If you thought you'd been hearing "income inequality" bandied about a lot more lately, you were right!
In 2008, the year Barack Obama was elected the first African-American president and the global economy teetered near collapse, the word “inequality” was used just 14 times on the liberal-leaning cable network MSNBC. So far in 2014, which is barely more than a third over, the word has been said 647 times on the network.
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A good amount of the increase came in 2011, the year of the Occupy Wall Street protests, when MSNBC used “inequality” about five times more often than it did in 2010. But the term’s frequency has continued to increase since then. This year, as the economist Thomas Piketty’s treatise on inequality has topped best-seller lists, the word is on pace to be used more than twice as often on MSNBC as it was in 2013.
What may be more surprising is that there has also been an “inequality” boom on the Fox News. The word has been used 0.57 times per hour on Fox so far this year, almost an order of magnitude larger than the 0.08 instances per hour in 2013.
And if you're damn sick and tired of it, you're not alone:
Equality? Don’t make me laugh. Not only has it never really existed, but societies that try to enforce it become blood baths like revolutionary France, or hell holes like Cuba. And even then they’re not egalitarian. Those at the top, enforcing the “equality” always end up far better off than the masses, because, well, some animals are more equal than others, right?
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When you ask for a clarification, you get some bleating about entrenched classes. But look here, that doesn’t happen in a free society, where the state is not trying to enforce either equality or redistribution. The only places where rigid quasi feudal classes emerge are in places like the Soviet Union or, yes, Cuba, or North Korea, where the people in power make themselves aristocracy.
Yes, our clowns are trying to do that, controlling access to the best colleges, and whatever. The difference is that as long as we’re free enough (and it’s amazing how even a little freedom can disrupt these schemes) we retain the right to make their success markers irrelevant.
Let's just go all the way and say it: Income inequality is actually a good thing. Any attempt to claim otheriwise is just another progressive "what's yours is ours" scheme in disguise.
