P. J. O'Rourke's Pizza Boxes Metaphor Explaining the Triumph of Capitalism ( William K. Black )
December 31, 2012
O'Rourke's straw man attacks on Obama
P.J. O'Rourke's column: "Dear Mr. President, Zero-Sum Doesn't Add Up" claims that the following metaphor explains President Obama's world view and policy choices: "life [is] like a pizza, where if some people have too many slices, other people have to eat the pizza box."
A zero-sum interaction occurs when one party's gain must exactly match the other party's loss.
O'Rourke creates two, related straw man positions that he falsely ascribes to Obama.
"But the worst thing that you've done internationally is what you've done domestically. You sent a message to America in your re-election campaign. Therefore you sent a message to the world. The message is that we live in a zero-sum universe.
There is a fixed amount of good things. Life is a pizza. If some people have too many slices, other people have to eat the pizza box. You had no answer to Mitt Romney's argument for more pizza parlors baking more pizzas. The solution to our problems, you said, is redistribution of the pizzas we've got--with low-cost, government-subsidized pepperoni somehow materializing as the result of higher taxes on pizza-parlor owners."
O'Rourke is a deficit hawk even in response to the Great Recession
Obama's central economic policy was actually to spur economic growth -- a positive-sum policy. To spur growth, Obama proposed a program of moderate stimulus, which House Republicans and conservative ("Blue Dog"
Democrats reduced to modest levels that did not come close to replacing the enormous drop in public sector demand caused by the Great Recession's severe rise in unemployment. Obama's policy positive-sum growth policy, even though it was weakened by his conservative opposition's negative-sum policies, produced what UMKC macro-economists (and other progressive economists) predicted -- modest growth. The eurozone's negative-sum austerity policy, as our macro-economists predicted, threw the eurozone back into a gratuitous recession.
in full: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-k-black/p-j-orourkes-pizza-boxes-_b_2387914.html
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