Taxing Our Patience, Con't

The Great GOP Tax Scam will soon be law, and while Republicans are more than happy to congratulate themselves on "saving the American people more of their own money" the reality is that most of us are screwed.

The hostility to redistributive democracy at the ideological center of the American right has made standard policies of successful modern welfare states, happily embraced by Europe’s conservative parties, seem beyond the moral pale for many Republicans. The outsize stakes seem to justify dubious tactics — bunking down with racists, aggressive gerrymandering, inventing paper-thin pretexts for voting rules that disproportionately hurt Democrats — to prevent majorities from voting themselves a bigger slice of the pie. 

But the idea that there is an inherent tension between democracy and the integrity of property rights is wildly misguided. The liberal-democratic state is a relatively recent historical innovation, and our best accounts of the transition from autocracy to democracy points to the role of democratic political inclusion in protecting property rights. 

As Daron Acemoglu of M.I.T. and James Robinson of Harvard show in “Why Nations Fail,” ruling elites in pre-democratic states arranged political and economic institutions to extract labor and property from the lower orders. That is to say, the system was set up to make it easy for elites to seize what ought to have been other people’s stuff. 

In “Inequality and Democratization,” the political scientists Ben W. Ansell and David J. Samuels show that this demand for political inclusion generally isn’t driven by a desire to use the existing institutions to plunder the elites. It’s driven by a desire to keep the elites from continuing to plunder them.

It’s easy to say that everyone ought to have certain rights. Democracy is how we come to get and protect them. Far from endangering property rights by facilitating redistribution, inclusive democratic institutions limit the “organized banditry” of the elite-dominated state by bringing everyone inside the charmed circle of legally enforced rights. 

Democracy is fundamentally about protecting the middle and lower classes from redistribution by establishing the equality of basic rights that makes it possible for everyone to be a capitalist. Democracy doesn’t strangle the golden goose of free enterprise through redistributive taxation; it fattens the goose by releasing the talent, ingenuity and effort of otherwise abused and exploited people.

At a time when America’s faith in democracy is flagging, the Republicans elected to treat the United States Senate, and the citizens it represents, with all the respect college guys accord public restrooms. It’s easier to reverse a bad piece of legislation than the bad reputation of our representative institutions, which is why the way the tax bill was passed is probably worse than what’s in it. Ultimately, it’s the integrity of democratic institutions and the rule of law that gives ordinary people the power to protect themselves against elite exploitation. But the Republican majority is bulldozing through basic democratic norms as though freedom has everything to do with the tax code and democracy just gets in the way.

We live in, and have lived in all my life dating back to the Reagan era when I was a toddler, an era where protecting the wheels of government from getting dirty from the unwashed masses has always been the point of the federal government.

With the singular exception of Obamacare (which will soon be completely broken thanks to this tax bill) the American federal government has always been classified as "the enemy of the people" while simultaneously I have been told all my life that the word "democracy" itself is dirty word, that it represents the basest tyranny of the majority, but only when the wealthiest among us disagree with that majority.

This bill is going to wreck the economy and the Republicans know it, the real test comes when the GOP is voted out of office and they can go back to blaming the Democratic majority voted in next year for not fixing things quickly enough in 2019, something that should lead to a brand-new GOP majority in Congress in 2020 (and a second Trump term) by my calculations.

By the way, this is where wealth inequality in America was at five years ago, before the GOP bill makes it exponentially worse.  We're already the most unequal developed country on earth by a long shot.  We're now headed deep into New Gilded Age territory.



Maybe I'm a cynic, but Poly Sci has been a pretty harsh mistress all my life, and History is far more violent than she is.