Forced redistribution dominates public discourse about wealth inequality, yet much of the debate overlooks how people earn, trade, innovate, and create value. T

Objections to income inequality are commonplace. We hear these today from across the ideological spectrum, including, for example, from the far-left data-gatherer Thomas Piketty, the far-right provocateur Tucker Carlson, and Pope Leo XIV.

Nothing is easier – and, apparently, few things are as emotionally gratifying – as railing against “the rich.” The principal qualification for issuing, and exulting in, denouncements of income inequality is first-grade arithmetic: One billion dollars is a larger sum of money than is ten thousand dollars, and so subtracting some dollars from the former sum and adding these funds to the latter sum will make incomes more equal. And because income is what people spend to achieve their standard of living, such ‘redistribution’ would also result in people being made more equal. What could be more obvious?

Countless careful researchers have convincingly shown that popular accounts of the magnitude of differences in monetary incomes are vastly overstated. But let’s here grant, for the sake of argument, that differences in monetary incomes within the United States are indeed vast. And then let’s pose some probing questions to proponents of using the state to tax and ‘redistribute’ high incomes.

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