The Free Stuff Majority
“Conspiracies of the Ruling Class,” by Lawrence B. Lindsey, reviewed in the WSJ by Joseph C. Sternberg.
Mr. Lindsey is an economist who served in Republican administrations from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush and the book, the reviewer adds, was written before Trump surged to power. The book suggests that we’re angry because of how badly we’re governed. America has fallen captive to a “Ruling Class” (his capitalization throughout the book) concerned more with its own power than with the welfare of the country.
The author has a whole line of theory how the "liberty seekers" can take control of the country. But, as the reviewer points out
Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of evidence that a pro-liberty electoral majority exists—even without pondering the 2016 Trump juggernaut. Consider 2012, which Mr. Lindsey acknowledges is a challenge to his hypothesis. Voters claimed to be worried about government overreach and yet returned Barack Obama to office.
The worrying sign here is the number of voters who say in polls that they want to elect a president who “cares about people like them”—around 20% in 2012, four out of five of whom voted for Obama and were enough to swing the election. Mr. Lindsey recognizes this is as a signal that voters deep down want candidates who are likely to direct government favors toward them. Nonetheless he hopes that the right kind of small-government message can persuade these voters that constitutional order is good for them personally. He describes this political mode as “philosophically populist, operationally libertarian.”
It’s hard to share his optimism when even Tea Partiers cling to Medicare and Social Security. Most people seem to view congressional stasis as a flaw in the system—the subtext being that inaction in Washington makes it hard for the government to give us the things we really want—rather than as one of the last lines of defense that we common folk have against the Ruling Class. We may think that government spending in general is bad for the country, but by golly the spending that benefits us personally is indispensable
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-free-stuff-majority-1459464473
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