How Free Markets Can Address Income Inequality
13th January 2019
This is a good example of what Scott Adams calls ‘talking past the sale’. If somebody gets in your face and shouts ‘WHAT ARE YOU DOING ABOUT INCOME INEQUALITY?’ the automatic response of most people is to start fumbling around trying to think of what it is you’re doing about income inequality as if it were obvious that income inequality were ipso facto some bad thing that needs to be fixed.
The correct response, of course, is to ask the shouter ‘Why should I be doing something about income inequality?’ since (a) you didn’t create it and (b) no demonstration has been made that it’s a bad thing. But that’s the way the Usual Suspects deal with their agenda: They just proceed on the assumption that their grievances are fully justified and therefore the discussion (using the term loosely) is about how to satisfy them.
There is a lot of income inequality between me and Bill Gates, because I didn’t see an opportunity in the computer field when I was in college, as he did, and I didn’t drop out of Harvard, as he did, to pursue it by working sixty-hour weeks for twenty years, as he did, to build a company to take advantage of that. Is that his fault, or mine? Or maybe nobody’s? In any event, I don’t see that I have any legitimate beef that he’s one of the top ten richest people in the world and I’m not.
Democrats, of course, don’t see it that way. Since there’s no way yet to make me clever and workaholic, their solution is to steal most of his money (thus ensuring that his decades of cleverness and hard work gained him very little) and give it — not to me, of course, because I’m a white man, but to some prole who can barely use a computer much less create an industry to provide them for everybody. As one can plainly see, this guarantees that in the future we will have a lot more ignorant proles and a lot less clever hard-working people like Bill Gates.
But those whose wealth and power depend on harvesting the votes of the ignorant proles (and, hardest to comprehend, the contributions of people like Bill Gates) don’t worry about that, because no matter how bad it is for the rest of us, they’ll be doing very well indeed, as will their children. (Yeah, Chelsea, I’m looking at YOU.)