On the Demonization of Redistribution of Wealth
Author: J Crowley

It’s strange to me how so many Americans get so easily lured into this trap, along the campaign trail, of caring so much about how much money about three percent of the population makes that they lose sight of the importance of the quality of their own lives.

First, let’s address the subject in question, and then we’ll get to the obsession with “redistribution of wealth” as some kind of ideological profanity.

There’s something very wrong with the fact that Person A is paid maybe $12,000 a year to successfully flip hamburgers while Person B is paid $58,500,000 a year (at least for the first year) to unsuccessfully run AIG, to the point of nearly destroying the American economy. I’m sure we can all agree about the problem with paying executives large amounts regardless of performance. Where our paths may diverge, however, if you subscribe to laissez-faire and trickle-down economics, is that I see something tremendously wrong with Person B receiving 4,875 times the yearly income of Person A regardless of whether they’re not running the business into the ground.

No one could credibly argue that Person B is doing 4,875 times the work as Person A. Granted, it’s more stressful a job in certain ways, and one’s decisions regarding the direction of a company will have much greater an impact than deciding how much salt to put on the fries when you take them out of the deep fryer, but the difference certainly isn’t enough to warrant that much of a pay disparity. Surely those decision-making skills aren’t equivalent to the mind power of thousands of people.

Link to con.