Inequality matters little

We are being told that growing income inequality will be a major issue in the 2016 presidential race, such that even those mean-spirited Republicans will need to address it in some way.

That the gap between haves and have-nots (or simply between the super-rich and the rest of us) has grown in recent decades isn't in much dispute, even if not to the extent Occupy Wall Street types claim and scholars disagree over the causes.

That said, we are still left to hover back to several issues that have made our inequality debate somewhat nonsensical.

The first of these is that we have no understanding of what a proper distribution of wealth would look like, a lack which tends to leave us in the unhelpful "we know it when we see it" position when seeking to identify unacceptable disparities. Indeed, to say that income inequality has grown by "Y" amount since year "X" doesn't tell us much, unless we assume that year "X" featured for some reason a preferable distribution of what there is to distribute.

We can't, in short, and without some agreed-upon conception of the good, confidently identify the bad. If at least some inequality is inevitable, how much is too much? And how are we to know?

Rather than tell us what a proper distribution of wealth would look like, the left simply argues that whatever disparities in wealth exist at any point are too great, suggesting that the grievance lies less with increases in inequality and more with the very concept of inequality of condition inherent to market-based economies. The hunch is that income inequality could somehow be dramatically reduced in the next few years and the left would still be unhappy with what remained.

This unhappiness with market-generated inequality often leads contemporary liberals into an intellectual cul-de-sac in which the only solution becomes collectivist programs that seek to eradicate it altogether. Indeed, because it never actually takes the step of identifying an ideal distribution of wealth, the left is left with nothing but the socialist vision of the classless society administered by a monstrous state that abolishes private property (and liberty with it).

This is also why the political right's understanding of inequality proves in many ways more useful. The right not only tolerates higher levels of inequality but embraces such outcomes as salutary consequences of individual freedom.

For the right, precisely because real human beings--rather than the abstract classes like "rich" and "poor" favored by leftist intellectuals--naturally possess vastly different abilities, character and ambition, anything approaching equality of outcome would be unnatural and thus highly suspect.

As seen from the vantage point of contemporary conservatives and libertarians (and "classical liberals" before them, like the American founders), different levels of wealth are a consequence of what James Madison called our "unequal faculties of acquiring property," which government is obliged to protect.

In this Madisonian conception, there is nothing inherently unjust with some people having more money, even lots more, than others, so long as it represents the hard-earned fruits of our labor; or with someone having significantly less money if that condition (however lamentable) is deserved, as we all know it sometimes is. The right is unwilling to pay the price of lost liberty in order to move us closer to the leftist goal of equality of condition.

We need to believe that we get what we deserve in life, if only because believing otherwise is the road to ruin.

To talk purely in abstract terms about rich and poor is thus meaningless because detached from real people with real qualities who happen to be rich or poor (or sometimes both in the course of a lifetime).

In the end, the actual level of inequality itself doesn't matter much. Nor, necessarily, do increases or decreases over a given time period. This is because people generally don't care if others do better than they do so long as they still see themselves as doing well.

We wouldn't hold it against a friend, for instance, if he got a bigger raise than we did, although it would increase the level of inequality between us. And the same logic applies to those millions of strangers in our national economy who might experience more economic success than we do.

No, an increase in inequality only matters if it occurs because those in the middle and bottom are going backward or are stuck in place. But the seriousness of that circumstance would not be mitigated in any way by impairing the progress of the rich. A market economy isn't a zero-sum game in which gains for one quartile automatically represent losses for others.

Money can, after all, be easily taken away from the wealthy, but doing so doesn't necessarily benefit the poor. If it did, the Soviet Union would still be with us and its people prospering in their classless utopia.

A reasonable argument can be made that in recent decades the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. But the former hasn't caused the latter.

Which is also why "soaking the rich," however emotionally satisfying for some, won't make the poor any less poor or numerous. Or help our struggling middle class, either.

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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

Editorial on 02/23/2015

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