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Wealth Has Never Been More Equal aier.org/article/wealth… via @aier
It takes nothing away from me that the guy across the bar is a billionaire and I’m not. Chances are that he is providing jobs, donating to charities, and boosting investment in the capital structure that actually benefits all of us.
A society of equality in deep poverty is easy to achieve with enough force.
As a practical matter now, the poor today live better than kings of old. If the goal is to better the lot of everyone, measures of material equality actually distract from the main goal of universalization of dignified lives.
It’s true on the streets, at the mall, at restaurants, everywhere you look. Ninety percent of Americans have internet access, and three-quarters have a smartphone. This is a record, and a trend driven by deregulation and market forces. It’s a beautiful thing to see.
Consider the contrast with 30 years ago. What we knew was controlled only by those who had privileged access. They were writers of books, the journalists published in magazines, and the people on the few television networks, and their communication with us was one-way.
We could not talk back to this elite. They talked and we listened. Our capacity to contribute was limited to sharing with people only around us, unless we wrote letters delivered after a long wait via a government employee.
Isidore of Seville in the 6th century set out to assemble all the world’s knowledge in a single book. The result was the Etymologiae. It was the project of a lifetime. It became the essential book of learning during the whole of the middle ages. Only the privileged few had access
Now we are all carrying countless expanded versions of the Etymologiae in our pockets. That same tool offers the power of television, not just as consumers but as broadcasters, to everyone. We can access every course at MIT. The portals of information are overwhelming to us.
We can play games and communicate peer-to-peer with anyone who has Internet access. Even turning on our television gives us instant access to many hundreds of stations. The information explosion in our lives is so vast it is impossible to describe.
Crucially, it is not just for the elite; it is for everyone, and this is because it was made possible by a market ever in search of the next customer base.
In terms of information access and the opportunity to learn and share knowledge, we’ve never been more rich and equal. We share what we know, learn from others, and experience a never-ending rush of data crucial to living a good life.
Do we see the champions of equality celebrating this remarkable achievement? I’ve not seen it at all. Instead, the terms of debate seem to have shifted entirely to an exclusive and maniacal focus on material income as the sole source of wealth.
It’s even worse than that. We’ve never had more access to other ways of thinking and living, new cultures, languages, and human experiences. The opportunity for discovering and adopting has never been more voluminous.
In the midst of this extraordinary flood of information outside of our narrow experience, we are being told that it is wrong to appropriate other people’s experiences and learn from them in a way that is operational in our lives. To do this is considered “cultural appropriation”.
It’s a remarkable claim. You cannot steal a culture. Culture is not a scarce good. It is available to everyone to appropriate. To attack our freedom to learn and be influenced, to call it unethical to discover and live in a different way, is to cut off chances of progress.
So you can see here that in the way the Left has rigged this game, there is no way that freedom can win the debate over equality. You point out that information is the most valuable good and that there’s never been more of it, and they say this doesn’t matter.
You point out that culture has never been more accessible, and they say it is wrong to consume it and be influenced by it because that would be theft.
The critics of the market economy who invoke equality as an ideal cannot and will not be satisfied until they crush every last opportunity for everyone to live a good life.
