Apparently people need to be told this.
The first thing to notice is that economic inequality, however undesirable it may be for various reasons, is not inherently a bad thing. Think about it: We could arrange for the members of a society to be economically equal by ensuring that the economic resources available to each member of the society put everyone equally below the poverty line. To make everyone equally poor is, obviously, not a very intelligent social ambition.
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It isn’t especially desirable that each have the same as others. What is bad is not inequality; it is poverty. We should want each person to have enough—that is, enough to support the pursuit of a life in which his or her own reasonable ambitions and needs may be comfortably satisfied. This individually measured sufficiency, which by definition precludes the burdens and deprivations of poverty, is clearly a more sensible goal than the achievement of an impersonally calibrated equality.
Continue reading Income inequality actually isn’t poverty, and the American people know that.