Here’s to hoping Joe Biden remembers his ‘you can’t eat equality’ line

Jan 18, Robert Lawson, who directs the Bridwell Institute for Economic Freedom in the Cox School of Business at SMU Dallas, for a piece reminding incoming President Joe Biden that he once said: “You can’t eat equality.” Published in the Orange County Register and affiliates of the Southern California News Group with the heading Here’s to hoping Joe Biden remembers his ‘you can’t eat equality’ line: http://bit.ly/392fmPv

Hillary Clinton’s defeat by Donald Trump in 2016 generated a lot of soul searching among Democrats confused about how they could lose to such a loathsome creature. Predictably, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of the growing left-wing of the party called for more efforts to fight inequality, social injustice, racism, globalism, and whatever other –ism of the day motivates their always-outraged, activist followers on any given day.

Clinton seemed content to put on her tin-foil hat blaming the nefarious forces of Russian Facebook bots instead of her own lackluster campaign. Meanwhile, among the Democrats, only Joe Biden seemed to get it. The then-vice president correctly diagnosed the problem to be that the Democrats had run too far to the left blaming racism, sexism, and inequality for every problem in America and had lost touch with the party’s traditional jobs and opportunity message. At one point he quipped, “you can’t eat equality. You know?”

By Robert Lawson

Now with the end of the coronavirus pandemic perhaps in sight and as the memory of four long years of foolish presidential tweets recedes in our minds, we should ask, what kinds of policies will we get from President Biden? His electoral strategy, a sound one as it turns out, was to run as “not Trump,” and there were essentially no concrete new policies proposed during his campaign.

The dejected candidate Joe Biden who said, “you can’t eat equality,” knew that the Democratic Party’s embrace of radical ideas, even to the point of openly advocating for socialism, was bad politics. I hope President Joe Biden knows also that it is bad economics.

But if there is an Achilles’ Heel to economic freedom, it is that a relatively free economy will create opportunities for some to amass great wealth and economic inequality may grow. I say “may” grow, because the academic research on this question is mixed. One recent study however, written by Donatella Saccone in Applied Economic Letters, found that countries with more economic freedom had smaller income shares for the bottom 80 percent of the population and higher income shares for the top 20 percent. This kind of study certainly supports the far left’s view that the benefits of American capitalism are not being shared equally.

But remember you can’t actually eat equality. In response to that paper, I co-authored a study with economist James Dean at West Virginia University, which is forthcoming in Economics and Business Letters, that looked at the income levels of the bottom and top of the income distribution as they relate to economic freedom. We found that countries with more economic freedom have higher income levels in every single 10 percent grouping from the poorest 10 percent to the richest 10 percent. For the lowest 10 percent, one additional unit of economic freedom corresponded to an additional $305 per person; for the next 10 percent, $479; $565 for the third group, and so on for every decile.

At the end of the day, voters have to ask themselves if they would rather have a larger share of a small pie or a smaller share of a big one, especially when the latter will give them more to eat. I suspect most people would rather have a bigger slice of pie, period, and will vote for the candidate who promises them the best shot at getting it.

Let’s hope President Joe Biden, the same Joe Biden who correctly diagnosed the problem in 2016, governs in a way that increases the size of the pie rather than just redistributes a shrinking one.

Robert Lawson holds the Jerome M. Fullinwider Centennial Chair in Economic Freedom and directs the Bridwell Institute for Economic Freedom in the Cox School of Business at SMU Dallas. He is co-author of the 2019 book, “Socialism Sucks.”