Over at Vox last week, Dylan Matthews wrote a great article, The Case Against Equality of Opportunity. It’s somewhat long, but I recommend reading it. He showed that “equality of opportunity” is just not possible. This should be understood by everyone at this point. We simply don’t have the kind of society that would say to rich people, “You can’t spend your money on your kids!” And that is what it would take. In fact, we don’t even have the kind of society that provides equal funding for all children in public school. Even that kind of “equality of opportunity” is a bridge too far.

But the meat of Matthews’ article is that we shouldn’t want equality of opportunity. His quote of Thomas Nagel sums up the point, “When racial and sexual injustice have been reduced, we shall still be left with the great injustice of the smart and the dumb, who are so differently rewarded for comparable effort.” Take it to extremes: do we provide the same “opportunity” to get ahead to a child born without arms and legs as we do to other children? It’s a ridiculous notion when put in such stark terms, but that’s what we are saying. It just isn’t as obvious because someone who is intellectually slow would probably struggle through life. But that’s hardly fair.

The problem is both genetic and environmental. People who have a natural gift for trading stocks are more likely to have children with a similar gift. And, as Matthews pointed out, “We know, for example, that lead paint is more prevalent in poor neighborhoods. We also know that lead poisoning hurts children’s IQs, their ability to pay attention, and their school achievement, and that its effects on cognition last through adulthood.” Offering such children “equality of opportunity” is obviously just a sick joke.

But a sick joke is exactly what many conservatives would like to offer. A couple of years ago, reformish Republican Avik Roy wrote an article where he laid out what Republicans mean by “equality of opportunity.” And it was truly vile. According to him, equality of opportunity means only the lack of explicit laws. So as long as there were no laws stopping African Americans from having certain jobs, there was equality of opportunity. Note what’s happened here. First, Republicans said they believed in equality. Then it was equality of opportunity. Then even that “reformer” Avik Roy defines out of existence.

When we liberals talk about equality, we aren’t requesting that everyone have the same thing — all that Harrison Bergeron nonsense. The funny thing is that not even the communist countries pretended to have that. All we are really talking about is the safety net. The truth is that we are far too wealthy a country not to provide a basic level of care to our citizens. I would go far beyond that. Since I’m no fan of the idea of “free will,” I believe in great limits to how far one can rise economically. But we are at a point where we still have to argue about whether poor children should be given school lunches.

Matthews’ main point is directed at liberals. He pointed out that we want people’s lives to be better, “The desire isn’t egalitarian, but humanitarian.” And that means we care about outcomes. To me, the politics of this are pretty simple. And it goes back to what I’ve long been saying about how the New Democrats destroyed America. The Republicans and the Democrats talk about “equality of opportunity.” But it is meaningless. It is just a way of avoiding doing those things that would improve the lives of the ever increasing share of Americans who are struggling. The fact that the numbers are increasing should be all that we care about.

Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution wrote something interesting, Generic Drug Regulation and Pharmaceutical Price-Jacking. It’s about the recent price rise of Daraprim from $13.60 to $750. He noted that the drug is not under patent, so this, at least, is not an issue of our broken intellectual property system. It is just that the the company that makes it is the only company that makes it, and Martin Shkreli is using that fact to price gouge. It is an example of our broken pharmaceutical system generally.

Tabarrok is a libertarian, and he has a bit of an ax to grind — although not like his partner, Tyler Cowen. Regardless, he did note two things that are important. One is that FDA approval for getting a license to produce a generic drug is costly. The other is that we aren’t able to just import drugs from other countries. In an incredible comparison, this drug is available in India for 5¢ per pill. This is the drug that Shkreli has gone around telling people the company was losing money charging $13.60 — and which he now sells for $750.

The main point is that we should allow reciprocity in drug purchases, “All that we would be doing is allowing import of any generic approved as such in Europe to be sold in the United States.” I agree with that. In fact, I would go further, Tabarrok is a bit of a protectionist when it comes to this issue — claiming that allowing patented medicines to be imported might have a “effect on innovation.” I’m getting kind of tired of the “innovation” line when it comes to the pharmaceutical companies. They mostly seem to be providing us with more and more diverse drugs for erectile dysfunction.

I would like to see far more government involvement in the markets for healthcare needs. As it is, the US government already spends a huge amount of money on drug research, but then allows private companies to get all the rents on them. It’s madness. What’s more, I don’t see why the government doesn’t just go into the business of making generic drugs. Clearly, our market system is not working in the case of Daraprim. But personally, I don’t think we need various sources of generic Vicodin.

One thing is certain: this is not a situation where all we need is for the government to get out of the way. It’s true that Shkreli is abusing the existing system. But any system we have will be abused by the likes of him. And I find it interesting that we arrest people for price gouging during a hurricane — charging ten dollars for can of peaches. But when Shkreli does it on a massively larger and more damaging scale, all we get from people is a shrug: that’s just the way our economy works. Well that’s the problem! We need to stop thinking that the way things have been is the way they must be or or that they are the “natural” way.

Work by the Center for Economic and Policy Research has found that our drug patent system costs us many hundreds of billion of dollars per year. Given this, I think we have to ask if the current system is the best that we can do. As it is, pretty much all economists believe that patents are a really bad for the economy. They cause enormous distortions in the market. The only point to having them is if they provide great benefits. Clearly they do provide some benefits. But I think we could do much better for our money through collective action.

It seems that the editors at The Washington Post are very concerned, The End of Globalization? The last three years the global economy has grown more than international trade. The last time this happened was in 1985. Oh. My. God! What are we going to do? I just looked outside and there are no flames as of yet, but clearly it is just a matter of time because the world is on fire. I’m sure that Thomas Friedman is hiding under his bed. How can we possibly survive without ever increasing international trade?! If people are buying more things locally, it must be a sign of Armageddon.

Dean Baker responded, The Trans-Pacific Partnership, International Trade, and Arithmetic Problems at The Washington Post. Because this is all about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). All our worries will supposedly be over if only we get the TPP — at least until the next trade agreement comes up. But as Baker noted, “The TPP actually will not do much to reduce trade barriers, since the barriers to trade among the countries in the pact are already low in almost all cases.” Like most trade deals these days, it doesn’t have that much to do with trade in a general sense and it has nothing to do with “free trade.”

This reminds me of an article that Noah Smith wrote a few months back, Free-Market Ideology and the Burden of Proof. It was about tax cuts and regulation reductions and their effects on the economy. He said basically, “Let’s assume that Reagan’s changes really helped the economy in the 1980s; isn’t it likely that making taxes even lower and getting rid of even more regulation will have — at best — a far smaller effect on the economy?” I feel the same way about trade agreements: getting rid of trade barriers in the past was doubtless a good idea. But are we really likely to gain much now? Reducing tariffs from 50% to 5% was a much bigger deal than reducing them from 5% to 0%.

And that’s why when we look at the new trade deals they don’t seem to have much to do with their stated intent. Baker has done everything but run through the streets banging pots to bring attention to this. We aren’t talking “free trade” when “one of the main thrusts of the deal is to increase patent and copyright protections.” That’s not about bringing prices down for consumers — quite the opposite, actually. That’s about providing certain industries with economic protection — industries that have a lot of political power.

There is a cargo cult aspect to this too. Thomas Friedman famously said, “I wrote a column supporting the CAFTA, the Caribbean Free Trade initiative. I didn’t even know what was in it. I just knew two words: free trade.” That’s true of most of the trade deal boosters who don’t have a direct stake in the matter: trade deals helped the economy in the past so they must always be good under all conditions. And in the case of Friedman: the deal didn’t even have to be about free trade — it just had to claim to be about it.

William Jennings Bryan once spoke about how the financial types wanted to “crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” Well, now it is a cross of free trade. And the people advocating it today are no more well informed than the gold standard types were then.

It is well known (among liberals at least), that the economy has done much better under Democratic administrations than under Republicans — going back to World War II. And the difference is big: it’s almost double in terms of GDP growth. But I’ve always been skeptical about the claim. While it is certainly true, it isn’t based upon a lot of data — just 12 presidencies. And besides, I tended to think that the president doesn’t have that big an effect on the economy. But then I read Mark Thoma in The Fiscal Times, The Political Party of the President Matters for the Economy.

Thoma is a liberal, but he’s no bomb thrower. He’s a very careful economist. If it had been just anyone writing such an article, I probably would have passed it by. But instead, I read it, and he makes a very compelling case. He goes through the many ways that presidents do, in fact, effect the economy. It wasn’t all new to me, but it I wasn’t thinking too clearly even about the stuff that I knew. One thing that did surprise me is that because people don’t stay on the Federal Reserve board for very long, both George W Bush and Obama were able to fill it with all their own people. That matters. As Thomas put it, if we had had a Republican in the White House “does anyone doubt that policy would have been much different? Would interest rates still be at the lower bound? Would the Fed’s balance sheet be as large?”

The more obvious way the president matters is in fiscal policy. Democrats approach recessions in ways that actually help: tax cuts for the poor and middle classes; extended unemployment insurance; infrastructure spending. Republicans approach recessions the way they do everything: tax cuts for the rich. Even though “there’s little evidence that cutting taxes on the wealthy spurs economic growth, particularly in a severe recession when the tax reductions mostly end up as idle savings.” Basically, a recession is just an excuse for Republicans to do what they want to do anyway.

What’s more, individuals and businesses are more confident about the economic outlook when the Democrats are in charge. So they spend and invest more. That, I must say, is a bit of a shock to me. If the people know that the economy will do better under the Democrats, why do they ever vote for the Republicans? I understand that turnout is an issue. But if even businesses know it, why hasn’t there been a huge amount of pressure on the Republican Party to change its economic policies?

When put this way, it all seems so clear. The Republicans really are all about the shock doctrine: they don’t care about doing what is best for the economy; they have a set of things they want to do — which they always want to do — and that is what they do. It would be like going to a dentist who only knows how to pull teeth. Before long, you would have no teeth.

If you want to do a little low key activism, you might discuss this issue with people who aren’t much into politics. You don’t have to mention policies. You just have to talk about how they feel about the economy under Democrats and Republicans. Because the last time the economy did reasonably well under a Republican was under Reagan — 30 years ago. And all the Republican Party has offered since are the same policies, only more so. And it hasn’t worked. And it isn’t intended to. It is intended to just take more money away from you and me and give it to the rich.