Well, there is. Thanks to legalized corruption ( lobbying ) the rich are able to twist laws and regulations more and more to their advantage. This is self feeding process and the final outcome does not look nice at all.
"Therefore forcing absolute equality on everyone is a moral hazard."
Nice try at twisting the line, who is talking about absolute equality here? You know there are all kinds of shades between black and white.
Inequality and corruption are different things. It's like there used to be a catchphrase "sex and violence", piling together things that clearly don't go together
> Thanks to legalized corruption ( lobbying ) the rich are able to twist laws and regulations more and more to their advantage.
What you are describing is regulatory capture, and you don't have to be against wealth inequality in order to be against this. This is common ground between traditional conservatism and traditional liberalism.
> ...who is talking about absolute equality here?
The principled/moral argument goes something like this:
- Wealth inequality is a symptom of an unjust system.
- We see wealth inequality.
- Therefore, we *must* have an unjust system which
created it.
- Therefore, we should *correct for injustice in the
system* by creating laws X, Y, Z to bring about
greater equality. )
Instead, you seem to be arguing that:
- Wealth inequality is undesirable for some unstated
reason.
- We see wealth inequality.
- We would like to reduce wealth inequality for some
unstated reason.
- Therefore, we should implement some laws Q, R, and S
to reduce wealth inequality (presumably to one of
your "shades between black and white").
The first argument is a moral argument. It says "wealth inequality is bad." When confronted with the fact that no two people start out in the same place in this life, it can fall back to "So? that doesn't mean they should be stuck with where they started, because wealth inequality is bad!" When confronted with the fact that freedom means people with different values being allowed to make choices with different outcomes, it can argue against that freedom, because it considers Wealth Equality to be a virtue.
The second argument is an argument of degrees. To what degree is wealth inequality acceptable, and at what degree does it become unacceptable? That's not a moral argument. It's lost its fallback position of morality. The person making the argument has already agreed with the principle that in some cases, under some circumstances, wealth inequality is acceptable. Now we're just arguing about where the line should be.
Reasonable people can disagree about where the line should be in an argument of degrees, but neither person can claim a moral high ground in such an argument, because they aren't disagreeing in principle.
You should either strengthen your position by making the moral argument, or agree with the GP who said that forcing absolute equality on everyone is a moral hazard. Where you seem to be at the moment isn't a very defensible stance to take.
> Well, there is. <snip some unrelated discussion about Regulatory Capture [0]>
At no point did you make an argument that there is a principled, moral problem with Wealth Inequality. My "diatribe" was simply pointing out that there was a moral argument to be made, but that you weren't making it, and instead you were actually agreeing that there's nothing wrong with a little inequality now and again.
Personally, I don't care what stance you take, I was just trying to help you decide on a better one than you were taking. ;-)
Would it be a terrible evil to put measures in place to prevent people from ending up in grinding poverty though?
Reasonable financial/social welfare regulations do not amount to violence by any reasonable definition.
If inequality is inevitable, then some people are going to end up on the bottom. If the bottom is not enough to live on, then that could be argued to be structural violence.
If you are born as a serf in a feudal system then being willing to work twice or thrice as hard doesn't guarantee success or even safety from near-starvation.
Hard work alone can only guarantee success in a perfectly fair and even system, and obviously not even the west is anything close to that.
I never did like this kind of binary thinking. What if people could work twice as hard, but after acquiring more money than you can spend in a beautiful life, decide to either retire or work for free? I believe this would reduce inequality too, and it would only require that earners set an upper-bound on their earnings. You could still compete on, for example, velocity. (I call this my Enough number, by the way).
In my limited experience, it takes a very special someone to adhere to an "enough number." I've met many who claimed to have one, only to work long past it. For most, reaching that number only becomes a motivating factor to reach a higher number ad infinitum.
unfortunately in current western society, equality of opportunity (or somewhere closer to that) will never be achievable compared with equality of outcome due to an enshrinement of identity politics in our political structure.
