Jon Perr — Value Work? Then Tax Capital at the Same Rate as Labor

Republicans have a new talking point. Because the latest analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office forecasts that the Affordable Care Act will give some workers the freedom to work fewer hours or retire early without the fear of losing health insurance, conservatives now regurgitate in unison, Democrats don't "value work."

PERRspectives
Value Work? Then Tax Capital at the Same Rate as Labor
Jon Perr

Should be, if you value work, don't tax work (productive contribution), tax away unearned gain (economic rent).

Corey Robin — Not Even a Bourgeois Freedom: Freedom of Contract in John Roberts’s America

For the free-market right, that’s the end of the discussion: Workers are free. No one’s forcing them to work. If they don’t like a job, they can leave it.

For the socialist left, it’s more complicated. Workers are not in fact free, the left argues, but the source of their unfreedom is not to be found in the usual guise. The most important constraint upon the freedom of contract is not the discrete or formal acts of coercion by power-holders (what political scientists sometimes call the first face of power), which are embodied in law and enforced by the state. Rather, it is systemic inequality and disparities of power between labor and capital....

Corey Robin
Not Even a Bourgeois Freedom: Freedom of Contract in John Roberts’s America

The phrase, "systemic inequality and disparities of power between labor and capital," says it in a nutshell. It's about institutional power, which is masked by the bogus narrative of individualism as the basis of economic liberalism.