Envy and Secular Materialism

 That Boring Income Gap Once More

Income inequality is in the news again.  Apparently an OECD report has come out to say that income inequality has increased in New Zealand.  The socialist shills are apoplectic.  Most Kiwis, being closet socialists anyway, move uncomfortably around in their seats at such news. 

We well remember that great egalitarian, David Lange gravely telling us that if he had to choose between a society where income equality was widening, but that the income levels of the poorest were also rising, on the one hand, and a society where the gap between rich and poor was closing, and the income levels of the poor were static, on the other, he would always prefer the latter.    In other words the income gap was more offensive to Lange than income levels of the poor rising in absolute terms.  It is only envy that could lead one to such a perverted position.


The OECD's recommendation to close the gap is "better job training for unskilled workers and more access to formal education." This does not help us very much.  Every child in New Zealand has access to our wonderful formal education system which inculcates the uninitiated into a secular, materialistic, Darwinian world-view yet still fails to teach an astonishingly large number of pupils how to read and write.  Moreover, it's hard to train unskilled workers who are functionally illiterate and innumerate.  Employers complain that a significant proportion of the low-skilled labouring jobs are done by people who do not understand enough written English to function effectively in any job.  Good luck with up-skilling there.  Whilst this is indeed sad, it is reality.  No flick of a legislative pen is going to solve this problem. 

Now the hard core leftists have an immediate solution to hand, not contemplated by the OECD.  Just tax those "rich pricks" more and distribute the money to the poor (minus a transaction cost paid over to the ever increasing and bloated bureaucracies of state, of course).  Hey presto.  Income inequality goes down; the gap narrows.  It's so patently obvious that only the wickedly feral and hard-hearted cannot see it.

Au contraire.  Only the myopically doctrinaire materialist can "see" it.  It is far worse than being simplistic.  It is stupidly naive.  It regards human beings as nothing more than machines to be rebored and fine-tuned.  The one thing such "thinkers" can claim is that they have learned long and well from the fonts of knowledge on offer in our wonderful state secular education system.  Indeed they have.  To the detriment of us all.