Free Lunch Read Online Free PDF Page B

banner of deregulation can
make people rich at the cost of others’ lives. We will follow the career of an economics professor who embraced the idea of getting
government out of the way of business, yet made his business career cultivating government, leaving behind a trail of deaths and
costs that were shifted onto the taxpayers. His name is John W. Snow and he rose to become our government’s Treasury
secretary.
    The benefits of the nation’s overall growth in incomes and wealth flow like a mighty
river of greenbacks to the powerful, wealthy men and women who have twisted Mr. Reagan’s revolutionary creed. They want more
government, just so long as it makes them richer. They have captured for themselves and their class the benefits and rewards of a
government that is today as intricately involved with the private sector as it ever has been. They have found the proverbial free
lunch, enjoying a sumptuous feast and leaving their bill for the rest of us.
    There is, of course,
no such thing as a free lunch. Every cost must somehow be accounted for and paid. When bars offered a free lunch in the 1800s,
the cost was built into the nickel charge for beer. For our purposes, a “free lunch” refers to an economic benefit received by one
party that is paid for by another by government action or inaction.
    For example, when a
developer receives a plot of land free or at a discount, your taxes may have paid to buy it, the original owner may have been
cheated out of its market value, or someone else not at all obvious got stuck with the real cost. When an executive shortchanges
the pension plan, making his company appear to be more profitable, he inflates the value of the company stock and therefore his
stock options. When the pension later fails and the workers get less than what they were due, or the taxpayers have to make up the
part of the shortfall guaranteed by the government’s Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (PBGC), the executive gets a free
lunch. Our economy is riddled with these subsidies, many of which are intentionally subtle and hard to detect.
    Executives’ free lunch is a major factor in America’s growing inequality and why our economy is closest to
those of Brazil, Mexico, and Russia in how it distributes resources.
    The evidence of a growing
divide between the superrich and everyone else in America is so overwhelming that all but the few lightweight ideologues among
economists acknowledge this harsh truth. When George W. Bush was running for president in 2000 he famously referred to a
white-tie audience at a Waldorf-Astoria dinner as the “haves and the have mores.” He said that “some people call you the elite. I call
you my base.” By 2007 even the Bush White House had publicly acknowledged that the divide between the superrich and
everyone else was a real concern.
    Since that talk about the “have mores,” a national debate
has arisen over just what is going on. Why are the rich getting so much richer, while the middle class struggles and the poor fall
behind? Why are the richest of the rich—billionaires—pulling away even from those whose net worth is in the many millions? The
cable and broadcast television networks, national news magazines, and scholarly conferences have all examined the question of
why inequality is growing and what it means.
    Is education behind increasing inequality, as the
White House says? Or could it be globalization, with cheap labor in China and India combining with free trade to create new
world-scale fortunes? Or is it technology, from ever-faster silicon chips to drugs that soothe what ails you? Or maybe it is just a
proper reward for talent, with corporate executives getting their fair share of the wealth they create for shareholders.
    All of those answers are right—and wrong. What they all have in common is that they are just superstructures
arising from the same foundation.