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Don’t Say the Magic Word

Communist propaganda

The Obama administration is scared, oh so scaredy scared, of a word. It’s a big mean word, and all of liberalism must tremble in its wake: “redistribution.”

The New York Times reports that, among other things, the administration in 2011 bypassed a qualified candidate for its economic team because she used the dreaded term in a 1992 paper. Yes, that’s “1992,” as in two decades ago:

“A commitment to economic justice necessarily implies a commitment to the redistribution of economic resources, so that the poor and the dispossessed are more fully included in the economic system,” Ms. Blank, a noted poverty researcher, wrote in 1992. With advisers wary of airing those views in a nomination fight, Mr. Obama passed over Ms. Blank, then a top Commerce Department official and now the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin. Instead he chose Alan Krueger, a Princeton economist.

What Blank essentially described is the basis of current liberal ideology within a regulated capitalist system and, ostensibly, the point of the Democratic Party. But because she used terminology to describe it, well, she’s screwed. The Times piece goes on to point out the political lengths to which the Obama administration (notably during the battle to enact the Affordable Care Act) will go to try to “redistribute” some resources without in any way giving off the impression that it is redistributing resources. In the ACA’s case, this led to an extraordinarily complex means of extending health care financing to more people for the purpose of minimizing structural disruption to the health care system as much as it could. “But throughout the process,” the Times adds, “they knew that some level of redistributing wealth—creating losers as well as winners—was inescapable.” And so they get attacked as authoritarian redistributionist crusaders anyway.

Unfortunately, the political predicament is a real one. It would be easy to say, “the Democrats should just be honest and embrace the word redistribution!” But, hey, the word pisses off a lot of voters who are needed to cobble together a majority, even if many of them would benefit from a “redistribution of wealth.” On the other hand, if the leaders of the Democratic party want to use language that’s consistent with their ostensible ideology—A MAJOR “IF”—it would be important at one point or another, maybe over Thanksgiving weekend, to grapple with these issues.

David Axelrod, at least, is onto something here that may be workable:

At the same time, Mr. Axelrod argued that widening income inequality has, to some Americans at least, changed the meaning of redistribution. “The whole redistribution argument has shifted in the country because there’s a sense that a lot of redistribution has been to the top and not the bottom,” Mr. Axelrod said.

To a political adviser, the idea then would be to take the evil connotations of the term “redistribution” and use it to cudgel Republicans. That may or may not be effective. But it would reaffirm the idea that “redistribution” is something terrible altogether, leaving the root of the problem in place.

The major problem with the word “redistribution” is that it doesn’t actually mean anything. It is a political term. There is only “distribution” of wealth: there is wealth, and laws regarding taxation and regulation determine how it’s distributed. The only thing served by adding the scary prefix “re-” is a politicization of something that everyone knows exists.

Right now many people would agree that current law distributes wealth disproportionately to the top. This is just one possible distribution of wealth. Isn’t the rhetorical goal of the Obama administration, at least, to create a distribution of wealth that’s more favorable to the center? We know this polls well, because all politicians are careful to say they work for the “middle class” 100 times in every sentence. And yet, when moves are made to shift the distribution back towards the center, it’s called “redistribution” — taking yer money away! On the other hand, when actions like, say, cutting SNAP benefits, shift resources away from the impoverished and working poor, it’s called “teaching personal responsibility.”

It’s time to freeze all this chatter about whose wealth is being “redistributed” to whom and ask what a fair distribution of wealth would look like, and then enact laws and regulations to create it.