Progress!
by digby
Matt Yglesias notices a small but important change in the way the plutocrat apologists are presenting their case:
You can tell something’s happening in the economic policy debate when you start reading more things like AEI’s Arthur Brooks explaining that it would simply be unfair to raise taxes on the rich. Harvard economics professor and former Council of Economics Advisor chairman Greg Mankiw has said the same thing. And of course Representative Paul Ryan is both a fan of Brooks and a fan of the works of Ayn Rand. Which is just to say that we used to have a debate in which the left said redistributive taxation might be a good idea and then the right replied that it might sound good, but actually the consequences would be bad. Lower taxes on the rich would lead to more growth and faster increase in incomes.
Now that idea seems to be so unsupportable that the talking point is switched. It’s not that higher taxes on our Galtian Overlords would backfire and make us worse off. It’s just that it would be immoral of us to ask them to pay more taxes even if doing so would, in fact, improve overall human welfare.
Rand did write a whole series of essays on “The Virture of Selfishness” so intellectual wingnuts and certain college freshmen will not find anything to quarrel with in the idea that it’s immoral to ask the wealthy to pay more in taxes. But since that adds up to a few thousand people at most, that leaves the much larger number of conservatives who subscribe to the teaching of a fellow named Jesus Christ. And while they may be influenced by the new breed of capitalist evangelicals, I think most of them still unconsciously accept the teachings of the older Biblical moral system — we are our brother’s keepers and all that rot.
But as Yglesias says, this is good news. It means they know their intellectual flim-flam isn’t working any more.
For more on Rand’s deeply anti-Christian philosophy and how it inspired the deeply selfish Ryan budget, read this epic post at Down With Tyranny.
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