Forum Post: Absurdity, if not piggishness, from the super-rich

http://niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=background.view&backgroundid=00633

"Mr. Conard takes the notion that free markets reward participants in proportion to their contribution and uses it to justify only the massive shift of income to the very rich. He ignores what happens if he applied his economic theory to everyone else in the economy. He simply doesn’t deal with the obvious corollary to his classic economics: If the rich got that way because they deserved it, then the middle class, with its stagnant income and declining share of the economic pie, also got just exactly what they deserved. This corollary is insanely obvious. To deny it is like claiming 2 + 2 = 4 and then denying that 4 - 2 = 2.

In simple terms the logic of Mr. Conard’s economics requires us to conclude that virtually, if not all, of the economic gain of the last several decades is attributable to the heroic efforts of less than 1 percent of the population. And the efforts of the entire middle class – engineers, software designers, computer technicians, physicians, teachers, construction workers, auto workers, etc. – contributed next to nothing. A proposition that most would find patently absurd.

Indeed, as Paul Krugman recently pointed out, Conard’s thesis collapses in the face of history. In the 1950s and ‘60s the top 0.01 percent got only a fifth of the share it gets today. Yet this was the best period of economic and productivity growth of the past century. "