In Defense Of Prosperous Inequality

This really gets to the heart of this debate in many ways:

But, financial equality has never been, and will never be, a goal of the Internet economy. The goal is wealth creation.

Some people value equality for equality's sake... others value freedom for freedom's sake. Those two camps are constantly at odds with each other, and caught in the middle is the phenomenon where increasing prosperity benefits everybody, even if it benefits some people more than others.

IOW, "a rising tide lifts all boats". Even the poorest of the poor in the US have a standard of living that would seem like royalty to someone from 200 years ago. I've lived below the official "poverty line" and we still had a color television, VCR, cable TV, microwave oven, etc. So what if the richer people had Rolls-Royce Silver Ghosts and servants and a mansion with a diamond lined swimming pool?

Unfortunately, human nature is such that we find it hard to to compare our position with others in relative terms, and feel subjective pain over our position, no matter how well off we are in absolute terms.

But inequality does have actual, measurable negative consequences for society. So what to do? I stand by the position that the best answer is to focus on education, promoting financial literacy, encouraging entrepreneurship and decreasing artificial restrictions on the ability to create wealth (IOW, I'm a Libertarian). No, the Libertarian vision does not guarantee a world of perfect equality, and yes it has its pathologies... but so does every other system. But I'm biased, since I fall into the "freedom is it's own end" camp.

(Note: when I use the term "freedom" I very specifically mean "freedom of choice, vis-a-vis use of coercive force").