Already plenty of good reasons

Digby has interesting discussion going about extreme income in-equality. The key sentence:

...that sense of dissatisfaction and anxiety so many of us feel is a direct result of the conspicuous consumption of the fabulously wealthy overclass trickling down through society and making it necessary for people to constantly buy more, even as they are earning the same.

I don't agree. There are an a lot of good reasons to be concerned about enormous income inequalities. I don't believe that the paragraph above captures them.

Feeling inadequate because you can't afford a $13 thousand barbecue grill (an example in one of Digby's links) is because one has a distorted sense of values to begin with — probably due to a poor education & upbringing etc etc -- and not because Bill Gates has one or can afford several hundred of them. When I read about people who spend $200 thousand or more on a wedding I feel sorry for them as it just seems so weird and such a sign of insecurity. (I don't mean that people shouldn't have a fine party to celebrate a marriage.) But the real super-rich live in a world so breathtakingly far away from mine that it doesn't impinge on me at all, (except that we have a screwed-up tax system which aids them.) At the personal psychological level I can't agree that my life is impacted by the buying habits of the super-rich or even just plain rich.

Most importantly, my objection to this view of enormous income inequality is that feels somewhat contrived to justify changes in tax policy etc etc  But there  are already plenty of good reasons for a certain amount of income re-distribution (e.g. to pay for health care so we don't have people dying on the street and as an aid to small business). I don't think we have to reach to what I see as condescending arguments to justify such re-distribution.

Even more to the point, I don't think it's a winner politically and is not one on which to base political change (e.g. electing a Democrat) as it plays into old images of progressives as haters of wealth.

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Btw, I am not saying that on occasion I don't personally feel a generalized "sense of dissatisfaction and anxiety." I do and it's for two very good reasons:
1. We have a very unwise President who has a lot of power and I am worried about what he may do in his remaining days in office
2. At 60 years old you start to feel the cool breeze of mortality.

Comments

[JRoth]

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with what you write here, David, but it doesn't seem to grapple with the pretty well established fact of human psychology that we really do respond to perceived inequality, and that it affects our self image. For most (not all) people, being conspicuously the poorest guy on the block results in a different set of feelings than being the richest guy on the block even if the wealth level is exactly the same.

I'm not comfortable with dismissing this kind of broadly-observed fact of human nature as merely the folly of the weak or poorly-raised; it's too close to blaming the clinically depressed for not being cheerful, or to crediting the wealthy with superior work ethic, not merely superior genetic gifts and/or economic opportunity.