Is inequality inevitable

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Is inequality inevitable? 1. Is inequality
desirable or undesirable for social
progress in improving the quality of life for the
vast majority of people? 2. What
determines the variability of inequality
across the nations of the world? 3. Are there
thresholds in the disparities between the
haves and have-nots that lead to social
revolution? 4. Is inequality, at least in
terms of income and wealth, really a
social problem? 5. Can there be economic
inequality and yet political equality?
Can, for instance, capitalism coexist with
democracy? 6. In capitalist economies, who
should provide the safety nets for those
unable to compete, such as because of age
or physical or mentally disabilities?
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Our inequality materializes our upper class,
vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower
class.-Matthew Arnold. English essayist,
1822-1888 Superfluous wealth can buy
superfluities only.- Henry Thoreau, Walden, 1854
If our civilization is destroyed, it will not be
by barbarians from below. Our barbarians come
from above.- Henry Demarest Lloyd.American
Journalist. 1847-1903
The outstanding faults of the economic society in
which we live are its failure to provide for full
employment and its arbitrary and inequality
distribution of wealth and incomes.-John Keynes
The poor of the world cannot be made rich by
redistribution of wealth. Poverty cant be
eliminated by punishing people whove escaped
poverty, taking their money and giving it as a
reward to people who have failed to escape.
P.J. ORourke.
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Your fortune is rolling up, rolling up like an
avalanche. You must keep up with it! You must
distribute it faster than it grows! If you do
not, it will crush you and your children and your
childrens children Frederick Gates, John D.
Rockefellers philanthropic advisor.
There should exist among the citizens neither
extreme poverty nor, again, excessive wealth,
For both are productive of great evil. Plato
The freest government cannot long endure when the
tendency of the law is to create a rapid
accumulation of property in the hands of a few,
and to render the masses poor and
dependent.-Daniel Webster
We can either have democracy in this country or
we can have great wealth concentrated in the
hands of a few, but we cant have both- supreme
court justice Louis Brandeis
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A state divided into a small number of rich and a
large number of poor will always develop a
government manipulated by the rich to protest the
amenities represented by their property- Harold
Laski
Any city, however small, is in fact divided into
two, one the city of the poor, the other of the
rich ther These are at war with one another
Plato. www.richcity.poorcity.org
Behind every great fortune is a crime. Honore de
Balzac .
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