At Belmont Club, Richard Fernandez says of the Marxist Piven’s philosophy:
The problem with Piven’s theory is that events in Europe have shown those “major economic reforms” to be unsustainable, if not actually ruinous. However, she appears to believe that the European crisis is only apparent, being the result of the Man hiding the Stash. Find that stash and things become sustainable again.
I think this fallacy deserves its own name because I think this is the central economic fallacy of leftists in general. Whether we are talking about unions, public workers, redistributionists, etc., there is always the implicit idea that somewhere there is this big pile of money that the rich business people are hoarding away like a squirrel with its winter store of nuts. Leftists tell everyone that all problems can be solved if we just use the force of the state to threaten the squirrels to give up their nuts.
The problem is that rich people don’t own a lot of nuts, they own nut producing trees, i.e., rich people don’t have a stash of cash, they own assets that can, if managed properly, produce a stream of income. Worse, for the leftists, those assets usually provide jobs for the majority of the population, so you really can’t alter their use too much. If you cut the tree down to get the nuts, what are going to eat next year?
) The Founders knew this, and built a central government of limited powers for exactly this reason, with the mercantilist, politically-connected monopolies of Britain very much in mind. In the mid-20th Century, Mancur Olson, James Buchanan and George Stigler, among many others, documented and demonstrated that the regulatory state will be in the hands of the supposedly regulated parties based solely on the incentives and knowledge of all the parties.