Think you’re liberal?

Try this.

On one side of a city there are people so wealthy that after big parties, they are throwing out meat. On the other side there are people so poor, they cannot afford to buy meat.

Is this a moral problem?

–This question is a litmus test. It is attributed to John Rawls, liberal theorist from the 1970s. Free market and laissez faire conservatives see no problem – they think it’s “in the nature of things” that some people have more than they know what to do with, while others live with scarcity. For them, the inequality is simply not an issue.

Next, there are people who say it’s a technical problem of not enough food being grown to keep everybody in abundance, not a moral problem.

But liberals see it differently. Liberals feel there is something wrong with a system (city, nation) which in total, contains enough food for everybody, but not everyone is able to get it. The situation is unjust.

Liberalism – the left – rests on moral judgments. A prime moral is justice.

The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Is this a coincidence?

The heart of conservative economics is the idea that rich people’s wealth eventually benefits everybody. Rich people begin businesses, hire the poor people and pay them. Rich people spend money on goods the poorer people manufacture. So the wealth at the top “trickles down.”

We’re supposed to see a picture here of the shape of society as roughly like a diamond, with most people in the middle class. And as the rich get richer, the top of the shape moves up, pulling lower ranks up.

But actually the bottom of society is not moving up. So as the top goes up, society just gets longer and more unequal. That’s what’s happening.

Trickle down theory is fairy dust. (But it drives government policy.) To a large extent, very wealthy people invest in things that bring no benefit for the working poor: paintings, jewelry, real estate.

What’s the alternative? Well there’s a new idea called the Winner Take All theory which says in this competitive society people have an intense drive to win. And the prize for rising to the top is that you grab it all – or a huge percentage – then the losers divide up what’s left.

A winner-take-all society has a different shape. A tall pyramid.

That shape is more accurate, because currently the top 1% of our population actually owns 40% of the wealth. This means a sharp inequality.

So are the rich get richer at the expense of the poor?

The Left is naturally opposed to laissez faire (free market) economics because it produces wealth only for some people. What it always produces in inequality. The Left doesn’t like hierarchy (inequality) anyway, and the inequality creates great pain for the people left behind. The Right actually encourages social inequality. Some of them say it makes the economy run better.

There’s a statistic which population experts now use called the Gini Index. It shows how unequal a society is. It runs on a scale from 0 (perfect equality) to 1 (perfect inequality) and in the U.S. it has been increasing steadily, and stood at 0.47 in 2005. If the Gini Index gets high, it predicts social unrest.

And there’s some new scientific research showing the more social inequality in a country, the lower the life expectancies. For everybody. Naturally, the Right is vigorously ignoring that research. But it’s your health. It is the single biggest threat to free market economics.

More here.