I mentioned the book by Dean Baker, The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive, in a previous post.

Here is the excerpt that exemplifies what the book is about and what so agrees with the points I have tried to make on this blog.

For the most part, progressives accept the right’s framing of economic debates. They accept the notions that the right is devoted to the unfettered workings of the market and, by contrast, that liberals and progressives are the ones who want the government to intervene to protect the interests of the poor and disadvantaged.

But this view is utterly wrong as a description of the economy and competing policy approaches. And it makes for horrible politics. It creates a scenario in which progressives are portrayed as wanting to tax the winners in society in order to reward the losers. The right gets to be portrayed as the champions of hard work and innovation, while progressives are seen as the champions of the slothful and incompetent. It should not be surprising who has been winning this game.

In reality, the vast majority of the right does not give a damn about free markets; it just wants to redistribute income upward. Progressives have been useful to the right in helping it to conceal this agenda. Progressives help to ratify the actions of conservatives by accusing them of allegiance to a free-market ideology instead of attacking them for pushing the agenda of the rich.

For the last three decades the right has been busily restructuring the economy in ways that ensure that income flows upward. The rules governing markets, written by the rich and powerful, ensure that this gravity-defying outcome prevails. The right then presents the imposition of rules that it likes as the natural result of unfettered market forces.

Whenever you are in a position of defending progressive economic policy, remember the above description.  Do not fall into the trap that President Obama so often does of justifying his policies on the basis of making the income and wealth distribution more fair because it is more moral.  In truth, we need this change in distribution because it makes the economy work better. Instead, you can talk about how the current situation is such a perversion of the principles of free markets.  You can talk about how the current rules are so detrimental to the workings of the economy that the Republicans claim that they are such experts on making run efficiently.

When the Republicans say they want to encourage job creation by loosening regulation and lowering taxes, remind the audience how this makes no sense in the Republicans’ own terms of how a smart investor should invest.  They are saying that if we only make it less difficult for entrepreneurs to produce more goods that are already in over supply compared to what people have the money to buy, these entrepreneurs will gladly invest in producing goods for which there are no customers.  Somehow, the Republicans must expect us to believe that these entrepreneurs are going to make money by putting the output of their factories into warehouses.  Maybe they think that the profits from building warehouses will more than make up for the loss in producing goods that can’t be sold.  This is almost a twist on the famous idea from the book Catch-22, where one of the protagonists lost money on every transaction, but he made it up in volume.