Shooting At A Birds Tale
I am hearing an uncomfortable and persistent message from both sides of the political universe:
This may be true...a cow sucks for transportation but tastes just fine. So what are we to make of this fake equality between prosperity and de-enhancement of personal rights? Does prosperity and its manic pursuit make us richer than inclusion and diversity of wealth and income? Or is our present system of allocation a zero sum game except for the "levitation effect" of opportunity and inclusion? Looking at the data and a few graphs tells a very clear story:
"The figure and its data come from Janet Gornick, the director of a CUNY research centre on international inequality. The dark-blue lines tell a now-familiar tale: America boasts the highest post-tax-and-transfer income inequality of any highly developed country in the world. The metric at play is a number between 0 and 1 known as the Gini coefficient. In a hypothetical country with a coefficient of 0, everyone has exactly the same income, while a nation with a coefficient of 1.0 is home to one fat cat who takes everything while everyone else earns nil. At 0.42, America’s level of post-tax-and-transfer inequality outranks Israel, Britain and Canada, and dwarfs the figures in Japan and Scandinavia."
Now, about that zero sum game...it won't win the Warren Buffet bracket, but the returns could be considerably higher with a tweaked model of our economy. Equality of opportunity and freedom certainly have some non-zero value. The challenge of the working folks is to enhance this value and make it the "point of the spear". Be happy.
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