BrianGarst.com

Writing for the Washington Examiner, Randolph May highlights President Obama’s recent declaration that that income inequality is the “defining challenge of our time.” May harkensd back to Alexis de Tocqueville’s prescient warnings in Democracy in America:

Tocqueville argued that a democratic regime, by the sheer force of the majoritarian canon it embodies, would ceaselessly move in the direction of striving for ever greater degrees of what he called “equality of condition.”

This continual push for more equality of condition would lead inexorably to an ever-increasing encroachment of government authority at the expense of individual freedom.

We’ve witnessed just such an encroachment and it appears to be accelerating despite vast growth in overall human prosperity. That’s the thrust of a piece by Marian Tupy that challenges overly pessimistic accounts of the state of the world:

The dystopian world that Francis describes, without citing a single statistic, is at odds with reality. In appealing to our fears and pessimism, the pope fails to acknowledge the scope and rapidity of human accomplishment—whether measured through declining global inequality and violence, or growing prosperity and life expectancy.

The thesis of Evangelii Gaudium is simple: “unbridled” capitalism has enriched a few, but failed the poor…

Just how free the free market really is today is debatable. The United States is perceived as the paragon of free-market capitalism. And yet over the last two decades, according to Wayne Crews of the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute, Washington has issued 81,883 regulations—or nine per day. Maybe the marketplace should be regulated less, and maybe it should be regulated more. But unbridled it is not.

…

As for the negative consequences of “trickle-down” economics that the pope bemoans, let’s look at them in turn.

First, consider inequality. Academic researchers—from Xavier Sala-i-Martin of Columbia University, to Surjit Bhalla, formerly of the Brookings Institution and Rand Corporation, to Paolo Liberati of the University of Rome—all agree that global inequality is declining. That is because 2.6 billion people in China and India are richer than they used to be.

…Paradoxically, the shrinking of the global inequality gap was only possible after India and China abandoned their attempts to create equality through central planning. By allowing people to keep more of the money they earned, the Chinese and Indian governments incentivized people to create more wealth. Allowing inequality to increase at home, in other words, diminished inequality globally. And global inequality, surely, is the statistic that should most concern the leader of a global religion.

Tupy is also the editor of new Cato Institute project HumanProgress.org, which documents the dramatic improvements in human well-being that have taken place primarily over the last century. The site is needed because public perception is much more negative than reality, driven by cynical politicians who conjure ever more reasons to continue expanding government, as well as their own power.

Speaking of prosperity deniers, Donald Boudreaux recently provided a list of salient questions to ask of redistribution’s proponents, questions which they are unlikely able to answer. Here’s a sample:

Do you not worry that creating government power today to take from Smith and give to Jones — simply because Smith has more material wealth than Jones — might eventually be abused so that tomorrow, government takes from Jones and gives to Smith simply because Smith is more politically influential than Jones?

Suppose that Jones chooses a career as a poet. Jones treasures the time he spends walking in the woods and strolling city streets in leisurely reflection; his reflections lead him to write poetry critical of capitalist materialism. Working as a poet, Jones earns $20,000 annually. Smith chooses a career as an emergency-room physician. She works an average of 60 hours weekly and seldom takes a vacation. Her annual salary is $400,000. Is this “distribution” of income unfair? Is Smith responsible for Jones’ relatively low salary? Does Smith owe Jones money? If so, how much? And what is the formula you use to determine Smith’s debt to Jones?

I highly recommend reading the rest of Boudreaux’s piece. And if you happen to favor redistribution, I suggest you try answering the questions and seeing if you still do.