction of our country even in just one broadcast.  Even after the death of Osama Bin Ladin, something that should have been celebrated by every American, Fox News perpetuated the idea that President Obama was someone who proved that he has no issues going into a country without authorization, to kill whoever he wants—whenever he wants.  Really?  You take what should be an apolitical event and turn it into a means at which to paint Obama as some kind of tyrant who will stop at nothing to kill whoever he wants.  It was simply ridiculous.

Even long after the “death panel” myth has been soundly debunked, many Republican still fear “death panels” in the Affordable Care Act.  They’ve been conditioned to believe Obama is some kind of gay rights supporting, foreign-born, radical Muslim socialist set on destroying “traditional American values,” yet can’t pinpoint a time when we had those—for everyone.  Hell, they can’t even comprehend that for someone to be a socialist, a radical Muslim and support homosexuality is nearly an endless line of contradictions that no one person could ever singularly encompass.

They’re told by most of their media sources to be afraid.  These bad men are out to bankrupt your grandchildren, create panels deciding who lives and dies, and turn this country into some socialistic style of governing.  You can’t constantly be bombarded with this kind of intensely negative and hate filled information and not come out emotionally compromised.

2)  I’ve always said Republicans are all about simple thoughts and vanilla ideas, I call it bumper sticker politics.  They create catch phrases like “Obamacare” or “job creators” because it’s easier to peddle to their followers.  Their party is essentially based on 3 main ideas: God, taxes and guns.  It’s simple and easy to repeat.

I always say the liberal strengths and weaknesses are the very same things.  Our ability to be diverse and think differently, while still fundamentally agreeing upon an issue, makes liberals more well-rounded.  On the contrast, that same diverse nature makes us seem weaker and far less organized.  Republicans aren’t this way.  If Fox News or other right-wing media sources push an idea, I’ll almost instantly see Republicans repeating those same exact ideas—practically verbatim.

No matter their argument, be it about taxes, Obama, terrorism, the Constitution—whatever the right-wing media tells them to believe, they will.  Then they’ll repeat them over and over, indoctrinating their audience until it becomes second nature to repeat the exact same response anytime they’re faced with that issue from the opposing side.  Want proof?  Ask a random Republican the real name of “Obamacare.”  Heck, Republicans won’t even say rich or wealthy anymore.  If you are rich or wealthy you’re now a “job creator”—even if you don’t create a single job.
3)  While I wouldn’t call it unconditional love, it is shocking whenever I see Fox, Beck or Rush disagree with anything Republicans are doing.  These outlets make Republicans feel good and justified for their hatred and fear of anything and everything not like them.

They perpetuated the notion that, “While the “liberal media” may bash you, and Democrats may call you ignorant—who cares?.  Those people are the enemy, they tell you what you don’t want to hear.  But if you listen to us, the “fair and balanced” media, we’ll spoon feed you exactly what you do want to hear.  You’re not bad Christians!  Sure you may hate homosexuals, call the poor lazy moochers of our welfare system, then cheer executions—but you’re a devout member of your church!  You volunteer in the choir and tithe 10% of your income each month.  You’re a fantastic Christian American—don’t you let anyone tell you otherwise.”

When a gay soldier was booed at a GOP debate, not a single candidate there reprimanded the audience for doing so.  At another debate a hypothetical man without health insurance was presented to Ron Paul in which he concluded let him die, which was cheered by the audience.  This, the party who clings to the Bible and calls themselves the “moral majority.”  But it was alright, because Fox News said it was.  They perpetuate this idea that “While the rest of the world may be against you, we love you and it’s perfectly acceptable to believe the way you do—they are the enemy, we are your friends.”

4)  Republicans are no longer a political party.  Not anymore.  It’s a faith, similar to any religion.  Republicans wear their party as proudly as they do their religion.  Ideology should always be up for adjustment or debate.  Facts should be considered the basis for which you build your political system of beliefs.  For many Republicans, they’re born and bred to be a conservative.  Granted, liberals are this way in a lot of aspects, but liberals are typically more diverse and open to progressive and changing ideas.  Republicans cling to the same talking points they have for decades.

I am a liberal and I think differently, very differently on a lot of occasions, than many of my liberal friends.  Republicans aren’t this way.  In fact, if you’re not essentially 100% committed to their ideas from the top to bottom they have a title for you with a nice little acronym to match.  You’re a R.I.N.O. (Republican In Name Only).  Sure, they’ll accept your vote and support, but do you think gay marriage is acceptable?  Do you think we should raise taxes?  If the answer is yes, then I’m sorry— but you’re not really “one of us.”

Now it’s not just being a Republican, it’s being a “Tea Party Republican”—which means you’re a “true conservative,” not just your average conservative.  You can’t simply have a set of political ideologies, debate them and be diverse.  You have to be the alpha Republican, all or nothing.  Otherwise you’re really not a true Republican.
5) And my favorite.  Access to information is highly controlled.  Currently, the Republican answer to anything is, “If a Fox approved media source didn’t report it, then it is all a part of the liberally bias media, thus a part of the whole conspiracy against the truth.”

I’ve said for a while now, facts have become objective statements.  I can provide links to simple, factual ideas such as Reagan raised taxes 11 times, but most Republicans either don’t care or won’t believe it.  Tell them Reagan (the messiah of “conservatism”) quadrupled our deficit and they aren’t even phased.  Many Republicans, especially Tea Party Republicans, cling to Reagan’s legend as the epitome of Republican values, despite the fact Reagan is closer to being a Democrat than a Tea Party Republican in today’s right-wing world.

It’s the classic case of trying to argue with a conspiracy theorist.  Essentially you can never win the argument as it’s almost an impossible task.  To someone who buys into a conspiracy, all evidence opposed to that conspiracy is just part of the conspiracy.  That’s how Republicans are right now.  Any economic or political evidence showing the obvious hypocritical and contradicting beliefs they currently value is simply the liberal media trying to push their agenda.

Suddenly global warming is a hoax, homosexuality is a choice, green energy is bad because it requires about 1/1000th the fossil fuels we use today (it still needs oil for lubrication—that one always makes me laugh), Reagan never raised taxes, etc..
Honestly, I could go on and on about the ridiculous statements I’ve heard Republicans make, simply because Fox News and their buddies decided to push that particular agenda.

Now I know this doesn’t include “all Republicans”.  Nor am I saying Republicans are bad people.  But to say it’s a simple political ideology now days is simply not true.  The dogma of “Republican” has turned into a full-fledged cult following.

The next time you talk politics with a Republican ask them to provide you with an example of a strong economic country where the government is weak, taxes are low, and the welfare of the country’s economic future is put into the hands of the rich and powerful—just one historical example.  I already know their answer because there isn’t one.  In fact, the closest resemblance to any nation that has a weak government,  little or no taxes and the powerful are left to do what they wish are Third World countries like Somalia.  That still doesn’t change the fact they believe in the ideology that supports this style of governing.

Or just simply ask them not to tell you what they believe, but provide examples of where it’s worked.  Republicans have mastered the art of repeating their talking points and political rhetoric, but when you ask them to provide actual information on where their ideology has worked, they typically come up lacking any evidence to support their argument.

Ask them not to tell you why you’re wrong, but to prove to you why they’re right.  It can’t be done.

Ryan, Rand, and the Political Cult of the Right

DAILY KOS 

Mon Aug 13, 2012 at 02:16 AM PDT

Ryan, Rand, and the Political Cult of the Right

by ignatzmouse

       
  

Randism is a cult, the political equal of Marxism. Cults and ideologies always begin from a naming of the primary center of reality. This center then becomes the prescription for every ill, every wrong, every modern failing, every Utopian hope, and structures every sphere surrounding its heartbeat from the walk of one's own life to the will of government. Religious ideologies name this center as God (as proxy for the Church hierarchy), Clan ideologies name the center as one's heredity and are closely related to Nationalist ideologies who name the center as the state and its dictatorial head, Marxist and communist ideologies name the center as the collective organism, and Rand simply took Marx's center of the collective organism and shifted it to the singular (self-centered) organism.

This cult-like prescription of the renamed center is present in the spread of Randism, but there is something yet more troublesome in the context of its 'populist' rise on the Right. Paul Ryan's version of Rand's ideology emerges in the context of America's transition to a multi-ethnic society. This is important to note for it lays bare the confounding problem how a populist movement could proliferate whose end result is seemingly counter to the interests of the commoners. A good portion of White America fears the change brought about to their familiar way by the new multi-ethnic community. They fear this just as they feared integration in the 60's and school desegregation in the 70's and the ongoing influx of minorities into their suburbs.

Some of us see pluralism as the fulfillment of America's promise. Others, however, see it as its demise. Pluralism threatens their perceived structure and invades their comfort zone. Randism to them is a way to 'stick it' to the rising pluralism -- to those whom they deem as inferior, as slackers living off government programs, those who are now taking over their neighborhoods and the reins of politics, changing America. Randism offers a way to pull out the ladder from their upward mobility. It comes in a time that 'minority' babies in the United States outnumbered white babies for the first time. That's the context, the racial fear that provides the identity for this Tea Party brand of 'Objectivists.' And, it is happening at the same time that these very same 'patriots' are destroying the anathema of affirmative action and erecting electrified border fences.

The gutting of all meaningful social programs is the New Right's way of making their stand, drawing the line, joining the border patrol, and taking on 'the others.' It reminds me of the last, reactionary years of Apartheid as the power structure tried desperately to cling to the final remnants of their power. 'If we're on the way out, we're going to tear it down for you.' It does not matter that these same people depend upon so many of the programs they seek to abolish to maintain their middle class standard of living. It does not matter that their parents depend upon Medicare and Social Security to survive just above poverty level. There is a cognitive disconnect born out of underlying racial fear to which they have hitched their wagons and assimilated as a group identity. The cult of Randism has wedded the cult of the clan and the prescription has been handed down.

This is why you hear the right wing pundits on talk radio and Fox News and in editorial pieces laud the virtues of Rand on one hand and slip into racial slurs and stereotyping on the other. The two are part of the same meme. It would not surprise me at all if this were an actual strategy formed within the Right Wing think tanks to cultivate the dumb white masses to provide what their backing plutocracy could never expect, populist allegiance. The infamous "wedge" has been employed to such great effect on these same saps in order to corral them toward the hidden causes behind the front causes they thought they owned.

This populist Randism, however, is even more subtle, more insidious, because it is touted as "values" and "work ethic" and "patriotism" even though it is nothing more than the unstated throttle of base racism. The clue that this is indeed a political manipulation rather than ideological or even philosophical organic chemistry is that Rand's individualism, the naming of the self as 'the' center, runs absolutely counter to the idea of a 'populist' movement, a movement of the masses.

Ayn Rand herself despised these movements and these easily led people referring to Libertarians as "monstrous," "disgusting," and "scum." In Rand's own words, “All kinds of people today call themselves ‘libertarians,’ especially something calling itself the New Right... I could deal with a Marxist with a greater chance of reaching some kind of understanding, and with much greater respect.”

        Ayn Rand, The Moratorium on Brains, 1971

Don't tell this to any Tea Partier or vague Libertarian caught in the clutches. They won't hear it because they are something else, some new brew drunk on precepts kept just beyond their wits end, guided by racial resentment that they dare not name in mixed company or social media, and set out to burn down the community of America in a race riot orchestrated by those who want to divvy up the ruins. If I am right, Mitt Romney's seeming gaffe in introducing Paul Ryan as "the next president of the United States" is not so much a gaffe as it is a Freudian slip. It says that the shackles put on the recovery by Republicans during Obama's first four years are to pale to the unabashed arson they intend during Obama's next four years -- for it is the very notion of pluralism to which they are setting fire and from whose ashes they will have positioned a prescription.

Originally posted to ignatzmouse on Mon Aug 13, 2012 at 02:16 AM PDT.

Also republished by Community Spotlight.

Tags

• Ayn Rand
• Libertarians
• Mitt Romney
• Paul Ryan
• Plutocracy
• Populism
• Racism
• Rescued

Libertarian Writings that Read Like Comic Books

  Tea Party and the Right  

AlterNet / By Paul Buchheit

Libertarian Writings that Read Like Comic Books

Robert Reich recently noted that people without arguments often resort to personal attacks. They also resort to pleasant-sounding nonsense.

 

 

Photo Credit: Albert H. Teich / Shutterstock.com

September 15, 2013  |  

 

Free-market libertarians go to outrageous exremes to convince themselves and others of the infallibility of the market. Even when opposing evidence smacks them in the face, they conjure up sound bites that seem vaguely convincing but are in reality meaningless. Here are some examples.

1. A Free Market is Good for Everyone.

Milton Friedman was a magician with words, making reality disappear: "There is no alternative way so far discovered of improving the lot of the ordinary people [than] the free-enterprise system...The free market system distributes the fruits of economic progress among all people."

The Cato Institute added their own banality: "Free markets create a future promoting integrity and trust."

2. The Market Works. It Just Doesn't Feel Like It.

The Wall Street Journal,the Heritage Foundation, and The Economist have teamed up to try to convince us all is well. The Wall Street Journal exclaims, "Middle-class Americans have more buying power than ever before." Perhaps the Journal staff should compare notes. Their own writer tells us that "the middle class...has shrunk considerably over the past few decades."

The Heritage Foundation contends that "In reality, the living conditions of poor Americans have shown significant improvement over time." Heritage may equate living conditions with TV sets and window air conditioners, but for the rest of us many studies show the relationship between poverty and ill health -- chronic diseases, depression, and a slew of other physical and emotional maladies.

Finally, The Economist states: Before the 1960s...most blacks were poor, few served in public office and almost none were to be found flourishing at the nation's top universities, corporations, law firms and banks. None of that is true today. But much of that IS true today. According to Pew Research, median wealth for black families in 2009 was $5,677, compared to $113,149 for white families. Meanwhile, Blacks and Hispanics, with 29% of the population, are severely under-represented in both the corporate boardroom and higher education.

3. Why Can't You Be a Successful Individual Like Me?

The Wall Street Journal published a remarkably self-congratulatory article that is, once again, short on facts and high on emotion. "The American dream," trumpets the author, "has traditionally been one of individual success that is rewarded and admired." Perhaps he's not aware of the recent Executive Excess study that found "Nearly 40 percent of the CEOs on the highest-paid lists from the past 20 years were eventually 'bailed out, booted, or busted.'" And how about that "individual success" part? The fact is that the richest 10% own almost 90 percent of stocks excluding pensions, and the stock market has historically risen three times faster than the GDP itself. Success comes easy when you can make money just by going to bed at night.

The author goes on to announce, "In Silicon Valley, the rich commonly reinvest their wealth close to home...I have reinvested most of my net worth in 8.5% of the shares of my own company." Good for him. But Over 90% of the assetsowned by millionaires are held in a combination of low-risk investments (bonds and cash), the stock market, and real estate. Business startup costs made up less than 1% of the investments of high net worth individuals in North America in 2011.

Perhaps, instead, they're building businesses on their own? No. Only 3 percent of the CEOs, upper management, and financial professionals were entrepreneurs in 2005, even though they made up about 60 percent of the richest .1% of Americans. A recent study found that less than 1 percent of all entrepreneurs came from very rich or very poor backgrounds. They come from the middle class.

4. If You're Not a Successful Individual, You Must Be Lazy.

The Cato Institute claimed that "Welfare currently pays more than a minimum-wage job in 35 states, even after accounting for the Earned Income Tax Credit, and in 13 states it pays more than $15 per hour."

Both the Economic Policy Institute and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities discredit the claim, noting that, contrary to Cato's implications, hardly any families receive multiple benefits at the same time. Furthermore, the benefits do not replace work. Many employed families are simply not making enough to survive. Over 83 percent of all benefits going to low-income people are for the elderly, the disabled, or working households.

5. If I Accomplish Everything on My Own, Why Should I Pay Taxes?

Using their pet buzzwords 'capital' and 'mobility,' the Wall Street Journal came to the roundabout conclusion that a lower capital gains tax rate would end up causing higher-income taxpayers to pay more taxes. The logic is too elusive to explain here.

The Journal also attacks the Financial Transaction Tax, calling it a "sin tax" that will "punish sinners" to raise revenue for the U.S. Treasury. Never mind that the current sales tax on financial transactions is ZERO.

Robert Reich recently noted that people without arguments often resort to personal attacks. They also resort to pleasant-sounding nonsense.

Paul Buchheit is a college teacher, a writer for progressive publications, and the founder and developer of social justice and educational websites (UsAgainstGreed.org, PayUpNow.org, RappingHistory.org).

10 False Claims Made by Libertarians: Why I am Not a Libertarian

Public Discourse

Why I am Not a Libertarian

by  Nathan Schlueter
within Economics, Politics

March 26th, 2012

Libertarianism and conservatism are often lumped together, but there are fundamental differences between the two philosophies that make them incompatible.

The contemporary Tea Party Movement, like its revolutionary ancestor, looks to principles for guidance. Yet an old but active fault line runs just beneath the surface of the movement that has the potential to cause a fatal rupture. Tea Partiers simultaneously promote both a conservatism based upon the principles of the American founding and a libertarianism based on individualism, but the two are ultimately incompatible.

Libertarians are good at explaining why the market works and why government fails, and they have made important policy initiatives in areas such as school choice. On the other hand, they actively oppose laws prohibiting obscenity, protecting unborn children, promoting marriage, limiting immigration, and securing American citizens against terrorists. These positions flow from core principles that have more in common with modern liberalism than with the American founding, and which threaten to erode our constitutional order even further.

The attraction of libertarianism is also its main defect: it offers neat solutions to complex problems. Unfortunately, reality is far more complex than libertarians acknowledge. Only conservatism offers principles adequate to that reality. Consider ten claims libertarians often make:

1. “The Founders of the American political order were libertarian.” Although the American Founders believed in limited government, they were not libertarian. The Constitution was designed for a federal system of government, specifying and limiting national powers and leaving to the states the exercise of their customary powers to protect the health, safety, morals, and welfare of their citizens. None of the American founders challenged these customary state powers, nor did they attempt to repeal them. Even on its own terms, the Constitution provides for powers that many libertarians would object to, such as establishing post offices, granting patents, regulating commerce among the states, and suspending the writ of habeas corpus.

2. “Conservatism fears new ideas because it has no distinctive principles of its own to oppose them.” This claim, made by F.A. Hayek, is simply false as applied to American conservatism (as Hayek himself knew). American conservatism seeks to conserve the principles of justice that lie at the root of the American political order, what might be called Natural Law Liberalism. These principles, enunciated in the Declaration of Independence, are rooted in nature, which fixes the boundaries to all authority. They include “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God”; “self-evident” truths such as “all men are Created equal” and “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”; and a clear statement of the end of government, to “secure” rights and to “effect [the] Safety and Happiness” of the governed.

3. “Only individuals exist, therefore there is no such thing as a ‘common good.’” The statement reflects the corrosive nominalism that Richard Weaver decried in Ideas Have Consequences, and which fatally undercuts the principled limits to coercive authority identified above. Every human association, whether a marriage, business partnership, or sports team, has a common good, or why would it exist?

Common goods are not substantial entities standing over and against individual persons; they are the good of individual persons. But this does not mean common goods are always divisible into individual shares, like a cake. An orchestra, a marriage, an army cannot be divided without being destroyed. Within such associations individual persons exist as bandmates, spouses, and soldiers.

The common good of the political association consists in the ensemble of conditions in which persons and associations can more easily flourish. These are nicely summarized in the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States: “to . . . establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”

4. “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.” The “harm principle,” first formulated by J.S. Mill, is a moral claim. It cannot be derived from moral skepticism without committing a self-referential fallacy: The argument, “We don’t know what is right or wrong, therefore it is wrong to do x,” is obviously invalid.

As a moral claim, the harm principle is not neutral with respect to competing conceptions of the good. Underlying it is the conviction that the good for human beings is to live according to one’s own conception of what is good, and to live in a society in which that freedom is protected. For the sake of this conception of the good, it requires the repeal of legislation enacted by those with a different conception of the good. It thus deprives them of their right to choose and live according to their own conception of the good. In effect, libertarians wish to compel other persons with whom they disagree to live in a society that these others find, often with very good reason, to be hostile to human flourishing.

Further, the harm principle is neither self-evident nor demonstrably true. It certainly cannot apply to children and mental incompetents, as Mill himself knew, and this concession significantly undermines the principle.

The greatest objection, however, is the narrow construction Mill gives to it. For him, as for other libertarians, the principle only applies to bodily harm. But why deny the existence of moral harm? If it is true that some actions are intrinsically self-destructive or self-corrupting, then it is also true that encouraging such actions can cause harm to others. Prostitutes, panders, pushers, and pimps all profit from the moral corruption of others. Why should society be forced to treat these actions with indifference because of a questionable moral claim like the harm principle?

5. “Conscription is Slavery, and Taxation is Robbery.” This is Murray Rothbard’s succinct summary of the anarcho-libertarian objection to politics. Anarcho-libertarians are opposed to conscription and taxation on principle. What gives people calling themselves “the state,” they ask, the moral right to do that which, if done by “private” persons, everyone would call criminal? (Rothbard, consistent to the point of absurdity, would even prevent parents from restraining their run-away toddlers.) Because non-anarchist libertarians also regard all coercion as evil, this objection presents some difficulty for them.

Conservatives do not regard coercion as evil, simpliciter. Some limits liberate. Human beings enter the world utterly dependent, and they require for their security and development the authoritative and sometimes coercive direction of parents, teachers, police, soldiers, and judges. There are many subtle threads of coercion, conservatives argue, that make social cooperation possible.

Outside the bounds set by natural right, however, coercion is tyranny. It has been the greatest achievement of Western civilization to recognize the basic human needs, interests, and inclinations that make coercive associations necessary, to carve out their rightful scope and limits, and to bring them under the discipline of reason and the rule of law. Civilization depends upon citizens (cives), members of a political association (civitas) who understand and are grateful for the gift of free government, attached to its principles, and prepared to defend it against all threats, including free riders who would exploit the system for their own private advantage. Libertarians often treat this difficult achievement like mere scaffolding that can now be kicked down for the sake of a utopian vision that has never existed and never will.

6. Virtue cannot be coerced, therefore government should not legislate morality. Coercive law cannot make people virtuous. But it can assist or thwart individuals in making themselves virtuous. Law is both coercive and expressive. Not only does it shape behavior by attaching to it penalties or rewards; it also helps shape attitudes, understandings, and character. Libertarians who doubt this point can examine the difference in attitudes toward racial discrimination in America before and after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or the availability of pornographic materials before and after Roth v. United States (1957), or the stability of marriage before and after the introduction of no-fault divorce laws in the 1970s. The law, both by prohibition and by silence, is a powerful signal of acceptable behavior, and thus a powerful influence on character. When the behavior in question involves moral norms that are consequential for the rest of society, it is a proper object of law.

This is not to say that the law must prohibit every vice or mandate every virtue, as libertarians often suggest. Aristotle, Aquinas, the Declaration itself all make clear that “prudence will dictate” whether the costs outweigh the benefits in concrete circumstances (e.g., difficulty of enforcement; more pressing needs with scarce resources; the danger of encouraging underground crime, etc.). But this is prudence in the service of principle, not mere pragmatism.

7. Government should not interfere in the free market. Because they oppose commerce in things that are intrinsically immoral and harmful, such as hard drugs, prostitution, or obscene materials, conservatives are accused by libertarians of opposing the free market. This is false. Conservatives value the free market as much as libertarians, as a means for mutually beneficial exchanges, as an occasion for the exercise of virtues such as creativity, cooperation, industry, honesty, and thrift, and as an indispensable source of information (through the pricing mechanism) for individuals on the best use of resources.

But conservatives oppose the “total market,” in which all human associations, such as families and churches, are falsely remade in the image of ordinary contracts, and in which all voluntary (short of force or fraud) contracts between consenting adults are enforced by law. In the libertarian universe there are no citizens, only consumers.

For conservatives, private property and the free market are important institutions for human flourishing, but their value and success critically depend upon non-market institutions such as the family and the political association, as well as a moral and cultural milieu favorable to honesty, trust, industry, and other important virtues. When the use of private property and market exchanges have spillover effects that adversely effect these other institutions and individuals, they are subject to reasonable limits by law. This is the understanding of law and morality that lies behind the common law, was embraced by the states after the American Revolution, and although under steady assault by modern liberals and libertarians, continues in America to this day.

8. The only alternative to libertarianism is totalitarianism. This is a false dilemma. Between the fantasies of libertarianism and totalitarianism is the wide spectrum of governments that have actually existed through most of human history. The false dilemma is often associated with the slippery slope fallacy: If people are given the power to coerce in one area, they will eventually coerce in all areas. Libertarians rarely give the cause or reason why this must be true, and conservatives deny that it is true.

Conservatives recognize the dangers of moral fanaticism, but they insist, with historical evidence to back them up, that the remedy is not to facilitate the debauchery of society by eliminating the props to good moral character, but to reinforce and support those props.

9. Libertarianism is based upon a realistic understanding of human nature. Libertarians accuse conservatives of being utopian or naïve about human nature. Self-regarding actions are sufficient for producing a free and prosperous society, they argue. Moreover, power by its very nature corrupts human beings and therefore should be narrowly circumscribed and vigilantly watched.

Conservatives reply that it is the libertarians who are utopian for failing to give proper weight to the full range of human motives, and to the exigencies of a free society and limited government. They concur with James Madison’s observation in Federalist No. 55: “As there is a degree of depravity in mankind, which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust: so there are other qualities in human nature, which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these [latter] qualities in a higher degree than any other form.”

Public virtue alone is not sufficient to secure limited government, but it is foolish to think that it can be dispensed with altogether. If the despotism of George III caused the American Revolution, the virtue of George Washington was necessary to conclude it. “The aim of every political constitution,” Madison writes in Federalist No. 57, is “first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust.” Here, from the “Father of the Constitution,” is a sober constitutional principle based upon a true realism.

10. “Freedom works.” A frequent refrain of Hayek, but what does it mean? Weapons also “work,” though not necessarily for good. Freedom cannot be evaluated apart from the ends that it serves. John Winthrop, in a passage Tocqueville called “this beautiful definition of freedom,” once said:

There is a liberty of corrupt nature, which is effected by men and beasts, to do what they list; and this liberty is inconsistent with authority, impatient of all restraint; by this liberty, [we are all inferior]; 'tis the grand enemy of truth and peace … But there is a civil, a moral, a federal liberty, which is the proper end and object of authority; it is a liberty for that only which is just and good; for this liberty you are to stand with the hazard of your very lives.

Stand the first Tea Partiers did when their true liberty was threatened, and stand we must if it is to be preserved.

Nathan Schlueter is a visiting fellow in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. He is associate professor of philosophy at Hillsdale College. This piece is adapted from a book manuscript, co-authored with Nikolai Wenzel, on the Foundations of the Libertarian-Conservative Debate. Tomorrow Wenzel will defend libertarianism here on Public Discourse.
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The 1 percent played Tea Party for suckers

SALON

Saturday, Sep 7, 2013 4:00 PM UTC

The 1 percent played Tea Party for suckers

When the super-rich feel threatened, they foment grass-roots uprising on their behalf. Here's why it always works

 
By Isaac William Martin

Topics: Books, Tea Party, Editor's Picks, 1 percent, Koch Brothers, Business News, News, Politics News

 

Excerpted from "Rich People’s Movements: Grass-roots Campaigns to Untax the 1 Percent"  

 

 

On Election Day, November 2, 2010, more than eight million Americans voted for congressional candidates who claimed to represent the Tea Party and its grassroots insurgency against the federal government. Most of the Tea Party candidates won. Their victory marked a sea change in American government. Even before the winners were sworn in, reporters began to refer to the 112th Congress as “the Tea Party Congress.” On the day of the swearing-in, the prominent Tea Party backer David Koch likened the electoral success of the Tea Party to the American Revolution. “It’s probably the best grassroots uprising since 1776 in my opinion,” he said.

The proposals of the new Congress had little in common with the revolutionary slogans of 1776, but many of them would be familiar to activists who had participated in the grassroots uprisings on behalf of the rich in the twentieth century.

On January 5, for example, House Republicans introduced a “balanced budget amendment” that was really a tax limitation amendment—modeled on the precedents that the National Taxpayers Union and the National Tax Limitation Committee had furnished in the 1970s. A flurry of other balanced budget amendment bills followed. On January 23, Senate Republicans, led by Orrin Hatch, introduced a tax limitation/balanced budget amendment bill of their own that was even more restrictive.

The next day, Representatives Steve King (R-IA) and Rob Woodall (R-GA) introduced a one-sentence proposal to repeal the Sixteenth Amendment. On March 15, 2011, Representative Ron Paul (R-TX) introduced the Liberty Amendment, precisely as Willis Stone drafted it in 1956.

And throughout the session, Republicans introduced bill after bill to cut top income tax rates and make estate tax repeal permanent. Many of these tax proposals were regressive enough that they might have made even an Andrew Mellon blush. But they would have warmed the heart of J. A. Arnold if he could have lived to see them. They could almost have been copied from the 1927 program of the American Taxpayers’ League.
 

Thanks in part to proposals like these, the Tea Party Congress is likely to be remembered as one of the most conservative Congresses in American history. Scholars have described this rightward turn in Congress as “historic,” as “a new phase in the extreme ideological polarization of U.S. politics,” and as a “historically unprecedented development.” And they have pointed to unprecedented conditions to explain it. The historic segmentation of media markets is said to have allowed voters to surround themselves in closed and ideologically extreme social worlds. The influx of money into politics following the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 50 (2010), is said to have given an edge to ultraconservative candidates whose policy proposals flatter the pocketbook interests of the very richest Americans.

Some new conditions like these are surely part of the explanation for how such radically inegalitarian tax policy proposals came to dominate the policy agenda of Congress. But these new conditions cannot be the whole story, because so many of the proposals themselves are old: not founding-fathers old, but early-twentieth-century old. They are the harvest of a century of rich people’s movements.

Why Rich People’s Movements Now?

What can we say about the sources of this new radicalism, and how long it is likely to be with us? The answers depend on a proper understanding of the history of rich people’s movements.

Even commentators who recognize that the Tea Party has historical roots might be forgiven for thinking those roots do not go very deep. Social scientists have noticed other movements that share many of the hallmarks of rich people’s movements—including the use of protest tactics by relatively affluent people; the fact that the activists were already fully enfranchised participants in the political system; and the fact that these activists seem to demand the preservation of comfortable consumer lifestyles, rather than the realization of some utopian vision of the future—and have argued that these are distinguishing characteristics of late-twentieth-century social movements. An influential body of scholarship on “new social movements” argues that protest movements took on these characteristics in postindustrial economies of the late twentieth century because economic development had made earlier agrarian and industrial class conflicts passé. The rising incomes of even ordinary wage earners made the late-twentieth-century United States into a consumer society. It is small wonder, to this way of thinking, that some protest movements today consist of affluent consumers protesting their taxes, rather than wage earners protesting their poverty. Another body of scholarship argues that the professionalization of social movement organizations in the late twentieth century made possible a mainstreaming of social protest, by taming the more disruptive protesters and by standardizing tactics so that they became easier for ordinary citizens to learn and apply in new contexts. Some scholars have also credited, or blamed, the mass media for the spread of social movements to the middle classes. Television, for example, brought images of the 1960s protest movements to middle-class households around the country, and thereby taught a new style of politics to previously staid suburbanites. All of these scholars describe how the economic and technological transformations of the twentieth century made the social movement repertoire available to ever-more affluent people. It is tempting to see the rich people’s movements of our time as the endpoint of these transformations—the newest new social movement, the capstone on the social movement society, or the last ripple in the widening circle of people who have appropriated and repurposed the political techniques of the poor.

Whatever the uses of theories like these for explaining the emergence of new social movements in the late twentieth century, they would miss the mark in accounting for rich people’s movements, because rich people’s movements are not that new. When the Texas tax clubs under the leadership of J. A. Arnold mobilized for tax cuts in the top brackets, they were not expressing the demands of suburban consumers in a postindustrial economy; they were advocating for the interests of rural bankers in a predominantly agrarian economy. When Edward Rumely and Vivien Kellems first began to commit civil disobedience in protest against the federal income tax, television had not yet brought images of the Civil Rights movement into the homes of millions of Americans. For much of the twentieth century, these movements relied on tactics that were decidedly old-fashioned even for their times. In the 1940s, Rumely used direct mail techniques to bypass existing civic associations and recruit directly, because that was the model that he had learned in the Progressive Party. In the 1950s, Kellems organized through women’s clubs, argued on the basis of constitutional rights, and attempted to inspire imitators through civil disobedience, because those were the techniques she had learned from the fight for woman suffrage. In the 1960s, Willis Stone recruited supporters for the Liberty Amendment through fraternal organizations and veterans’ organizations, because those were the organizations in which he had acquired his own civic education after the First World War. The tactics of all of these activists hearkened to the early decades of the twentieth century because these social movement entrepreneurs acquired their skills and organizing experience in social movement organizations of that era.

Many activists in rich people’s movements know that their movements have deeper roots in the early twentieth century. In particular, they have often portrayed their movements as reactions to the so-called revolution of 1913. The ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment, according to these activists, was a turning point in the history of the United States. It marked the end of limited government and the beginning of a new era of expanding federal power. If any great social change of the twentieth century paved the way for rich people’s movements, according to this story, it was not economic growth or the development of the postindustrial economy or the development of new communications technologies, but the growth of the federal budget; and that development, the story goes, was set in motion by the Sixteenth Amendment.
This activist story also gets the causal dynamics wrong. It is true that rich people’s movements would not have emerged in the absence of federal taxes on income and wealth. But such movements are not inevitable just because the Constitution authorizes progressive taxes. They did not emerge in direct response to the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment. To contemporaries, there was no “revolution of 1913.” It was not until after World War I that the dramatic consequences of the new federal income tax became clear. Nor did these movements grow in lock-step with the long-term expansion of the federal budget.

By comparing the campaigns described in this book, we can see instead that rich people’s movements arose episodically in response to immediate policy threats. The particular policies that provoked protest were heterogeneous. The top statutory tax rates on income and wealth nevertheless give us a crude but serviceable index of policy threats to the rich. By fixing our attention on the timing of new campaigns, the figure illustrates the simple point that activists started these campaigns in the wake of policy threats. It was not heavy taxes that caused protest. It was rapid tax increases on the rich that did.

Two late-twentieth-century campaigns look like exceptions to the rule, but these exceptions are more apparent than real. The campaign to revive a tax limitation amendment in 1978, for example, began at a time when top rates of federal income and estate tax were stable. However, activists launched this campaign at that time in order to capitalize on an influential movement for state and local property tax limitation; and that movement was triggered by policy changes that produced a rapid increase in local property taxes. The revival of a campaign for estate tax repeal in 1993, at a time when estate tax rates had not changed for almost a decade, also looks like an exception to the rule. However, the activists who inaugurated that campaign were responding to a proposed increase in the estate tax, and their movement gained adherents when a previously scheduled expiration of the top tax rate was revoked. Even these campaigns were triggered by policy threats.

History teaches us that policy threats are necessary conditions for the emergence of rich people’s movements. Such threats help to explain not just when people felt aggrieved enough to protest taxes on the rich, but also who felt aggrieved enough to support tax cuts for the rich. In every case, the pool of potential recruits extended well below the top tax brackets. The non-rich sympathizers, however, always had particular reasons to see top tax rates as threatening—from the farm mortgage bankers of 1924 who feared that high tax rates advantaged their competitors, to the married women of 1952 who saw that they were subject to higher marginal tax rates than their husbands, to the upper-middle-income taxpayers of 1978 who saw that inflation could push them into higher income tax brackets. Many people like these campaigned for tax cuts in the top brackets because they believed they were also protecting their own economic security.

These movements took advantage of the structure of political opportunities established by the American constitutional order, which may help to explain why they seem so distinctively American. In Western Europe, affluent people who feared taxes on the rich in the twentieth century sometimes started new political parties. But they rarely used the sort of populist tactics employed in the United States, and they never made the sort of constitutional arguments that characterized the American movement. Perhaps it is unsurprising that the American rich and their allies turned to social movement organizing and interest group lobbying instead of third-party politics; the combination of direct presidential elections, single-member districts, and the winner-takes-all electoral system make it difficult for small political parties to achieve anything in the United States. But there is more to the explanation than that. These political institutions merely create obstacles to founding new political parties. They do not dictate which alternative to party politics will be pursued by threatened people.

Why did policy threats to the rich provoke grassroots movements instead of conventional interest-group lobbying? Given the ease with which many rich people have secured selective tax privileges by back-room lobbying, the choice to pursue universalistic benefits for all rich people by means of public grassroots lobbying campaigns is puzzling. The solution to this puzzle is tradition. The rich and their allies joined grassroots social movement campaigns because that is what they were recruited and taught to do by experienced movement entrepreneurs. Those entrepreneurs were passing on tactical skills and lore that they had learned in other movements. To call this set of political practices a tradition is to say that it is more than merely a recurrent phenomenon. It is to say that similar patterns recur because people learn from and imitate the past.

It may be that all social movements rest on a bedrock of tradition. For rich people’s movements, however, the existence of a social movement tradition was almost certainly indispensable. Short-term causes such as policy threats were necessary, but not sufficient, conditions to explain mobilization. Social movement tactics have a history; they must be passed down in order to become available to particular people at a particular time. It is doubtful whether rich people’s movements would exist at all today if activists did not have a long movement tradition to draw on.

Under What Conditions Do They Win?

The history of rich people’s movements may also tell us about their prospects for victory in the future. Even the wildest optimists in the Tea Party Caucus probably did not expect their proposals to become law, at least as long as the Democratic Party retained the presidency and the majority in the Senate. But the comparison of past rich people’s movements shows that such radical proposals may influence policies even when they are not enacted. Rich people’s movements in the twentieth century made extreme demands that made moderate groups appear comparatively reasonable. Sometimes they also used tactics that threatened public order—for example, by calling on businesses to disobey the Internal Revenue Service, or plausibly threatening to call a constitutional convention that could throw American politics into turmoil—and thereby permitted moderate conservatives to sell their own preferred policies as ways to co-opt an unruly movement and restore order. The Tea Party may have similar effects. Its activists have not won the war against the income tax, nor are they likely to repeal the Sixteenth Amendment. By keeping radical tax proposals on the policy agenda, however, they have positioned a radical flank for battles to come.

The history of rich people’s movements shows that the mobilization of a radical flank can indeed influence the shape of federal tax policy. Influential Republican politicians sometimes felt compelled to propose tax cuts in order to obviate the need for more radical proposals to repeal the Sixteenth Amendment. The Republican chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Daniel Alden Reed of New York, made this argument explicitly to his collegues in 1944. “[T]he movement to limit federal tax rates by constitutional amendment should be noted,” he wrote; “One way to meet this issue is by voluntary Congressional action to establish moderate tax rate levels.” So did the presidential candidate Dwight David Eisenhower in 1952, when he wrote that “a prudent and positive administration should be able to approach the goal which the amendment seeks without the difficulty and dangers involved in the adoption or continuing operation of such an amendment to our Constitution.” There is no evidence that rich people’s movements had any direct influence on legislation under these leaders. But in a handful of other instances, including the Revenue Act of 1926, the ERTA of 1981, and the EGTRRA of 2001, there is evidence—in the timing of the laws, in the geographic distribution of legislators’ support, and in the statements of some members of Congress—that at least some provisions of the law were intended as responses to movement demands. These acts legislated some of the largest tax cuts in American history. So it is that rich people’s movements, through their influence on the ERTA and the EGTRRA, made a small but real contribution to the growing income inequality—the rise of the so-called 1 percent—that is one of the most important social changes of our time.

Sometimes rich people’s movements had an impact, but at other times, the radical rich found themselves isolated and powerless. Their failure to influence policy is most evident in the case of the Sixteenth Amendment repealers. The activists of the American Taxpayers’ Association and the Committee for Constitutional Government tried for two decades to bend federal tax policy toward greater inequality, with no measurable success. Their peak years of mobilization corresponded to the years when federal income tax rates were highest, and yet there is little evidence that they were able to pull top tax rates down. It is possible that these movements may have exercised a kind of diffuse cultural influence, and thereby helped to restrain policymakers by swaying public opinion against progressive taxation; perhaps federal revenues would have grown even more rapidly in the absence of their grassroots pressure. History does not give us a comparison case that would provide the critical test of this hypothesis. But it is clear that, in many instances, their efforts had no immediate impact. Consider the Liberty Amendment campaign. The peak years of the Liberty Amendment Committee coincided with one of the biggest income tax cuts in American history, but the activists could claim no credit for the Kennedy-Johnson tax cuts. Their radical posture condemned them to stand on the sidelines while liberal technocrats cut rich people’s taxes.

Why were these movements sometimes so influential and other times so impotent? The comparison of campaigns shows that geographically dispersed grassroots mobilization made a difference. Activists sometimes had particular influence when they were able to mobilize in congressional swing districts, as when the tax clubs swayed the votes of Representatives Green and Garner in 1926. As the comparisons across states have shown, policy crafting was also crucial for allowing these activists to get tax cuts for the rich on the policy agenda. Some tax cuts for the rich could not get a serious hearing because they were too politically costly. Activists had the greatest impact when they were willing to craft their policy demands to obscure these costs, and package their favored tax cuts with additional policy benefits for new allies.

But to move beyond agenda access to influence legislation required more than clever policy crafting. It also required a critical mass of ideological allies in Congress and the presidency. There were only three presidents in the last century who allied themselves openly with rich people’s movements—Calvin Coolidge, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush—and it was during their administrations that these movements exercised the greatest sway over legislative outcomes. The late-twentieth-century movement for estate tax repeal provides a critical test of presidential influence. Activists managed to get the Death Tax Elimination Act through both houses of Congress, only to have it vetoed by President Bill Clinton in 2000. Estate tax repeal would become law the following year, when President Bush signed the EGTRRA. The support of the president made the difference.

The program of the party that controlled Congress mattered too. Both the Revenue Act of 1926 and the EGTRRA of 2001 passed Congress when it was united under conservative Republican control. The ERTA of 1981 does not quite fit this pattern. It was passed by a divided Congress, with the help of some Democratic votes in the House. Even in this case, however, it was near-unanimous Republican support that made it possible; and congressional Democrats were under extraordinary pressure from a popular Republican president and an assertive grassroots campaign that nearly called a constitutional convention.

Rich people’s movements, in short, may influence policy when their partisan allies have control of elected policymaking bodies. For this reason, the most important legacy of rich people’s movements for American politics may be the capture of the Republican Party by veteran activists of these movements in the twenty-first century. This also may be the most important lesson of rich people’s movements for students of other American social movements. Sociologists know that activists are most likely to win collective benefits from policymakers when those policymakers are their partisan allies. But our most successful theoretical models of social movements persist in treating the party in power as an external condition, like the weather. The lesson that social movement scholars have drawn from their studies is that a movement may be most influential when its grassroots campaign is timed to match a window of political opportunity opened by its partisan allies in office. The most astute activists in twentieth-century rich people’s movements saw the same historical pattern, but they drew a different conclusion. The lesson they drew was not that they should time their actions carefully, or wait for partisan allies to show up and open a window of political opportunity. It was that they should take over a political party.

The Century of Rich People’s Movements

The first century of rich people’s movements is over. Rich people’s movements emerged in response to big wartime increases in the progressive rates of income tax and estate tax; comparable tax increases are almost unimaginable today. The most influential social movement entrepreneurs who led these movements acquired their skills in social movement organizations of the Progressive Era, and those movements and organizations are mostly long gone too. Rich people’s movements have been thoroughly institutionalized and thereby tamed. Many former activists are now well entrenched in the Republican Party and its allied think tanks, and their tactics are now correspondingly oriented toward inside lobbying. Some movement goals remain unrealized only because they are nigh unachievable. The barriers to amending the Constitution are so high, for example, that the Sixteenth Amendment will almost certainly remain unrepealed. For all of these reasons, it is tempting to think that the story told here is at an end.

I think it is much more likely that the story of rich people’s movements is just beginning. The Tea Party may prove to have been a flash in the pan. The long-term trends, however, suggest that something like it will be back. The population of the United States is growing older. The cost of caring for our elders and our sick loved ones continues to rise. For these reasons, the pressure on the federal budget is unlikely to abate. Pressure on the budget means that pressure for tax increases is unlikely to go away; and the threat of tax increases, in turn, is likely to stimulate more protest. Even when a tax increase can be targeted to a narrow segment of the richest Americans, it is likely to provoke a broader backlash, if people lower in the income distribution believe that this policy change signals further tax increases to come. People need not be dupes in order to protest on behalf of others who are richer than they are. The activists and supporters of rich people’s movements were defending their own real interests, as they saw them. A tax increase on the richest 1 percent may be perceived by many upper-middle-income property owners as the first step in a broader assault on property rights. When it is so perceived, we can expect a movement in defense of the rich.

Knowledge of the history of rich people’s movements will not allow us to predict the date when these movements will arise, or who exactly will join them. Such movements do not arrive like clockwork, any more than tax increases do. What we can predict is that some people will be ready to protest when policy threats come. We can also predict that some skilled movement entrepreneurs will be ready to help them organize. The proliferation of professional tax protest organizations since the 1970s has given rise to a generation of skilled movement entrepreneurs whose experience in rich people’s movements equips them for future campaigns. When policy threats make people ready to protest, there will be no shortage of movement entrepreneurs who have the skills and the mailing lists to recruit them.

No doubt the rich people’s movements of the future will also surprise us. They will exploit new technologies and organizing techniques. They will draw on some very old arguments and policy ideas, but they will recombine them and thereby invent some new ones. They will craft their policy proposals to recruit strange-bedfellows coalitions, just as their predecessors did. We can be confident that they will also continue to have all of the characteristics that so baffled observers of rich people’s movements in the twentieth century. They will use the traditional tactics of the poor on behalf of tax cuts for the rich.
They will behave like outsiders, but demand policies designed to benefit people who are consummate insiders in American politics. They will include many protesters who look unusually well heeled, and who will demand collective benefits for people even better off than themselves.

Rich people’s movements have a permanent place in the American political bestiary. As long as one of our great political parties is programmatically allied with the radical rich, it is safe to predict that rich people’s movements will continue to influence public policy in ways that preserve—and perhaps even increase—the extremes of inequality in America.

Reprinted from “Rich People’s Movements” by Isaac William Martin with permission from Oxford University Press USA. Copyright 2013 Oxford University Press USA and published by Oxford University Press USA. (www.oup.com/us). All rights reserved.

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