You've left a few things out :-), like fat-sustainable deficits, but on the whole I've done you wrong. Sorry.
My main point was that sympathy for the poor, Third World or domestic, can be and often is less radical and more congenial to the status quo than a pro-labor stance. The reverse seems less true, but PEN-L and LBO-Talk are not dominated by the latter phenomenon.
> And if I thought (as the EPI folks do) that trade protection is a good way
> of equalizing the distribution of income within the United States at a low
> cost (instead of restrictions on imports of, say, apparel being a way to
> transfer roughly $14 billion a year into the pockets of apparel company
> bosses and shareholders; roughly $2 billion a year into the pockets of
> apparel workers; at a price of reducing consumer welfare by some $30
> billion a year), I would be on the EPI's side their as well...
I'm not prepared to argue with you about the numbers.
One point I can try out is that to the individual in question, a dollar in the form of additional literal, real earnings is worth more than a dollar increase in real spending power by means of price changes or tax-financed transfer devices.
The reason is that more dignity attaches to earnings than purchasing power and government-derived income. In this respect, producerism is a salient response, if limited in certain other respects, to paternalism. As you might guess, I'm in the business of reinventing populism.
MBS