Dean Baker — Policy Choices, Not ‘the Market,’ Produce a ‘Small Number of Very Wealthy People’

It is amazing how frequently we hear people asserting that the massive inequality we are now seeing in the United States is the result of an unfettered market. I realize that this is a convenient view for those who are on the upside of things, but it also happens to be nonsense.
The latest nonsense-pusher is Amy Chua, who warns in a New York Times column (2/20/18) about the destructive path the United States is now on, where a disaffected white population takes out its wrath on economic elites and racial minorities. The key part missing from the story is that the disaffected masses really do have a legitimate gripe.
We didn’t have to make patent and copyright monopolies ever longer and stronger, allowing folks like Bill Gates to get incredibly rich. We could have made Amazonpay the same sales tax as their mom-and-pop competitors, which would mean Jeff Bezos would not be incredibly rich. We could subject Wall Street financial transactions to the same sort of sales taxes people pay on shoes and clothes, hugely downsizing the high incomes earned in this sector. And we could have rules of corporate governance that make it easier for shareholders to rein in CEO pay....

Neoliberalism is corporate control of government policy (state capture).

FAIR
Policy Choices, Not ‘the Market,’ Produce a ‘Small Number of Very Wealthy People’
Dean Baker