Nice column from Steven Pearlstein.
“Markets … are social constructs, and the idea that they generate a
distribution of income based on a purely objective measure of individual
economic contribution is a fiction, nothing more than free-market ideology.
When it comes to the distribution of income, there is no “pure” market. Any
distribution is, by its nature, “political,” reflecting changing social norms
and the distribution of political power.
“[If] we, as a society, decide that we find the current distribution of
income unacceptable — if it offends our moral intuitions that a single
financier earns as much in a year as 15,000 elementary school teachers — then
it violates no great moral or economic principle to alter that distribution.”
