Source: Beat The Press
by Dean Baker
“Eduardo Porter joined the chorus of people telling us that the inequality of the last four decades was just the result of the free market in his Washington Post column. As Porter puts it: ‘A paper last year by economists from Princeton and Columbia argues that Democrats started losing the working class back in the 1970s, when they bought into the notion that the government should let market forces rip, dropping the New Deal approach of improving workers’ lot via strong unions, job guarantees, minimum wages and protectionism — and instead assisting the economy’s losers via taxes and transfers.’ He then argues that this is the source of the rise in working class support for authoritarianism. The problem with this line is that we did not let market forces rip. Government-granted patent and copyright monopolies are not the f**king market.” (11/20/24)