I’m glad to see the debate that Max Sawicky has touched off with his review of Steve Teles and Brink Lindsey’s new book, The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality. The book, and the resulting debate, raises the question: can an attack on rent-seeking by the rich be the basis for a progressive agenda? This is a debate I’ve played some role in getting started, with several books, most recently Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer.

In my view, it’s an area of enormous potential, and it presents the only plausible path forward for progressive politics in the US and elsewhere.

The basic logic of the argument is that markets are pretty much infinitely malleable. The government sets rules that can lead to relatively equal outcomes or can lead to enormous inequality. In the last four decades, the Right has managed to use its control of the rule-setting process to engineer an enormous upward redistribution of income. The process involved the leadership of both political parties, so it’s certainly not a story in which right-wing Republicans exclusively can be seen as the villains.