I just finished Paul Krugman’s book The Conscience of a Liberal. As Krugman is a prominent voice on the economic left I was hoping for an informative and insightful book into the mind of the modern American liberal. What I got instead was approximately 280 pages of lefty partisan talking points. The thesis of the book is basically this: rich people working in tandem with far-right movement conservatives, who took control of the GOP in the 1970’s and 80’s through race baiting, are seeking to destroy the welfare state. There is really nothing more than that to the work. If you find yourself counting the days between Krugman’s columns in the New York Times then this will serve as a nice re-enforcement for ideas to which you probably already subscribe. For everyone else I would recommend looking elsewhere if you are in the market for a broad synopsis of liberal philosophy.
The book deals with two overarching points. One deals with the primary cause for the angst of the middle class and the other details the road back to the New Deal. Krugman argues that the collapse of organized labor has contributed substantially to the rising inequality that exists today. According to the author, unions not only get better benefits and wages for their members, they also increase wages and benefits for non-unionized workforces. Thanks to those union driven efforts we had a long postwar boom from 1945 to 1973 and created a middle class America from the ruins of the Great Depression. Krugman goes on to argue that, when the GOP took over, the party and big business were able to break labor. Such a collapse allows hedge fund managers and corporate executives to make millions and millions while blue-collar workers are finding it tougher and tougher to get by.
The other major point of the book is that any attempt to rectify the inequalities created by the weakened labor movement must begin with the creation of a universal healthcare system. Krugman isn’t one to mince words on this front. He doesn’t want any joint private-public plan. He wants a single payer Medicare-for-all system. While such a system would require a massive tax increase for high paying Americans (not a problem he writes as the top income tax rate in Eisenhower’s day was 91%, far from the corresponding 35% of the W era), it would also cost money for middle income Americans as well. Krugman believes that this would be revenue neutral for most families and businesses as money that was once spent on insurance premiums would now simply go to the government to finance this new all inclusive Medicare system.
Krugman is a brilliant man – an award winning economist, educated at Yale and MIT – and writes about serious issues that deserve serious proposals and analyses. This only compounds the poor quality of The Conscience of a Liberal. A New York Times columnist should be able to hit a higher literary standard than this. It’s hard to endorse Krugman’s policy proposals given their lack of intellectual and quantitative foundation. The weakening of the middle class, the rising costs of health care and the increasing inequality that is growing the gap between the haves and have-nots are all issues that need to be addressed. The Conscience of a Liberal does not address those issues in the manner they require; instead the reader is treated to partisan treatise on how Republicans make terrorists and black men into monsters to justify the GOP’s cold heartedness towards the poor.
Give ‘em Hell, Connscript!