Explaining away the income gap

One of the pet causes of the conservative movement is an ostensible committment to free-market economics. It wouldn't be possible to argue that we have one, of course, with the tax breaks, subsidies, and trade agreements that favor one industry or another, and only genuine kooks would argue that a totally unregulated market is a good thing (child labor laws, anyone?). No, free marketeers are more often about justifying inequality. You obviously can't get away with arguing that minorities are more likely to be poor because they're lazy and inferior these days, but as a good right-winger you wouldn't want to call for funding better and more affordable education. What do you do? David Brooks has come up with a silly answer that will no doubt be taken very seriously by his comrades-in-arms.

In [Brooks'] mind, the difference between the rich and the poor largely rests on having "high social and customer-service skills." The intent of this is that it justifies inequality. Instead of the maldistribution of income being something to fix, it's those who are losing income who are broken. Better yet, by relying on social skills rather than intelligence, Brooks makes the deciding factor mutable: a personality characteristic that we can change, improve, or develop.

Isn't that neat? It eliminates any means by which the government could improve people's lives, it blames failure entirely on the individual, and makes a sweeping statement that we live in a perfect meritocracy. It doesn't fit the facts, of course, but it justifies reactionary politics, and that's the name of the game.

Put another way, what's happening is that the super rich are leaving behind the rich, who are outpacing the wealthy, who are dusting the upper middle class. As that lefty rag The Economist puts it:

The figures are startling. According to Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, and Thomas Piketty of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, the share of aggregate income going to the highest-earning 1% of Americans has doubled from 8% in 1980 to over 16% in 2004. That going to the top tenth of 1% has tripled from 2% in 1980 to 7% today. And that going to the top one-hundredth of 1%—the 14,000 taxpayers at the very top of the income ladder—has quadrupled from 0.65% in 1980 to 2.87% in 2004.

Think about that. Are you really prepared to believe that the top one percent now gets paid 16 percent of the total income in this country because they developed "high social and customer-service skills"? And that the top hundredth of a percent quadrupled their take because they developed them so much faster than the rest of the country's CEOs? And that CEOs, who in the ‘70s made 30 times the salary of their average workers, now make 300 times the salary of their average worker because they became that much more social and customer-oriented?