Last week, readers of the Boston Globe were treated to yet another article lamenting the fact that Boston, according to an analysis of 2014 Census data by the Brookings Institution, is the U.S. city with the greatest income disparity between the top 5 percent of income earners and the bottom quintile. According to the analysis, the top 5 percent earners in Boston earned $266,000, which was almost 18 times that of the bottom 20 percent.
The question must be asked again, as in an earlier column on this topic: Is income inequality morally wrong? As long as the bottom 20 percent have sufficient means on which to live, why should there be such handwringing over the success of the 5 percent?
Over the past several years, elites in America have unleashed a tidal wave of propaganda about the curse of economic inequality in our country. President Obama has made it one of his signature themes, calling income inequality "the defining challenge of our day" in a widely reported speech in December 2013.
When reflecting on this topic, it is incumbent upon us never to forget the incredible suffering and the tens of millions of deaths which resulted in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Cambodia, Cuba and other communist countries whose goal was equality of income and wealth. The empirical evidence is clear that the utopian goal of economic equality destroys wealth and creates poverty in its place.
