Chait's savage and very good takedown: Do Liberals Want to Kill Iron Man? [View all]

[cali]

Harvard economist, occasional Republican economic adviser, and avid social Darwinist Greg Mankiw has produced the latest in his series of passionate defenses of the financial prerogatives of the ultrarich. In his most recent New York Times column, Mankiw begins with the relatively sympathetic case of gazillionaire actor Robert Downey Jr. Nobody is upset that Downey earned $50 million to appear in The Avengers, he posits. Therefore, Mankiw proceeds to argue, nobody should be upset with the incomes of other extremely rich people.

One sleight of hand in Mankiw’s column (as Paul Krugman points out) is his easy leap from the relatively unobjectionable way Downey earns his fortune to the way other executives — especially those in finance, who represent an enormous chunk of the very rich — earn theirs. If you don’t like Downey’s movies, you can choose not to attend them. If you don’t like the financial industry siphoning off your 401(k) or plunging the world economy into a massive crisis destroying trillions of dollars and ruining the lives of millions of people forever, you don’t have as much recourse.

Mankiw wants us to ignore the serious moral problems embedded in the rentier class – such as the Wall Street titans joking in secret gatherings about their reliance on bailouts – and think of the one percent as Iron Men, to whom we owe admiration and gratitude. But even if we consider Mankiw’s chosen example on its own terms, the Iron Man problem does not take us where Mankiw wants to go.

<snip>

But there is somebody who considers Downey’s income a great injustice: Greg Mankiw. As Mankiw has insisted time and time again, Obama’s tax policies unfairly seize too great a share of Downey’s income and spend it on people less deserving than Downey. Indeed, Mankiw’s work suggests he believes society’s cruel exploitation of Downey and his economic peers is the single most compelling social wrong in the world today.

<snip>

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/02/liberals-want-to-kill-iron-man.html