Entrenching the privilege of the political class? -- The Obamaklatura

Eminence · Mar 25, 2010

David Leonhardt of the New York Times--last seen (we are not exaggerating) touting National Socialism as a model for economic policy--is on more conventional ground today in praising ObamaCare as "the federal government's biggest attack on economic inequality since inequality began rising more than three decades ago":

Over most of that period, government policy and market forces have been moving in the same direction, both increasing inequality. The pretax incomes of the wealthy have soared since the late 1970s, while their tax rates have fallen more than rates for the middle class and poor. . . .
A big chunk of the money to pay for the bill comes from lifting payroll taxes on households making more than $250,000. On average, the annual tax bill for households making more than $1 million a year will rise by $46,000 in 2013, according to the Tax Policy Center, a Washington research group. Another major piece of financing would cut Medicare subsidies for private insurers, ultimately affecting their executives and shareholders.
The benefits, meanwhile, flow mostly to households making less than four times the poverty level--$88,200 for a family of four people.
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Remember when Sen. Obama told "Joe the Plumber" he wanted to "spread the wealth around"? This might have been the most revealing moment in the campaign--and the mainstream media responded by investigating and vilifying the man who had the temerity to confront the candidate with a question.

Leonhardt's piece ends with an anecdote involving an Obama aide:

Before he became Mr. Obama's top economic adviser, Lawrence Summers told me a story about helping his daughter study for her Advanced Placement exam in American history. While doing so, Mr. Summers realized that the federal government had not passed major social legislation in decades. There was the frenzy of the New Deal, followed by the G.I. Bill, the Interstate Highway System, civil rights and Medicare--and then nothing worth its own section in the history books.

Now there is.
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One might mischievously suggest that it's terribly unfair for one girl to get free tutoring from a supersmart economist who used to be president of an elite university and assert that Larry Summers is a hypocrite unless he takes steps toward the socialization of his own brain.

That, of course, is a reductio ad absurdum--fun but fallacious. The inequality that benefits children of smart parents is a product of nature (and of nurture, but nurture is also a product of nature). Leveling it by coercive means is beyond the ability of any but perhaps the most brutal totalitarian state.

But another story, broken yesterday by the Chicago Tribune, illustrates why "equality" isn't all it's cracked up to be. Unlike medicine, elementary and secondary education in the U.S. is already almost completely under political control. Defenders of this arrangement justify it in the name of equality. They do not claim the current system achieves that ideal, but they do insist that efforts to reduce political control via vouchers and other forms of privatization would make inequality worse.

But the Tribune story shows that political control introduces its own kind of inequality, to benefit the political class:

While many Chicago parents took formal routes to land their children in the best schools, the well-connected also sought help through a shadowy appeals system created in recent years under former schools chief Arne Duncan.

Whispers have long swirled that some children get spots in the city's premier schools based on whom their parents know. But a list maintained over several years in Duncan's office and obtained by the Tribune lends further evidence to those charges. Duncan is now secretary of education under President Barack Obama.The log is a compilation of politicians and influential business people who interceded on behalf of children during Duncan's tenure. It includes 25 aldermen, Mayor Richard Daley's office, House Speaker Michael Madigan, his daughter Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, former White House social secretary Desiree Rogers and former U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley Braun.Non-connected parents, such as those who sought spots for their special-needs child or who were new to the city, also appear on the log. But the politically connected make up about three-quarters of those making requests in the documents obtained by the Tribune.
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This is "the aristocracy of pull," in Ayn Rand's memorable phrase. Its existence is probably inevitable inasmuch as government's is, but its extent can only increase with the power and reach of government.

If you and Larry Summers both get sick and need a treatment that the Medicare Advisory Commission (dysphemistically known as the Death Panel) deems too expensive, what are the odds that you'll find a way to get it anyway and he won't? How about the other way around? In the Soviet Union, those privileged by political connections were called the nomenklatura. Here, we can call it the Obamaklatura.
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Entrenching the privilege of the political class? -- The Obamaklatura

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