WSJ Op-Ed Page Revives Liberal Wednesday

For the longest time, Wednesday used to be Token Liberal Day on the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal.  The barely palatable Al Hunt held this post down for years before leaving to build Bloomberg News into the "Journolist" Hackfest that it is today.  Hunt ceded the Wednesday slot to the godawful Thomas Frank, who mercifully didn't last very long.  The slot seemed to go dormant for awhile with Gordon Crovitz filling in with no apparent ideological bent or real purpose.

So today I was surprised to see a new occupant of the Wednesday slot that appears to return the WSJ long tradition of subjecting giving its readers a liberal viewpoint in the middle of the week.  The New Republic's and The Brookings Institution's William A. Galston kicks off his ostensible new role with a fairly anodyne and harmless musing about the plight of the middle class.  The column opens up with what might have been a howler if it was not passed over so quickly and ends with a point worthy of much discussion that Galston fails to give it, and in between we get alot of economist-type on-the-one-hand-while-on-the-other-hand musing about the plight of the middle class.

The not quite howler is this.

President Obama is working hard to refocus attention on the middle class, and rightly so.

You will have a hard time convincing me that Obama is working hard on anything except maybe getting more Democrats elected in 2014 by poisoning the well of electoral politics with the most despicable brand of scorched Earth politics.  It is amazing to me that liberals still harbor the fantasy that Obama is hunkered down thinking of ways to advance policies that help people, when what he is doing is mostly just occupying the office and trying to make whatever part of government he can conform to hoary faculty lounge wet dreams.

Then we get four full columns of middle class yadayadayada, and then Galston ends with this.

If we cannot restore a vigorously growing economy whose fruits are widely shared, the struggles of the middle class will persist, and our democratic distemper will deepen.

In this little nugget is a truth that needs to be talked about as liberals are desperately purveying gibberish regarding income inequality.  What Galston's concluding sentence hints at is that income inequality is a political problem, it is not an economic problem.  Too large and too persistent gaps between rich and poor can destabilize society politically, but income inequality is not a brake on economic activity as liberals on down the line, including the President keep telling us.  There is no accepted economic theory that states that reducing income inequality spurs economic well-being.  A relatively free economy characterized by innovation grows and results in income mobility and reduces income inequality.  It is not the other way around.  If income inequality is your beef, then you should be advocating all manner of growth policies focused on experimentation, innovation, and deregulation rather than the typical liberal playbook of unionism, regulation and crony-laden central planning.  But I digress.

Galston's first effort in the revered Wednesday Token Liberal seat...?  Safe, uninspiring, competent.