Fairness

Wherever you live these days, you’re likely seeing plenty of evidence that political polarization is increasing all around you. Some of this polarization is reinforcing conventional left-right fault lines. Elsewhere in the world, other divisions — cultural, social, geographic, intergenerational — have ripped up and replaced those traditional polarizations. Socio-economic inequality has, of course, long rated as one of those conventional fault lines. The right has typically seen inequality as an inevitable — perhaps even necessary and desirable — byproduct of the dynamism that drives prosperity. Inequality, this argument contends, incentivizes and rewards effort and entrepreneurial risk-taking.