The MAGA people are against immigrants. They’re afraid that immigrants are taking their jobs. But every economist on all sides of the isle will tell you that stopping immigration and expelling immigrants will damage the economy, increase prices and reduce available jobs, not increase them. Yes, some people will take jobs immigrants have been doing but they’ll be worse jobs than the ones they have now because they’ll be the only jobs available and at wages you wouldn’t want if you had any choice. Score that against ordinary folk.
And in return? Ordinary Americans and their elderly parents lose their Medicare. Another score against ordinary folk.
That makes tax cuts possible. But the vast majority of those cuts will benefit the extremely wealthy. Score that for the elites!
Republicans and their elite supporters have been attacking government regulation forever. No human organization is free of mistakes. But government regulatory agencies are the people’s tool to keep giant corporations and the unscrupulous in check. They can improve their bottom line by paying us less and giving us less value. Stripping government of its regulatory powers takes away our power to hold them in check, collect our paychecks, pay reasonable prices for what they sell us, and pick stuff up at the grocery that isn’t likely to make us sick. Another score against ordinary folk and for the elites.
Those same elites keep telling us that capitalism is designed to protect us ordinary folk. We get to choose products and, they tell us, that means they have to give us value – if you can find out the risks, benefits and alternatives and if they can’t corner the market so you actually have a choice – not just at the counter at the supermarket but the markets throughout the supply chain so that your choices make much of a difference.
Let me tell you that studying economics is an acquired taste. It’s sometimes called the dismal science. But I was introduced to it by a very funny book when I was a teen – it was called The Worldly Philosophers – and the more you delve into capitalism the more it becomes clear that unregulated capitalism is a system for putting all the risks on the backs of those least able to afford it.
Business cycle turns bad? Fire the workers and protect the company owners. The work is hot, hard and dangerous. That’s the workers’ problem. Doesn’t pay a living wage? That’s the workers’ problem. The stuff they sell us is unsafe? The buyers won’t know what hit them. I could go through the court cases where benighted regulators fought to protect us and aghast corporations fought back saying it was too expensive to take care of us as either workers or consumers. Another score against ordinary folk and another for the elites. Capitalism doesn’t protect us; it protects them. If we’re lucky, the regulators protect us.
Oh, that DEI thing. The elites are never at risk. They send their kids to fancy private schools and fight against funding the public schools. Private colleges changed after World War II and took seriously the responsibility to admit, provide scholarships and educate ordinary Americans. The faculty we got cared about what was happening to ordinary Americans. That’s what Trump and his henchmen are really mad about – the faculty cares about ordinary Americans, and expects corporate America to behave responsibly.
Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.
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