Remember the tense final weeks of the presidential election? During the final stretch, John McCain’s most vocal criticism of Barack Obama was that the Illinois senator’s tax plan intended to “spread the wealth around.” Across the country, voters recoiled in horror upon hearing these words, for as McCain made blatantly clear, redistributive wealth policies are “one of the tenets of socialism.”

The ‘S’ word! Mothers baking apple pies and fathers grilling 4 of July hot dogs run to their bomb shelters as this ugly word rears its head. Obama already “pall[s] around with terrorists” according to Sarah Palin, and “harbor[s] un-American views,” according to Michele Bachman; now with his redistributive tax policies, the grisly specter of the soviet hammer and sickle looms forebodingly over the white house.

Yet, like all political doublespeak, McCain and the Republican Party’s attack on redistributive wealth policies have a major flaw. The Marxist scholar G.A. Cohen writes that capitalist society only sees one side of the story regarding the freedom that accompanies ownership of private property. Sure, ownership of land grants the owner the freedom to use the land as he wishes, but it “no less necessarily withdraws liberty
from those who do not own it.” Private property has a flipside; it is actually a distribution of freedom and unfreedom.
Similarly, when McCain attacked Obama for wanting to “spread the wealth around,” he evidently only saw one side of the story. The average American voter usually associates the phrase, “redistribution of wealth” with social-welfarist Robin Hood tax policies.

But taking wealth from the rich and giving to the poor is not the only way to redistribute wealth; Government policies that concentrate wealth in limited hands are also redistributive. With the Bush mantra, “privatize and deregulate, baby”, the last eight years of Republican dominance in government have led to some of the largest redistributions of wealth in history.

Let’s start where all things seem to start: the Iraq war. This past summer, the Congressional
Budget Office estimated that since 2003, the US government has spent $100 billion on funding the 180,000 privately contracted personnel in Iraq. Private contract employees now outnumber US troops in Iraq. One out of five dollars spent on the war go to funding these companies. Forty cents out of every tax dollar winds up in the pockets of corporate contractors like Blackwater, DynCorp, and Kellogg Brown & Root. The privatization of military operations in Iraq is not the invisible hand of the free market, nor is it trickle down economics: these contracts represent the deliberate aggrandizement of private companies by the US government with your tax dollars. What is the difference between these contracts and programs such as welfare? In both cases, the government is “spreading the wealth around”: the only question
is to how many hands is the wealth spread?

Now consider the recent crisis on Wall Street. Of the original five largest Wall Street companies: Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs: only the latter two remain. Bank of America has taken over mortgage lender Countrywide and Merrill Lynch, JP Morgan bought brokerage firm Bear Stearns as well as Washington Mutual and UK’s Barclays acquired the bulk of Lehman
Bros.

The fact of the matter is that now, very few companies own an untold quantity of financial assets; the wealth of Wall Street has become grotesquely concentrated. In response, Congress passed a $700 billion bail out plan in October to purchase bad mortgage-backed assets, and inject capital into credit markets and banks. What is this bailout plan, backed by citizens’ tax dollars, if not a redistributive wealth policy: if not the government directly intervening to “spread the wealth around” in an economy of immensely
concentrated asset ownership? If Republicans like John McCain are against redistributive wealth policies, why did his party cooperate in the legislation the bail out plan?

Evidently, Republicans are not against “spreading the wealth around,” since the policies they promote are heavily redistributive. The fact that Republicans such as Representative Paul Broun still criticize Obama for his redistributive wealth policies reveals a gross inconsistency in the party’s ideological foundations. If these next years are truly the Republican Party’s journey through the wilderness, they must acknowledge that they cannot validly reject Obama’s statement that health care is a “right for every American” while supporting other interventionist government policies.