My quick take is that this sucks, because the more choke points in the policymaking process the better. That said, it probably doesn’t change all that much unless Senate Dems can muster reliable intraparty unanimity. A few things that wouldn’t have passed will, and those could be an important few things, but most final votes won’t be different. The one way this hurts the Dems is that it makes a narrative of GOP obstruction less plausible, and if various things go south by the mid-terms, the Republicans can more plausibly say that all of it’s the other guy’s fault.
Category Archives: Filthy Non-theoretical Politics
Pulped Intentions
The Nation’s Chris Hayes has written a great story illustrating how Washington and environmental policy work together to create wasteful stupidity.
Thanks to an obscure tax provision, the United States government stands to pay out as much as $8 billion this year to the ten largest paper companies. And get this: even though the money comes from a transportation bill whose manifest intent was to reduce dependence on fossil fuel, paper mills are adding diesel fuel to a process that requires none in order to qualify for the tax credit. In other words, we are paying the industry–handsomely–to use more fossil fuel. “Which is,” as a Goldman Sachs report archly noted, the “opposite of what lawmakers likely had in mind when the tax credit was established.”
What happened?! Read the whole thing. It’s a terrific example of unintended consequences. Chris says, “I’ve come to expect that even nobly conceived laws will be manipulated and distorted for private ends. But once in a while I hear a story that gives me the queasy feeling that I’m nowhere near cynical enough.”
Cap and Frayed
Here’s Kevin Drum on what he concedes is the most ambitious cap and trade legislation Democrats can realistically hope for:
First, their [the Waxman-Markey] cap-and-trade program allows a lot of offsets: two billion tons in all, which allows companies to pollute away as long as they “offset” their carbon emissions somewhere else. In theory, this is fine, but in practice it’s an invitation to abuse, substituting purely fictional reductions for real ones. Second, it allocates a portion of the emission credits directly to affected industries instead of auctioning 100% of them. This is yet another invitation to abuse.
It’s possible, of course, that both of these things can be beaten into submission with the proper oversight and regulation. But what are the odds?
[...]
A bill that started out with no offsets and no allocation might eventually end up with offsets and allocation. But what happens to a bill that caves in on these issues right at the start? It gets even worse as it wends its way through the sausage factory, that’s what.
As Ezra says, Markey and Waxman are as good as they come on this stuff, and if they don’t believe that a clean bill stands a chance even as an opening bid, they’re probably right.
Drum is right about those “invitations to abuse,” which is to say, mechanisms that practically gurantee abuse. And Drum’s right that it’s only going to get worse. The “opening bid” comes from some of the most zealous environmental ideologues in Congress. And the sausage factory is about to come online. Yet Drum remains hopeful! We’ll see how he and his comrades feel about what I’ll bet will be a gutted and impotent scheme good for little but corporatist jockeying for government-enforced advantage over competitors. If it turns out that way, will he want to kill it then? The folks who kept telling us that cap and trade and a straight carbon tax are “equivalent” were always full of it. There’s this thing called “politics,” you see, which does not treat them equivalently.
Here’s my column on cap and trade as a spectacular instance of corrupting and unstable political capitalism.
Are We Flirting with Fascism?
Folks are loose with ‘fascism’. The cops are fascists because they’re cops. Bush was a fascist because he blew new life into the military-industrial complex and herded protesters into “free speech zones.” And now, Obama is a fascist for sacking the executive of a private corporation and saying the government will back the warranty for your Yukon Denali. Is this fascist?
Fabio Rojas says no. He says fascists want to control capitalism, “but mainly as a tool for nationalism and clientelism, rather than redistribution.” He goes on:
Instead, we’ve got “quarterback capitalism.” The idea is pretty simple: don’t challenge the major features of capitalism, but opportunistically fix what you can with buy outs, loans, subsidies, and other ad hoc interventions. Reminds me of the great quarterback Randall Cunningham, who could scramble his way out of any mess. The idea behind Bush-Obama policy is that what ever mess you’ve got, you can probably fix with the right hodgepodge of incentives. The Federal government is the nimble quarterback who can get you out of the squeeze.
With regard to GM, Obama didn’t do what the fascists actually did – which was to make everyone dependent on the state so they could engage in militarism. Basically, the current strategy is to do what one can to save the financial and manufacturing infrstructure of United States, but not in ways the challenge the underlying structure. Better regulations for banks; new management for the auto people; a little help for homeowners. For GM, it was pushing out old management in exchange for money, a typical move in the private sector. Whether this is good is certainly for debate, but it certainly isn’t a return to fascism, socialism, or laissez-faire economics.
Sheldon Richman’s Concise Encyclopedia of Economics entry says:
Where socialism sought totalitarian control of a society’s economic processes through direct state operation of the means of production, fascism sought that control indirectly, through domination of nominally private owners. Where socialism nationalized property explicitly, fascism did so implicitly, by requiring owners to use their property in the “national interest”—that is, as the autocratic authority conceived it. (Nevertheless, a few industries were operated by the state.) Where socialism abolished all market relations outright, fascism left the appearance of market relations while planning all economic activities. Where socialism abolished money and prices, fascism controlled the monetary system and set all prices and wages politically. In doing all this, fascism denatured the marketplace. Entrepreneurship was abolished. State ministries, rather than consumers, determined what was produced and under what conditions.
If Sheldon’s right, it’s hard not to see the U.S. moving in a fascist direction. The government is indeed in the business of setting some prices and wages politically, which is troubling. But it’s pretty clear that we’re still pretty fully in the “mixed economy” mode. As Richman writes:
Fascism is to be distinguished from interventionism, or the mixed economy. Interventionism seeks to guide the market process, not eliminate it, as fascism did. Minimum-wage and antitrust laws, though they regulate the free market, are a far cry from multiyear plans from the Ministry of Economics.
Yet I think it’s clear that we are in fact seeing fascism in vitro, though I don’t think that’s anyone’s intention. Nevertheless, we’d better swallow some gunpowder pretty quick. Like Tom Palmer, I find it extremely troubling to see Barack Obama talking like he personally looked over the GM situation and finally made some decisions because that’s obviously his job, to be the decider, and because the managers of private corporations can’t possibly do the right thing. It’s a very, very, very bad precedent. Tom says:
I was so happy to see the back of George W. Bush and his administration, with their disregard for the Constitution, foolish and unnecessary war, attempt to subvert habeas corpus, reckless spending, and overall arrogance and disregard for limits on power. His successor has decided to follow even more carefully the examples set by Benito Mussolini and Vladimir Putin, and has sacked the head of a company. That is a decision for the shareholders of a private firm to make, not for the head of state. What next? Will private firms end up in the hands of friends of the president? Will the White House Chief of Staff serve simultaneously as head of a major state-directed company? Will journalists who criticize the president end up shot in the head in elevators?
I predict that the answer to Tom’s three concluding questions will be “no.” That doesn’t mean they don’t need to be asked. It happens, and it can happen here. Asking these questions helps ensure the answers will be “no”, prepares us to stand up against overweening power. But it ought to make you a bit sick that it has become necessary to say that, no, the President doesn’t run everything. Perhaps we’re getting “quarterback capitalism” and not yet “fascism,” but it’s still pretty troubling to anyone with a liberal bone in his body.
Hello? Excuse Me! Brrrring… Anybody Home?
Anatole Kaletsky today argues at length what I yesterday argued very briefly on Marketplace:
Which brings us to the greatest risk facing the world economy: Mr Obama’s failure to present a credible response to the financial crisis or even to assemble a proper economic policy team. After the British Government’s leaked messages of despair about nobody answering the phone at the US Treasury in the preparations for the G20, everybody is now aware that Mr Obama has nominated only two out of 18 deputy and assistant Treasury secretaries. What is less widely recognised is that this decision-making vacuum reflects a deeply worrying feature of US economic policy.
American politicians simply don’t seem to understand the existential threat that their economy is now facing. Instead of uniting to deal with a national emergency far more threatening to their way of life than the terrorist attacks of 9/11, they have responded by dividing more sharply than ever into hostile partisan camps.
Efforts to revive economic activity and to stabilise the financial system that are clearly indispensable on the basis of any economic analysis, whether Keynesian or monetarist or plain business-sense, have been denounced on the Right for interfering with free markets and on the Left for feather-bedding bankers. Instead of rallying around in a moment of crisis, many Americans are openly expressing their hope that the new President will fail and the economy collapse. Candidates for key Treasury posts have been viciously attacked in the media and Congress for trivial tax and administrative infractions inadvertently committed many years ago or simply for having once worked on Wall Street. As a result, these jobs have become almost impossible to fill.
Mr Obama himself seems to have attached a surprisingly low priority to dealing with the financial crisis. He had, for example, selected key State Department officials, from Hillary Clinton downwards even before his inauguration. He has managed to get dozens of these confirmed by Congress in the past two months and immediately put his personal stamp on US foreign policy. Yet there has been no similar focus on creating a properly functioning economic team or launching a coherent new response to the financial crisis.
The lack of urgency, of focus and of national unity in America’s response to the financial crisis is the most surprising – and most dangerous – threat to our chances of recovery.
Kaletsky’s right that conservatives are being stupidly obstructionist, especially about necessary political appointments. But as time goes on, the inattention of the administration to the truly urgent problem facing the country and the world is flabbergasting. The economic crisis does present a window of political opportunity big enough to drive a truck through, and so it’s easy to understand why Democrats have been gleefully loading up the truck with everything they’ve ever wanted ever. But it’s really the height of irresponsibility when the circumstances demand that efforts be devoted to ensuring the window doesn’t widen to the point that the house collapses on the truck. (What is a truck doing in the house? Can you drive a truck through a window? Where is the truck going? Another house? I can haz Tom Friedman!) If Obama does not luck out (and he is nothing if not lucky) and things get a good deal worse, this early episode of rather terrifying mismanagement will not be forgotten.
Those who think this is a mere partisan talking point and amounts to the idiotic claim that it is not possible to simultaneously walk and chew gum need to back away from their own partisanship and get a little perspective. Also, they should reflect on why Obama, despite his undisputed excellence in gum-chewing, has so far done such an embarrassing job of walking.
False Package Deals
In a speech this morning (via Ezra) Obama apparently said, in response to the idea that he’s trying to do too much at once.:
President Roosevelt didn’t have the luxury of choosing between ending a depression and fighting a war. President Kennedy didn’t have the luxury of choosing between civil rights and sending us to the moon.
WTF? (1) Roosevelt probably prolonged the depression. (2) Fighting WWII was most certainly a choice, and maybe not the best one. (3) Kennedy did nothing much by way of advancing civil rights other than voting against Eisenhower’s 1957 Civil Rights Act. (4) There was no point whatsoever in going to the moon.
Obama wants us to believe that not accepting his package deal of uneccesary programs is a “luxury” we cannot afford, which is even more ridiculous than the historical examples he picked. When it comes to responding to the basis of the actual crisis and repairing the wreckage of the banking system, the adminstration seems neglectful, ineffectual, and has become the butt of jokes. Maybe that has something to do with the incredible audacity of attempting to slam through an entire presidency’s legislative agenda in two months. But I guess we don’t have the luxury of lavishing attention on the things that actually need fixing.
"Never Waste a Good Crisis"
[U.S. Secretary of State Hillary] Clinton told young Europeans at the European Parliament that global economic turmoil provided a fresh opening. “Never waste a good crisis … Don’t waste it when it can have a very positive impact on climate change and energy security,” she said.
Damn you Milton Friedman!
So here’s the “shock doctrine” in action. “Climate change” itself is not actually a crisis that demands immediate action. And in the absence of widespread public demand for action, climate ideologues need a crisis to shove through otherwise unpopular reforms. Of course, imposing massive new taxes (whether implicit or explicit) on energy, and therefore on economic production generally, is a terrible idea during a recession from the depths of which it will take many years to recover. But who cares about restoring the average American’s standard of living? Never waste a good crisis!
On Going Galt
I can’t help but feel that threatening to withdraw from economic production, ala Atlas Shrugged‘s John Galt, is a certain kind of libertarian-conservative’s version of progressives threatening to move to Canada. For my part, I can’t imagine what would make me want to stop working, and each new president makes me want to move to Canada.
Despite my own inclinations, I’m among those who believe that labor supply is pretty sensitive to marginal tax rates, and I have no doubt that increasing the top marginal rate will make it so that some very productive people will quite rationally choose to produce less. But the effect comes from aggregating hundreds of millions of choices about the worth of an extra hour of work, not because the willing efforts of a small handful of productive geniuses are a necessary condition for ongoing economic production (and, therefore, civilization). Maybe vocally “going Galt” as a protest move is a useful way to put a dramatic face on optimal tax theory, but of course that’s not what folks who talk about it have in mind. They have morality in mind. And taxation is a moral issue, a matter of justice, and I’m glad Americans resist the idea that their government is entitlted to consume ever larger portions of their incomes. So I certainly don’t mind if a bunch of people declare they are “going Galt” if it reinforces healthy, deep-seated American norms about the injustice of excessive taxation.
But insofar as this is all about taxes on the wealthy (as the link to Malkin suggests) it’s a bit hard to see tax rates somewhat exceeding the Clinton era’s as a move over some inflection point from the tolerable to the completely outrageous. And of course none of these folks designed an engine that would have created basically free energy (and made global warming a non-issue). In the individual case, “going Galt” smacks of a kind self-aggrandizement in the same way that climate smuggery does. Because, really, your marginal contribution doesn’t matter that much.
By the way, Atlas buffs, the point of Atlas Shrugged is not that you are John Galt. The point is that you are not John Galt. The point is that you are, at your best, Eddie Willers. You’re smart, hardworking, productive, and true. But you’re no creative genius and you take innovation — John Galt — for granted. You don’t even know who he is! And this eventually leaves you weeping on abandoned train tracks.
I think Obama’s policies will be bad for innovation, but not because higher marginal tax rates will lead our best and brightest to retire from the field of endeavor. I’m rather more worried that our best and brightest will follow the incentives and go Robert Stadler. I’m worried that our money, which might otherwise have gone to capitalize real innovation, will be confiscated in order to finance government directed “investment” instead. Our economy can readily absorb a passel of drop-out Willerses (though Eddie never quits!). It’s the misdirected capital embodied by the Stadlers and their Project Xes that really hurts.
Why Obamanomics Will Hurt Innovation
The Manhattan Institute’s Jim Manzi has written a great column lucidly explaining why the economic policies of the Democrats under Obama threaten entrepreneurship, the ultimate source of innovation, productivity enhancement, and economic growth. Here’s his conclusion:
Like the college students who stayed up late to hear Obama’s campaign speeches only to find his first significant action to be a stimulus program that will transfer about $1 trillion from them to the Baby Boomers, Silicon Valley Obama supporters may find themselves in an uncomfortable environment. A government-dominated economic era may not be an auspicious one in which to start companies that threaten big, incumbent corporations with lots of political clout.
The concept of “animal spirits” recognizes that not all economic decisions are made entirely with spreadsheets. Some people start companies because they’re driven by a dream that transcends rational economic calculation. But most successful entrepreneurs are pretty serious about comparing risks with opportunities. Higher tax burdens raise the price of entrepreneurship. When you raise the price of something, then, all else held equal, you usually get less of it. Given that something like 7 million people in the U.S. work in companies that are or were venture-backed, including a majority of the employees in high-growth sectors of the economy like computers and software, this is likely to matter a lot in the long run.
What Policy Can Do for Growth and What Politics Won't
Yglesias’ valiant attempt to show how Obama’s big schemes are all connected by the thread of economic growth works mainly as an illuminating exercise in free association. The thread that in fact holds them together is that there are major constituencies within the Democratic Party that want them. Most of the time, that’s how politics works and Matt often displays a fine appreciation of that fact when it comes to Republican policy initiatives. Anyway, I’d like to comment on this bit of Matt’s post:
[P]erhaps the most important things policy can do to impact the capacity for sustainable growth—i.e., growth that’s not based on asset price bubbles—is to increase the availability of high-quality human capital and the availability and quality of public sector physical capital. Which is to say education and infrastructure.
I agree that human capital and physical infrastructure are crucial to growth. I’m even happy to agree that government investment in education has more than paid for itself over the years in added growth. But I also think the evidence points to the idea that returns to public investment in the status quo system of education have diminished to basically nothing. No Democrat is going to do anything to run afoul of their party’s most powerful client in order to promote the deep structural changes needed in primary education to actually improve the quantity and quality of American human capital. So instead we get free money for college, which is Obama’s way of saying “thank you” to the loyal, powerful bloc of Democrats who make their living pouring valuable human capital into nineteen-year-olds by making them pretend to have read Plato and Beloved.
As for energy infrastructure, we really could use a “smart grid” that allowed for real-time pricing of energy based on demand. (See Lynne Kiesling on the “transactive” potential of the smart grid.) Markets are known to be the best mechanism available for efficiently allocating resources, and putting in place an infrastructure for pricing energy would be good for growth and the environment. Just before the bit quoted above, Matt allows that:
There are a lot of factors behind growth including, of course, old fashioned human ingenuity at coming up with new products to offer and new ways to offer old products.
But Matt evidently thinks policy can’t do much about this. One thing policy can do is to make markets possible, so that there are rewards to ingenuity. That can mean making an illegal market legal, or making a legal market worth investing in by lowering the burden of regulation. Another thing it can do is to restructure intellectual property law to encourage rather than discourage invention. Another thing it can do is not crowd out private investment in innovation, which is the opposite of what Obama plans to do in education, energy, and health care. When I talked to Nobel Prize-winner Edmund Phelps, an expert in failed European attempts to spur growth by subsidizing technological advance and no right-winger, he seemed pretty worried that a lot of new infrastructure spending (much of which will be flat-out unecessary and unproductive) and targeted government spending on “green” technology would in fact adversely affect incentives to innovate. I don’t think he’s wrong to be worried. Matt thinks entrepreneurship is an empty business buzzword, but it is in fact the foundation of economic growth.
I will rejoice the day either Republicans or Democrats find that their interests align with the general good and plump for a serious set of pro-growth initiatives. Until then, I’ll expect the usual constituency service.
Interconnected Crises? Independently Urgent Emergencies? Whatever It Takes!
David Brooks says Obama is trying to do too much at once. (I agree.) Matt Yglesias says, no, because all these “crises” are interconnected, you see. Ezra Klein chimes in:
I’d make the argument on grounds of simple urgency: If a patient has cancer and heart disease, her doctor doesn’t have the luxury of treating only one or the other.
The “stricken with multiple potentially fatal diseases” metaphor has the virtue of not turning on Matt’s weak case for the specific interconnections that would make Obama’s gallimaufry of Democratic desirables seem like some kind of coherent, farseeing package. Back in our salad days, the likes of Matt and Ezra mocked this very metaphor when it was rolled out to compare the immense fiscal imbalance of Social Security to the even immenser imbalance of Medicare because Social Security was just fine, and so didn’t even count as a scratch. Of course, now we have imminently terminal cancer and heart disease and rickets and gout and apparently also Alzheimers.
The Crisis of Conservative Incoherence
Reflecting on Limbaugh’s CPAC bloviations, IOZ offers this treat:
Conservatives are for opportunity, but not equality of outcomes, but we are born equal, but we succeed or fail on our own merits, but conservatives will try to stop you from failing, but if you do, that’s too bad, and we need everyone to succeed as an individual for the country to succeed, except for those who don’t, because it’s their fault, and the fault of the war on poverty, or . . . some such. The Donk is deluded by the allure of technocracy, by the notion of scientific government; the Gopster is a set of cultural phobias, affected regular-guy affinities, and catch phrases. It’s probably appropriate that they draw their inspiration and spokespeople from the ever-more-irrelevant and anachronistic medium of radio.
The Donk complains that the Republicans are crass obstructionists. Would that it were true. The contemporary GOP wears the guise of obstructionism but lacks the wherewithal to oppose effectively. Superjesus Black Reagan rules the airwaves, and the supposed opposition is sequestered away in a chintzy hotel ballroom listening to C-list newsmedia celebrities extemporize around the posthumous legacy of Romulus and Remus Ronald Reagan. If there is anything we need right now, it’s a cranky minority party that reacts with zealous incredulity at the vast outpouring of expenditure and views with innate suspicion the claims of managerial liberalism. Instead we get awkward governors mumbling anathemas at the US Geologic Survey and talk-radio hosts giving recursive stemwinders to the choir. The Donk spent eight years under George Bush getting along by going along, but as polite acquiescence seems to have been bred out of the rightward faction of national politics, they’ll endeavor to continue the trend by creating the most thunderously loud irrelevance the world has ever known.
Perfect.
Also, I believe IOZ deserves a prize for “Superjesus Black Reagan.” Could Mencken have done better?
Shrum's Dream of Obama
Bob Shrum’s newThe Week column nicely portrays how a Democratic stategist would like Obama’s budget to be seen: a Rooseveltian, Reaganesque revolution in American politics that would establishes state control over the energy economy and politically irreversible new entitlements under the guise of “rights”:
Obama’s new America will be very American, a reach for enduring values of equality, opportunity and economic justice. But it will also be very different.
[...]
The big change, however, is that America will not only move from laggard to leader on climate change, Obama is proposing to leave behind the entrenched carbon-based economy and rely on American ingenuity—yes, Newt, financed by your disdained public sector—to create a cleaner, more self-sufficient economy and the “green” jobs of the 21st Century.
[...]
The 60 votes in the Senate will be found—or gotten around. And after 60 years of struggle, health care will finally be a right, not a privilege in America.
[...]
The Pell Grant program, which offers scholarships to poor and middle class students, will no longer be an annual appropriation, subject to cuts; it will be an entitlement on the order of Social Security, with more than $5000 a year guaranteed to every eligible student. In all but name, this establishes a right to higher education.
So, to summarize, the pillars of the Obama revolution are: government control of the (green!) economy, socialized health care, and checks for young voters.
The Obama Budget
Clive Crook’s gloss is right-on:
Take this budget at face value, and when Mr Obama talks about “a new era of responsibility” he does not mean: “We are all in this together.” He means: “The rich are responsible for this mess and it is payback time.” Leftist Democrats are thrilled, and rightly so. The budget has three themes: healthcare reform, public investment and unflinching redistribution. This is indeed a new social contract: we get, they pay.
This is, in fact, one of the reasons I am increasingly optimistic about liberaltarianism. I predict Obama’s unabashed embrace of throwback, dirigiste, soak-the-rich “liberalism” will not prove popular with generally pro-market, well-to-do voters who crossed over for the first time to pull the lever for a Democratic president. Yet the not-very-religious remain repelled by social conservatism all the same. As I’ve said, it doesn’t matter to me whether the Republicans become more liberal on “values” issues or whether Democrats adopt more sensibly market-oriented social and economic policy. Either way, by signaling the desire of contemporary Democrats to move even further left than is feasible in the U.S., Obama draws attention to the unoccupied space in American politics.
Will Coddling the Middle Class Kill Obama's Plans?
Earlier today I was thinking about the same Lane Kenworthy post Matt Yglesias discusses here. The upshot is that if you want to reduce inequality through redistribution, tax progressivity barely helps. You need to take a huge chunk of GDP in taxes in order to finance progressive spending. The more general, sort of obvious point is that if you want to massively increase government spending, the government needs a lot more revenue. But you can take everything from the rich and you still won’t have enough. So you’ve got to massively increase taxation on the middle class. The best way to do this is through a consumption tax. But Obama keeps reinforcing, again and again, that middle-class tax rates won’t rise, as if this is itself a matter of justice. So where’s all the money going to come from to do all these amazing things? Eventually, it’s a huge increase in taxes for the middle class or nothing. This may not be a big political winner.
The progressivity of the American tax system puts big-spending progressives in a bind. They should want a consumption tax with a huge, wide base. The easiest way for government to devour ever-larger chunks of economic output is through the device of a slow series of very small rate increases on a broad base. The smaller the tax base, the more dramatically you have to hike rates in order to significantly increase revenue. But dramatically hiking rates tends to discourage political buy-in from those who must pay. Indeed, it tends to incite heated resistance. Obama did very well with the rich. But that may not last if he hits them as hard as it looks like he’s aiming to. At the very least, pushback from this very powerful bloc of voters will limit his success in raising rates at the top. Perhaps he’s cagily playing a baseline-setting game, and by announcing large increases, he’ll effectively reduce resistance to small ones, which will look good in comparison. But even the large ones leave him massively short. And government spending cannot be debt-financed forever. And he can only inflate so much of it away.
So Yglesias is right (though he doesn’t quite put it this way). Democratic strategists need to be looking at clever ways for the government to take a lot more money away from middle-class families without thereby making the GOP look golden again. Obama’s been behaving as though he’s much less fiscally constrained than he really is. But by catering to the idea that middle-class taxes shouldn’t ever go up, he’s making it even tougher on himself. Unless he’s in the middle of some kind of ten-steps-ahead rope-a-dope wherein reaffirming the middle class’ right to not pay taxes is a way of softening them up to accept huge tax increases, he may be making a mistake.
Here’s what I initially said about Kenworthy’s post about revenues and inequality, when I was writing for Free Exchange.