Here is Morgan Freeman on income inequality and racism in America.
Is Morgan Freeman a liberal? Judging from his answer alone (and the fact that youngconservatives.com posted the video), it seems like the answer is no. But there are two very strong predictors of liberalism which he owns, one is being black and the other is being a Hollywood actor. This builds a very strong presumption of liberalism which any other more specific factors have to tug against. Most likely scenario: he’s a liberal who deviates from the popular liberal tone on this subject.
Freeman stops short of saying what conservatives seem to believe, and I think is correct, which is that racism these days is overblown. Instead he says that the media exacerbates the problem by talking about it so much, which is different from saying that there is no problem.
Is Freeman right about income inequality? He says that we need a middle class to buy things which the rich produce. Without a middle class you don’t have consumers. This is a common answer for non-economists to give, less common for economists, although I’ve heard it. There is something like what he said that has a stronger economic foundation (aggregate demand shortages). But the dollar bills that are not in the middle-classes hands – demanding goods and services - have not disappeared off the face of the planet. For many decades we had income inequality and we still had demand and production and employment. And we’ve had business cycles for two centuries during both income inequality and income equality periods.
I think this explanation is so appealing to people because inequality is a villain. And whenever there is a story where the villain is the cause of something bad, we buy into that story. Kind of like the people who think global warming or GMOs are killing the bees. There isn’t a single bit of evidence for it, but global warming and GMOs are also villains. All we need to believe that our villains are behind some problem is for it not to be absolutely impossible.
