Thomas Sowell: Them Pore Ole Bosses Need All the Help They Can Get
Posted by Kevin Carson on Mar 10, 2010 in Commentary • 13 commentsIn the Matrix reality put before us by the corporatist alliance of big government and big business, and its corporate media mouthpieces, there are several recurring themes. The economy we have now is the result of “free choice,” and all its specific features are the result of the free choices of individuals. Those who complain of aspects of the existing economy want to use government to restrict freedom of choice. Big business and big government are mortal enemies, and the main motive force behind government policy is a desire to restrict the freedom of big business and punish the rich.
Thomas Sowell manages so effectively to work all these talking points into a recent slimy little turd of a column, you’d think he was playing Neocon Talking Points Bingo.
Sowell laments the “resentment” toward excessive profits and wealth, and insinuates that it’s all part of some master plan–an “agenda”–by the “czars,” “our betters in Washington,” and politicians who seek “dangerous power.” The goal is simply to take away “our freedom to live our lives as we see fit.” Free to live as we please, we choose to create a corporate economy like the one we have now, and the only way to change the current corporate setup is by restricting our freedom.
In Sowell’s morality play, the struggle between big government and big business is a struggle between power and freedom.
Sowell has it exactly backwards. The struggle between big government and big business is about as authentic as the struggle between a “good cop” and “bad cop” in a police interrogation room.
Sowell also objects to the terms “‘obscene’ wealth” and “‘unconscionable’ profits,” asking just what’s wrong with wealth and profits. For Sowell, all wealth is by defnition good–it’s poverty that’s bad.
But he makes the unwarranted assumption that all wealth is obtained in a positive sum gain. What if our economy, as it’s actually set up, is a negative sum game in which most large concentrations of wealth are obtained at the expense of someone’s poverty?
It’s stupid to say, without qualification, that all wealth is good–just as it’s foolish to say that all property is good. Sowell should know better than most people that there have been unjust forms of property. And likewise, there is unjust wealth.
The fact is, big business and the rich are on the same side as those power-seeking politicians. The dominant corporations and large fortunes of our time result from the use of the state to restrict our freedom of exchange. Their wealth comes from the ability to restrict–with the help of the state–the terms on which we can buy and sell, and compel us to buy and sell only on terms favorable to them (if you don’t believe it, just compare the $10 you pay for a CD of Linux or Open Office to the hundreds of dollars charged for Windows or MS office). Their profits–most definitely unconscionable–come from state-enforced privilege, state-enforced artificial scarcity, and state subsidies.
Government redistributes income, all right: but it redistributes it to the rich, not from them. And our economic freedom is restricted–but to the benefit of big business and the rich, rather than to their detriment.
We have a corporate ruling class that has enriched itself at our expense, by using government to restrict our economic freedom and force us to do business with them on their terms. And people like Sowell are their shills. We don’t need any of them.
Individualist anarchist great Lysander Spooner's classic critique of the U.S. Constitution: "No Treason No.6: The Constitution of No Authority" in the new and handy Pocket Subversion Edition. Also featuring Roderick T. Long's "Libertarian Anarchism: Responses to Ten Objections". 
While I agree with the content of what you write, this comes off a little like a personal attack against Sowell. Sowell, Friedman, Williams, Hayek and Mises and even many of the AnCaps regularly neglect the harm caused by “private” business. That doesn’t really mean it isn’t implied or that they intended to neglect it. It’s a pro-business bias, but I don’t think it’s fair to personalize the issue or treat it like it’s intentional shilling. Can you provide me with a link to Sowell’s article that inspired this post so I can judge its vulgarity for myself?
I reckon it’s this one.
Chris George, the reason the article doesn’t link to the column is because C4SS commentaries in general are usually written without links so they can be reprinted in print.
And yes, I agree with Chris that this comes off as too harsh on Sowell; I don’t see anything in his op-ed that’s inconsistent with the fact of business-government alliance, or the rest of the stuff that Kevin points out; the thing about the conservative talking points about anti-rich sentiment made in articles like that is that they aren’t specifically wrong, although they aren’t the whole story. And to his credit Sowell has discussed in some detail how government intervention is often “socialism for the rich” in a column by that name; he even goes as far as saying that statism is worse overall for the poor than the rich:
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell010036.php3
Thanks, Roderick.
Chris and Joel, the reason Sowell’s column rubbed me the wrong way is that his defense of wealth and profits is so devoid of context as to be utterly misleading. If Sowell agrees we live in an economy dominated by welfare for the rich, where most large concentrations of wealth and most large profits result from state intervention, then why the knee-jerk defensive reaction in defense of wealth and profits against those who attack them? Regardless of whether he’s acknowledged corporate welfare and socialism for the rich elsewhere, the entire framing of this column implies that he’s defending existing wealth and profits as the natural outcome of a free market, against those who would use the state to suppress them.
Well, hey, I’d also oppose a state agenda to suppress large concentrations of wealth and profit that were obtained entirely through a genuinely free market. In fact, it’s right there on my list with all the other things I plan to do when hell freezes over. In the meantime, though, in the world I actually live in the government’s main function is to help rich people steal from me. So I get more than a little Emily Latella vibe from Sowell.
Unaccustomed as we are to seeing free-market criticism of Sowell, I like the article. It takes only a few words (as I am discovering) to note the context, i.e., to say that one is talking about wealth legitimately earned in a free market, rather than what goes on on frequently in a corporatist economy. It’s not difficult to do this, that is, if the issue is on the writer’s mind. For many free-market advocates, it is not.
The only suggestion I’d make refers to the example about Microsoft versus OpenOffice. There’s at least enough freedom for us to be able to obtain a decent alternative to Word at no cost. Corporatism isn’t invincible. We should emphasize that too.
I mean to say in my comment above that there are critics of wealth who wouldn’t care if the money had been earned legitimately. They are oblivious to the distinction that we think is to so important.
testing to see if I can post
Sowell seems to make a straw man argument: when people refer to “obscene” wealth, I don’t think that they mean that wealth is necessarily obscene — it’s the unjust disparity between the extremely rich and the extremely poor that makes the extreme wealth obscene. I also doubt that you would have to try too hard to find examples of the same people calling extreme poverty “obscene”.
In addition, Sowell doesn’t seem to understand the difference between real wealth and money wealth. (See my Nolan Chart column here: http://www.nolanchart.com/article5480.html ) He asks: “Wouldn’t we consider it great if every human being on earth had a billion dollars and lived in a place that could rival the Taj Mahal?” As regarding the billion dollars, if everyone had the same amount of money wealth, it wouldn’t make any difference how much it was — a billion dollars, ten dollars, etc. They would all have equal purchasing power regardless. Having a billion dollars wouldn’t make people have the real wealth that a billion dollars could currently purchase. (The Taj Mahal is more like real wealth, but if everyone had one, how would they take care of and run these places all by themselves?)
clore333 writes “it’s the unjust disparity between the extremely rich and the extremely poor that makes the extreme wealth obscene.”
I’m not sure what you mean by this. Why is it “unjust” that it now becomes “obscene”?
“For Sowell, all wealth is by defnition good–it’s poverty that’s bad.
“But he makes the unwarranted assumption that all wealth is obtained in a positive sum gain. What if our economy, as it’s actually set up, is a negative sum game in which most large concentrations of wealth are obtained at the expense of someone’s poverty?”
Unwarranted? Perhaps you should read Sowell’s “Basic Economics” before declaring his work little more than a slimy turd. Sowell explains, comprehensively and definitively, how capitalism is not a zero sum game.
Asking a loaded question (“what if our economy, as it’s actually set up…”) hardly strengthen your case. Glenn Beck uses a similar rhetorical question tactic routinely … and routinely gets his ass handed to him for doing so. (“I’m not saying Obama is a kitten-eating reptilian … I’m only asking why they bought a white house dog.”)
Sowell was a Marxist in his youth. But unlike many Marxists, he had the courage to admit that the facts went against Marx’s predictions.
CC, the very way you yourself phrase it, that capitalism “is not” (present, indicative) a zero sum game, suggests you’re defending the version of capitalism we’re actually living under based on the laws of a free market. “What if our economy, as it’s actually set up, is a negative sum game” is not comparable to Beck’s innuendo, because it’s not an innuendo at all. It’s not something I’m hinting at and then backing away from. It’s something I believe is actually the case. It is you who are begging the question–asserting that exploitation does not take place because what we live under is actually a free market, or close enough to one that existing concentrations of wealth reflect the workings of a free market.
P.S. So you tell me–when Sowell explains comprehensively and definitively that capitalism is not a zero sum game, do you mean that he explains how the existing system is not a zero sum game, or that he explains how a free market–which we do not have–*wouldn’t be* a zero sum game? Does he even acknowledge that it’s an issue? Or does he just make a typical vulgar libertarian argument that “big business can’t be exploitative, because in a free market….” Either what we have now is a free market, or it isn’t. If you think it is, we have a fundamental disagreement. If it isn’t, then what would or wouldn’t take place in a free market has nothing to do with the price of tea in China.
Every conceivable argument that mankind has formulated is flawed. Some are just better than others. Capitalism is bad? I ask, compared to what? A free market with all of it’s flaws is still better than socialism, communism and any other ism that man has created.