Some of the remedies fit more comfortably than others into what's recently been called "libertarian populism." What every suggestion has in common is addressing unfair gains that accrue to elites, who have arranged or manipulated the rules of the game in order to inflate their status.

The financial sector: As Kevin Drum once put it, "The mammoth profits of the financial industry are bad for the economy because they suck money away from other activities with actual value. They're doubly bad because they were built on, and encouraged, vast amounts of fraud and corruption."

As well, financial-industry profits are increasingly disconnected from the success of the economy. And if there was ever any doubt that Wall Street banks have grown too big to regulate, in part through the implicit subsidy they receive as so-called "too big to fail" institutions, it vanished during the recent cycle of financial crisis and bailouts (both acknowledged and hidden). The rules of the game are broken, and the amount of lobbying done by the big banks, the revolving door between the public and private sector, and the serial failure of the state to prosecute wrongdoing are further signs that successful reform will require breaking up the big banks.



Housing policy: Tax law ought to treat renters and owners equitably, rather than permitting mortgage interest but not rent to be deducted. In high-rent cities, permitting more construction at a lower cost would be a huge boon to most renters. Matt Yglesias has made this point over and over again with respect to the building-height limit in Washington, D.C. In suburbs, there is a much higher demand among working-class families for apartments than there is supply, because incumbent homeowners, fearing crime and traffic, almost never want multifamily units built near their neighborhoods. Eliminating all zoning laws isn't the right fit for every community, but moderate free-market reforms that reduce incumbent veto power would benefit poor and working class households.

Corporate welfare: The Export-Import Bank, ethanol subsidies, sugar subsidies, the part of the Pentagon budget that is protecting the interests of American-run multinationals more than taxpayers: End it all, along with the countless other examples of corporate welfare coursing through our system. There is so much of it that one could go on for pages about this problem alone.

Teacher incentives: One of several factors that prevents public education from performing as well as it might is a system of incentives for teachers, defended by powerful teachers' unions, that makes it (a) very difficult to fire the worst teachers and (b) very difficult to incentivize better teaching with pay, because so much of compensation is based upon seniority (along with masters degrees in education that don't seem to do much to improve teacher quality). Merit based pay need not be tied to test scores. In fact, I'd much prefer a system that empowered principals to reward the best teachers in their schools from a larger total pool of salary money.