An Excellent Description Of The Difference

The main political issue of our time isn’t whether markets are always right but whether they are always good. Adam Smith, in “The Wealth of Nations,” advocated free trade based on his theory that the market’s invisible hand would provide for the greater wealth of nations across the social spectrum. This moral vision was long ago abandoned by free marketeers in favor of another theory from the founding era: the inviolability of property rights. But we know that capitalism has historically followed a pattern of boom and bust, a cycle whose impact has been mitigated—in the spirit of Smith’s moral philosophy, and for economic conditions he could not have foreseen—by civic intervention, otherwise called government regulation and progressive taxation. This is the fundamental difference between Democrats and Republicans. Democrats tend to believe that, in the light of our long experience with boom and bust, fiscal policy should provide social and economic equity for the American people. Republicans seem to believe that fiscal policy should protect the acquisition of wealth, however skewed the distribution of wealth may become and however small the number of citizens protected. The difference is abundantly apparent in California today, where the Democratic legacy of equitable distribution of wealth, through public education especially, but also in many other areas, was long ago sacrificed on the altar of property rights in Proposition 13.

Dee E. Andrews
Professor of History
California State University, East Bay
San Francisco, Calif.