The Pathologies of Inequality Are an Age-Old Preoccupation
Conservatives today often denigrate a concern with economic inequality as a deviant left-wing preoccupation. In fact, from antiquity to the present, canonical thinkers of diverse political orientations have diagnosed economic inequality as a great evil.
Economic inequality has been a concern of many of the greatest Western thinkers going back to antiquity. (iStock / Getty Images)
You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you.
We shouldn’t care about economic inequality. And if we do care about economic inequality and try to fix it, that will only provoke trouble.
That has been a long-standing refrain of many a politician and intellectual. Milton Friedman famously remarked that a society that “puts equality before freedom will get neither.” Philosophers like Harry Frankfurt cautioned against a zeal for equality per se, insisting that what really matters is the absolute welfare of the poor rather than their relative level of wealth. Margaret Thatcher accused the Left of being content to have the poor be poorer so long as the rich were as well. And American conservatives have charged centrist politicians from Barack Obama to Kamala Harris with embracing “class warfare” and “Marxism” for proposing even milquetoast economic reforms.
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