Some income inequality comes from people working harder than others, some from people working just as hard in jobs that the market has put a premium on as others do in jobs for which this is not the case (e.g. professional athletes vs. special forces operators), some comes from corruption or abuse of the law to create market advantage (e.g. Congress exempting itself from insider-trading laws, or managers giving each other pay-packages without any real relationship to delivering shareholder value — if you doubt this is done, remember what “golden parachute” means — or abusive uses of patent law, or suborning Congress or state legislatures to create unfair market advantages), and some from ancestral income inequality from any of these causes.
This is one area in which it is important for the right to oppose the left not simply by turning their schema of “rich bad, poor good” upside down, but by actually rejecting the schema entirely. Becoming rich or maintaining wealth by working hard at an honest job or by investing well, by offering a good product or service at fair prices or by managing a company so as to deliver good shareholder value without corrupting the political process or the market to do it, are all praiseworthy. Becoming rich by abusing a fiduciary position — be it the insider-trading Congressman, the CEO who drove shareholder value into the ground, but did just fine for himself because his bonuses weren’t based on actual shareholder value or his “golden parachute” payed out when he was booted, or the sort of investment banker who calls his clients “muppets” and manages their portfolios for the benefit of his own bonus, not their wealth — is morally contemptible.
Likewise among the poor are those who are praiseworthy — the honest laborer, the monk or nun, the struggling artist who works a part-time job to keep body and soul together while painting, composing, trying to break into acting — and those who are blameworthy, the disability grifters, the folks for whom the subsidies for out-of-wedlock births have become a way of life, the genuinely lazy.
We need to completely reject the left’s schema that attaches moral worth to income levels qua income levels and frets about income inequality.
There is indeed a problem with the income distribution in America, and it is that the dishonest, whether rich or poor, are raking in too much of the income, while too little of it goes to the honest.
There is indeed a problem with the income distribution in America, and it is that the dishonest, whether rich or poor, are raking in too much of the income, while too little of it goes to the honest.”
That deserves repeating. The left work hard at *not* making moral distinctions. For them, a thief is “good” if he gives them money or furthers their cause, and an honest man is *bad* if he works against them.