[mjp]

Prosperity requires economic progress, which requires increased efficiency in the production of goods, which requires increasing productivity of labor, which requires an expanding system of division of labor, which requires a cause effect relationship between action and result, which requires economic inequality, which is natural and normal in a free and rational society.

Economic inequality is less extreme under freedom of competition and opportunity, and free market in labor, than under coercion and government interventionism.

[untenured]

I think you put your finger on it. The rise of the cronyist/special-privilege state has done more to cement inequality than any other trend, including immigration, of the last 50 years. The 18th and 19th centuries saw the tearing down of aristocratic, guild and other barriers to free competition in much of the Western world, with a resultant history-changing explosion of innovation and the first major decrease in the inequality that had been around forever.The one place where that innovation is most salient now is in high technology, where cronyism is still most distant.

All of the hands-out pleading and palm greasing of recent decades, yielding occupational licensing, subsidies and other state-mandated limits on competition and the division of labor, is in the process of undoing a lot of that progress. It is cronyism that unites the phenomena of Elizabeth Warren’s securing a tenured position at Harvard while flipping houses, and the bailouts of 2008-9.