The Inequality Obsession

[Conservative]

The Inequality Obsession

If it were learned that the car driven by the average American is 10 times more likely to burst into flames than the car driven by the richest 1%, what should the policy response be? Should it be to mandate that cars driven by the rich burst into flames more often?

Income inequality is a strange obsession, at least to the extent the obsessives focus their policy responses on trying to adjust the condition of the top 1% rather than improving the opportunities of everyone else.

Tax reform promises to improve the opportunities of all while sponsoring less tax evasion, less distortion of investment priorities and less politically corrupting pursuit of loopholes, all of which are the certain and inevitable corollary of high tax rates enacted to salve inequality neuralgia.

One can only wonder how much faster progress on tax reform or school choice would have been if the political capital devoted to income inequality had been devoted to fighting entrenched institutional resistance to useful reforms.

How society stimulates the creation and distribution of income is an important topic—so important that one could wish it were less infected with the pathology Freud diagnosed as "group spirit" and which he said was ultimately founded on envy.