Three Cheers for Income Inequality

Flopping Aces ^ | 05-30-12 | Vince

[Starman417]

One can’t but hear the almost daily drumbeat from the left about how unequal things are in the United States. There is an income disparity between the haves and the have-nots where Wall Street bankers take millions of dollars home to their Greenwich mansions while millions of others work for minimum wage and can’t afford their own home, never mind something resembling a mini-Versailles.

That may be true, but the reality is, inequality exists today, inequality has always existed, and inequality will always exist. Why? Because people are simply different. People have different motivations, different skillsets, different temperaments, different passions, different work ethics… essentially, everyone is different. As such, why does it make sense that everyone would be equal? It doesn’t.

It doesn’t matter if it’s at work or at school or volunteering for a church fundraiser, different people perform differently. In school I remember friends who earned straight A’s with seemingly little or no effort while I struggled to get Bs or Cs. Of course, even though I recognized how challenged I was, I rarely did the work I knew was necessary to merit anything other than a passing grade. I always told myself that I could have earned straight A’s had I applied myself. Maybe I was right, maybe I was wrong, but the reality is that I didn’t care enough about earning A’s to do the work to earn them.

And so it goes in life. Most people get out of it what they put into it. The United States is a nation where, for the most part, people have the opportunity to achieve the success they seek if only they work hard enough and smart enough to get it.

No nation of any size has ever created an environment where everyone was equal in outcomes. Lots have tied however from Revolutionary France to the Soviet Union to Communist China. Economic equality has been tried on our shores as well, from the Mayflower Compact to New York’s Oneida Community to the 1960s communes. All failed to achieve anything resembling a sustainable equality and are gone, other than Communist China, which is anything but egalitarian in any sense of the word.

Today in the United States it’s fashionable for union activists and college students to protest the inequality in society where the rich get richer and the rest of us get poorer. The problem with that logic is that while the rich have gotten richer, so has everyone else. Does it matter if the rich are 25 times richer than the poor if everyone is twice as well off as they used to be? Poverty used to mean that someone had little if any food and possibly a ramshackle place to live if they were lucky enough to have a roof over their head at all. Today, poverty in America means something quite different… Refrigerators, air conditioners, televisions, DVD players and cell phones.

Indeed, in America today poor people have far more in common with rich people than perhaps any point in human history. In 15th Century the King of France had hundreds of courtiers whose jobs were to do everything from cook his food, put his clothes on him to literally wiping his behind when he was done with his business. Paupers not only could never afford the King’s luxury, they didn’t have access to the same basic amenities in life from nutrition to leisure time to entertainment. The discrepancy was not something that could ordinarily be erased by hard work or ingenuity. In this respect Royal France was not so different than most periods of human history. Similar disparities existed in Cleopatra’s Egypt, Victorian England and Tsarist Russia as well.

[spel_grammer_an_punct_polise]

"but the reality is, inequality exists today, inequality has always existed, and inequality will always exist. Why? Because people are simply different. People have different motivations, different skillsets, different temperaments, different passions, different work ethics… essentially, everyone is different. As such, why does it make sense that everyone would be equal? It doesn’t."

but the reality is, inequality exists today, inequality has always existed, and inequality will always exist. Why? Because people are simply different. People have different motivations, different skillsets, different temperaments, different passions, different work ethics… essentially, everyone is different. As such, why does it make sense that everyone would be equal? It doesn’t. There are yet others whose only skill is to sit around and wait for their welfare checks.

I fixed it.

[marsh2]

It was not all that long ago when Edwardian England showed the huge disparity between the wealthy and the working class. Victorian era industrialization eventually fostered a good sized middle class of merchants, but it was the freedom of the American spirit of invention and entrepreneurial opportunity that really created a booming middle class.

Increasingly, that entrepreneuralism is choked in fees, restrictions and regulations. The merchant class is also being choked with fees and regulations. The middle class is rapidly disappearing in the United States as more and more people drop down into the lower economic strata of the working class abyss.

It is interesting to see that the “green” economy, sustainable development, climate change all have the aim of putting the middle class back into the lower class box. Supposedly, the middle class lifestyle has too great of a footprint on the environment to be sustainable. Certainly with the third world’s standard of living being raised, the European and American standard of living has to be reoriented downward to a less consumptive level for sustainability. It is not possible for the third world to rise, without the industrial world dropping back.

We are going backward to the Victorian era and perhaps the Edwardian era. The middle class will be a very small sector. The working class will support the wealthy once again.

Just look at gas prices, food prices, utility rates and taxes. Inflation is moving the middle class rapidly downward. Look at unemployment and debt - more downward pressure forces. The socialists, fabian greens, globalists all want what we see happening -——> a two class system.

[Graewoulf]

Income inequality is the basis for the desire to work harder.

Income Disparity is the way a society keeps score of who is the most fit to survive, just ask any highly paid athlete.

BTW, are the highest paid athletes the most highly paid workers in the World? On an hourly basis, of course.