The Rant Institute

Recently, a number of conservatives have been trying to explain away America's income inequality problem. One of them is Niall Ferguson, professor of History at Harvard University. Ferguson believes that incomes are distributed among two kinds of people: those of superior intelligence, whom he refers to as the "cognitive elites," and those of  inferior intelligence found among the lower classes. For him, the growing  financial differences between these two groups is, to put it simply, a byproduct of good breeding. Welcome to the religion of biol ogy , one that has morphed from a "belief" in the in nate biological differences between races , of which Darwin was John the Baptist and Adolf Hitler wa s the messiah, to one based today o n the religion of economics, where infallib ility rest solely in the providence of the almight y dollar.      To support his claim that the biggest bank accounts are simply a reflection of people with the biggest ...

Today, America’s income inequality problem is as bad as it has ever been, and for a number of reasons it's only getting worse. This fact guarantees that the check writers will continue to appoint the law makers they pay for. And by doing so, these “principle architects of policy,” as Adam Smith referred to them, will continue to make certain “that their own interests are "most peculiarly attended to,” no matter how grievous the effect on others.”   Naturally, the most important aim of the check-writers is to ensure their own checking accounts continue to grow as much as possible. To do that, they use a variety of “invisible hands” to help pilfer the checking accounts of everyone else. By one measure, doing so has contributed to making U.S. income inequality the highest it’s been since 1928, according to the PEW Research Center. Worse still is the fact that w ealth inequality is even greater than income inequality.  NYU economist Edward Wolff, for example, found...