Ending Inequality As We Know It
The biggest progressive goal ever for a time gone insane.
“My Daddy makes four thousand dollars a week!”
There it was. My earliest introduction to income inequality, sitting on the dock of a bay at summer camp with a group of fellow ten-year-old boys, back in the heart of the Reagan era.
Never mind the appropriateness of a kid that age being privy to that knowledge (yet another wrinkle of that crazy time). While we can all imagine — resent? admire? — the lifestyle of that kid’s family on that income in that era, this was, perhaps, the first time Young Me began to innocently ask the $107 trillion question (the total GDP of the world, by one reckoning):
Why does economic inequality exist?
Such a childlike question, huh? I think, whenever I asked it, the more conservative dads of the time fulminated about the perils of Communism — this was the Cold War era, after all — and economic redistribution and such (if you’re wondering why this offended them so much, this might be the answer). Which got me thinking about the basic societal notion we’ve all bought into: you know, the one that says certain people are entitled to greater rewards in exchange for greater contributions to society.
