Big Lies

In a post titled "Romney's Big Lie," Paul Krugman places the following hypothetical in Mitt Romney's head:

Mitt Romney believes that corporations are people, and that only corporations and the wealthy have a right to be paid for the efforts. He wants to reduce middle-class Americans to serfs, forced to accept whatever pay corporations choose to give them.

His point being that Romney would be excoriated if he said such things. But the policies Romney favors would actually amount to this statement.

Romney's belief that corporations are people is not quite as nutty as Krugman would have his readers believe. I've asked before, why should a voluntary arrangement of several people have fewer rights than an individual person? At what point, at what critical mass, are rights forfeited? And how does requiring wealthy people to continue to pay more to the federal treasury, just not as much as the Obama administration and Krugman would like, constitute reducing middle-class to serfs? Who has been forced to accept the wages chosen to be given to him? A person may not like the wages being offered in return for his labor, but as far as I can tell these are still voluntary exchanges of labor for wages. If the genius professor has any evidence to the contrary, I'd love to see it.

He then quotes Romney directly to contrast it with his imagination and then writes, "But nothing Obama has ever said and none of his actions bear any resemblance to Romney’s portrait."

But Obama did say, "I think that when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody."

This supposes that elected officials and bureaucrats are less self-interested than their private sector brethren. They aren't. It also presumes that the "fair" distribution of wealth that is generated and earned by other people is a legitimate function of government. It isn't.

Beyond being completely wrong about everything, another spot-on piece by Professor Krugman.