In my opinion, BOTH sides of this argument have merit.
What is often overlooked, I think, is the largish share taken by highly-paid labor rather than "capital."
"Taken"? That term would seem to imply that the wealth in question wasn't
produced by the highly-paid labor.
Oh criminy! You seize on an arbitrary often-neutral verb and pretend that I am deliberately (and almost surreptitiously!) invoking some sort of morality. I should expect better from you.
The heck are you on about? I pretended nothing; I implied nothing about it being deliberate or surreptitious; and I addressed your factual claim, so if "taken" doesn't invoke any sort of morality then neither did my response. To all appearances, you said "taken" because that's a fixture in discussions of the topic and you were simply using typical wording. And to all appearances, "taken" became a fixture in discussions of the topic because people repeat the arguments they personally find convincing, and "taken" appeals to leftists' pattern-matching circuits, so by Darwinian natural selection, versions of their arguments that use that terminology become more common than competing terminology.
The point is that leftist arguments are stupid, so they don't survive in the marketplace of ideas by being well-reasoned, but by triggering the pattern-matching circuits hard-wired into our brains by a million years of hunting and gathering. We are all natural-born zero-sum-game economic thinkers, because for 99% of our time on earth we lived in a zero-sum-game economy where nobody produced his own food and every deer anyone killed was a deer
taken from the shared supply. Keeping in mind that ten thousand years ago we started farming and it rendered our economic intuition obsolete, and reminding ourselves that we therefore need to draw conclusions by reasoning instead of by intuition,
takes effort. I'm pointing out that you're letting your brain be colonized by a meme that has evolved to parasitize brains by taking advantage of their subconscious zero-sum-game intuitions, even though your conscious mind knows economics is not a zero-sum game.
Income and wealth inequality are already major problems, and continues to rise.
...
(Source:
nih.gov)
And here's that graph you post every time "GINI" hits the filter.
No, only every time somebody claims inequality is increasing.
Just to return to the topic, is it your claim that income or wealth inequality is NOT a major source of emotional stress and social unrest in the U.S.?
Not claiming any such thing. Sure, people are often resentful of others having more. (This might be due to all those zero-sum-game intuitions.) But I don't see why every sort of emotional stress should necessarily be catered to in policy decisions. I'm not some Utilitarian who thinks every sort of happiness and unhappiness is automatically created equal -- that way lies deducing that the problem with Roman gladiatorial fights was they weren't televised to a million viewers. Wanting other people to be poorer is spiteful and I'm not a fan of rewarding spite. In the fifties and sixties racial integration was a major source of emotional stress and social unrest in the U.S. That wasn't a good reason to forego integration in order to cater to prejudice.
Rightly or wrongly, workers resent when they are replaced by robots owned by the boss.
That this makes the workers poorer is a real problem it's rational for them to want addressed and it's rational for policy-makers to address. That it makes the boss richer is not a real problem.
The U.S. GINI is much higher than the GINI of all Western European countries: Is it your claim that this is meaningless because almost everyone (except you) uses a flawed definition of GINI?
Hey, the NIH is using the unflawed definition too.
Within-country Gini is not a measure of inequality. It's a measure of street-address: it quantifies the degree to which rich people and poor people live close to each other. That may well influence how much emotional stress and social unrest they experience, but it doesn't influence how unequal they are. If you want to reduce the within-America Gini index, it's straightforward: elect Donald Trump. When he deports ten million illegal aliens it will make our Gini index go down. But it will not make anyone any less unequal.
