Income Inequality Is Worse Now Than It Was In 1774 - Even factoring in slavery s

[Politico]

Yet homeless people receive better healthcare in an emergency room than President Eisenhower and Nelson Rockefeller would have received in the 1950s, the average person enjoys a higher standard of living than the wealthiest person in a number of countries committed to command-and-control elements, the poorest enjoy a higher standard of living than the average person in most countries, etc.

An individual's utility should NOT be a function of the difference between their income and other people who earn more than them. If somebody has that mentality, they're beating themselves up instead of enjoying life (after all, there can only be one person who is THE richest, and even that person will have extreme implicit/explicit costs that go hand-in-hand with the extreme benefits they enjoy).

Obviously there are quite a few who are struggling and cannot enjoy themselves right now, but a defeatist attitude has never led to happiness for anybody. It is not about where we are, but about where we are going next. Things will get better. The pie is not fixed; the pie must grow, and the left-wing, defeatist mentality that is infecting our society must be stopped.

[Politico]

We're better off to grow the pot than to divide it.

Or you grow it as much as you can and then divide it to an extent. There's no reason both can't be done.

Economists have established an essential trade-off between efficiency and equity. Furthermore, to use the words of Milton Friedman:

"A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both."

"Whether it is in the slums of New Delhi or in the affluence of Las Vegas, it simply isn't fair that there should be any losers. Life is unfair — there is nothing fair about one man being born blind and another man being born with sight. There is nothing fair about one man being born of a wealthy parent and one of an indigenous parent. There is nothing fair about Mohammed Ali having been born with a skill that enables him to make millions of dollars one night. There is nothing fair about Marleena Detrich having great legs that we all want to watch. There is nothing fair about any of that. But on the other hand, don't you think a lot of people who like to look at Marleena Detrich's legs benefited from nature's unfairness in producing a Marleena Detrich. What kind of a world would it be if everybody was an absolute identical duplicate of anybody else. You might as well destroy the whole world and just keep one specimen left for a museum. In the same way, it's unfair that Muhammed Ali should be a great fighter and should be able to earn millions. But would it not be even more unfair to the people who like to watch him if you said that in the pursuit of some abstract idea of equality we're not going to let Muhammed Ali get more for one nights fight than the lowest man on the totem pole can get for a days unskilled work on the docks. You can do that but the result of that would be to deny people the opportunity to watch Mohammad Ali. I doubt very much he would be willing to subject himself to the kind of fights he's gone through if he were to get the pay of an unskilled docker."