Inequality is bad: left-wing dogma, or common sense?
The Australian Centre for Independent Study (CIS) recently claimed, in an article purporting to debunk “six social policy myths”, that an “egalitarian orthodoxy”, i.e. a systematic and biased belief that inequality is bad, “shapes the public policy agenda in all sorts of ways without people even realising it.”
This is a little bit like claiming that a “democratic orthodoxy” likewise pervades the public policy agenda. Sure it does, but is that so bad? Not everything is “up for question”, and I suggest that the ideal of equality (however that is interpreted) is not up for radical questioning. This is essentially what C.S. Lewis argued in The Abolition of Man: to question such things is to place yourself outside the “tao” or the canon of traditional morality (which sounds very conservative, but isn’t actually) and to set yourself up as a nihilist.
In any case, there are lots of reasons for thinking inequality is bad. Among them are those offered last fall by U of T professor of Philosophy and Political Science Frank Cunningham (What’s Wrong with Inequality? - published by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA)) and, somewhat randomly, Daron Acemoglu et al’s Theory of Military Dictatorships, in which they argue that inequality is a serious threat to the emergence of democracy.
This last item echoes the findings of the CIA State Failure Task Force, which examined state failure over the last 50 years and found that the main predictor was high infant mortality and that while democracy lowers the risk of state failure (akin to Amartya Sen’s suggestion that democracies do not suffer famines – a bit overstated, but generally true), poor democracies are still very vulnerable to state failure.