I’m talking about the Wall Street Journal. Last week, the paper ran an appalling piece by Virginia’s senator-elect James Webb, which blathered away on all the leftist complaints about the rich getting richer, wage stagnation, unfairness and so on. All the talk that supposedly resonated with the worried, ground-down workers of the country. The letters editor let many readers flay Webb’s hide. Here are my favorites:
LETTERS
‘Freedom’ Is America’s Truth, Sen. Webb — ‘Fairness’ Is Subjective
In response to Jim Webb’s Nov. 15 editorial-page essay “American Workers Have a Chance To Be Heard”:
It is unfortunate, albeit not unexpected, that senator-elect Jim Webb makes the common mistake of using income inequality as a gauge of social injustice in this country. In a free market, income inequality is the inevitable result of individual productivity inequality, and of course productivity inequality exists due to variations in natural ability, industriousness, education, risk-aversion and dumb luck. The reason income equality has grown rapidly (although hardly “infinitely,” as Mr. Webb hyperbolically asserts) is that productivity inequality has grown. And the reason productivity inequality has grown is that with the advance of technology and globalization, the impact of a good idea or exceptional performance can be leveraged dozens of times more than it could be even one generation ago. J. K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series, has made more than $200 million for each book she has written. Is that too much? Absolutely not, when one considers the benefits that each book brings to tens of millions of children (and adults) around the globe. But the impact of J.K. Rowling’s creativity and hard work, and the income she has earned from it, would have been perhaps orders of magnitude smaller 30 years ago.
Mr. Webb misses the point that one of the pillars of a free-market economy is that people should be allowed to earn in proportion to their productivity. To use government to do otherwise would be to impede productivity everywhere. In fact, my guess is that in most of the regrettable cases in which income vastly outstrips productivity, government intervention is probably to blame. The news that the three richest counties in the United States are clustered around Washington, D.C., certainly came as no surprise to me this morning.
In any case, a much better gauge of social injustice is consumption inequality. Of what relevance is it that there is large income inequality? Or wealth inequality for that matter? It only matters to the extent that it translates into unequal consumption of the country’s resources, consumption being the true gauge of one’s standard of living. I have not seen studies in this area, but my guess is that we are many times less unequal in our rates of consumption than in our levels of income or wealth.
Eric Meyer
Newton, Mass.
Mr. Webb forgets to mention in his diatribe against top wage earners that the top 5% band of earners pay 57% of the country’s total income taxes. I guess that kind of data flew out of his mind when he switched sides.
Margaret McGirr
Greenwich, Conn.
Underneath the smooth rhetoric is a frightening message: “Fairness” is emphasized, but “freedom” not at all. Beware of any politician who places fairness over freedom. What is at jeopardy, in his hands, are your life, liberty and property.
Jim Brankin
Southlake, Texas
Mr. Webb asserts that the top 1% of wage earners “takes in” (not earns, mind you) “an astounding 16% of national income.” IRS statistics for 2003 show the same top 1% pays a truly “astounding” 34.3% of all income taxes. If Mr. Webb could replace DNC talking points with some thinking and historical perspective, he might contribute rational problem solving rather then tired class envy and nostalgia for Great Society nostrums that led to Jimmy Carteresque stagflation.
Jay S. Haberman
New York
The country has changed in the 40 years since Mr. Webb “graduated from college in the 1960s,” but apparently he has not. Today, the percentage of home owners has increased from under 20% to about 70%; the stock-owning investor class has increased from less than 10% to about 60%. The “top tier” that “has grown richer” has itself increased (as a definition of upper middle class and above) exponentially. All of this is under a program of steady decrease in taxation and regulation.
Lenny Toboroff
New York
Mr. Webb says “manufacturing jobs are disappearing.” True. Contrary to his suggestion, though, this fact is unrelated to recent trends in globalization, corporate governance or tax policy. Manufacturing jobs as a percentage of the U.S. work force peaked in 1945 and have declined steadily ever since, even though manufacturing output continues to rise. Today this output is at an all-time high.
Donald J. Boudreaux
Chairman
Department of Economics
George Mason University
Fairfax, Va.
Mr. Webb’s discussion of class structure implies that we are locked into a class and cannot escape, something that is simply not true in America. We can all move through various economic situations quite fluidly without any restrictions due to birth. Mr. Webb himself is a fine example: From his days working part time in college to becoming a best selling author to a senator, he has moved dramatically between various “classes” of earnings. Opportunity in America is distinctly classless.
Richard Noble
Eagle, Ind.
Jim Webb expresses a profoundly shocking un-American idea: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Our founding principle of individual rights recognizes the sovereignty of the individual in his thoughts and actions and the government as the protector of the individual’s life, liberty, property and pursuit of his own individual happiness. The values he creates by his own efforts are his to dispose of as he chooses, not the property of the family, the tribe, or the state. There is no national income.
Ralph C. Whaley, M.D.
Barron, Wis.
How’s this for a pleasant daydream: Webb in a “focus group” with that group of people.
