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Reducing wealth and income inequality is an outcome, not a tangible goal. It's the same as ending police violence against black people. That is actually a more

• makomk 4y ago
  To the kind of left-wing populist involved in things like Occupy Wall Street, reducing wealth and income inequality is the tangible goal that they believe achieves the outcomes they want. Their thinking seems to be roughly like this: there is a fixed amount of wealth in the economy that is sufficient for all ordinary people to live a good life, but the super-wealthy have siphoned off much of that wealth due to their greed and that's why ordinary people are suffering, and the only solution to that is to forcibly redistribute that stolen wealth back to the people. Any attempts to make things more complicated than this, any talk about rising tides lifting all boats or suggestion it won't work, is just a propaganda trick from the super-rich.
  • ryandrake 4y ago
    The "rising tide" meme never made much sense to me. The economy is not like the ocean. A rising ocean affects all boats equally, but a rising economy does not affect all participants equally. The gains from rising economies tend to be disproportionately captured by the already-wealthy, and the losses from falling economies tend to be disproportionately borne by the poor.
  • WalterBright 4y ago
    The wealthy in a free market get that way by creating wealth, not transferring it from poor people.