I have a new piece up at the American Spectator criticizing Barack Obama for smearing the ideals of the Ownership Society as “Social Darwinism.” Includes a riff on social solidarity and cooperative market order from my Cato paper.
Will Wilkinson
The Sweet Release of Reason
IMO the fundamental issue here is that the Left views the market only in zero-sum terms — a distributor of wealth, not a creator of wealth.
Using that schema, it actually makes sense to have the .gov take a big hand in distrubution, since the .gov is (ostensibly) the least partisan entity around.
The problem is that thinking of the market in purely zero-sum terms is extremely limited at best and flat-out wrong at worst.
IMO the fundamental issue here is that the Left views the market only in zero-sum terms — a distributor of wealth, not a creator of wealth.
Using that schema, it actually makes sense to have the .gov take a big hand in distrubution, since the .gov is (ostensibly) the least partisan entity around.
The problem is that thinking of the market in purely zero-sum terms is extremely limited at best and flat-out wrong at worst.