True confession time: Richard Epstein is one of my heroes. Libertarian law professor and author of so many wonderful books. So when he writes, I pay attention. Here's the opening of his latest piece on the federal budget:
President Barack Obama’s budget speech was delivered at George Washington University Law School on April 13, 2011. What is most notable about the speech was not the predictable and partisan reaction to it. Rather, it was the president’s deft use of rhetorical tropes to pull off his increasingly transparent maneuver of talking right while moving left.
As is par for the course, the speech contains enough platitudes to make it appear that the president is a fair-minded man—a man who understands the difficult trade-offs that must be made in order to balance the imperatives of market growth with the just provision of government resources to all individuals. In the end, however, this presidential straddle will fall to ruins because of its implicit assumption that transfer payments will do no harm to total production, even as they redress the inequality of fortunes in this country. Not so. ...
And here's the conclusion:
In the end, it is growth, and only growth, that can cure the national malaise. And that means letting the rich get richer so that they can bring the rest of us along with them. But just as King Canute could not stop the tides, so it is that President Obama cannot draw blood out of a stone. What the president thinks are zero-sum policies are in fact no such thing. Given how they distort market incentives and increase political strife, Obama’s progressive policies translate into a profoundly negative-sum game, which, when replicated over time, will strip this nation of the entrepreneurial spirit that accounted for its past greatness.
In between the two is a concise and brilliant exposition of political and economic theory on which the conclusion is based. Go read the whole thing. Now.
