Allan H. Meltzer — The United States Of Envy

The conservative response to inequality is envy. Who woulda thunk it?

President Obama has openly encouraged envy of the top one percent of income earners. Reducing the share received by the highest earners to provide revenue for larger transfers to the lowest earners has long been a main objective of his administration. We can all expect this theme to be trumpeted loudly by the mainstream press as the mid-term election approaches: Some of us can have more, the argument goes, if we force others to have less.

Support for the alleged social benefits of setting much higher marginal tax rates on the highest incomes has now been endorsed by the International Monetary Fund, based heavily on research by two French economists named Thomas Piketty and Emanuel Saez. The two worked together on the faculty at MIT, where the current research director of the IMF, Olivier Blanchard, was a professor. Like Piketty and Saez, he is also French. France has, for many years, implemented destructive policies of income redistribution....

Voters who will hear the Obama call for envy and redistribution should ask themselves and others: Would you prefer to live in an America where the market is dynamic and opportunity abounds, or in France, where unemployment is high and tax rates are crushing? Don’t you prefer opportunity to envy?

Human Events

The United States Of Envy

Allan H. Meltzer | Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Allan H. Meltzer University Professor of Political Economy at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University

(h/t Charles Hayden)