These days the Commentariat and the chattering classes don't talk so much about poverty. They focus upon economic inequality. Rising inequality. (It's always rising.) This is a classic case of misdirection. It is also another indication of the intellectual dishonesty of many and legerdemain that passes for truth.
We see this kind of vacuous nonsense every day:
More than 300,000 Kiwi kids now in relative poverty
The number of Kiwi children in relative poverty has jumped over 300,000 for the first time since 2010 - but it's because of record inequality, despite falling absolute hardship. The Ministry of Social Development's annual household incomes report shows that the numbers below a European standard measure of absolute hardship, based on measures such as not having a warm home or two pairs of shoes, fell from 165,000 in 2013 to 145,000 (8 per cent of all children) last year, the lowest number since 2007.
Children in benefit-dependent families also dwindled from a recent peak of 235,000 (22 per cent) in 2011, and 202,000 (19 per cent) in 2013, to just 180,000 (17 per cent) last year - the lowest proportion of children living on benefits since the late 1980s. But inequality worsened because average incomes for working families increased much faster at high and middle-income levels than for lower-paid workers.
The net result was that the number of children living in households earning below 60 per cent of the median income after housing costs jumped from a five-year low of 260,000 in 2013 to 305,000 last year, the highest since a peak of 315,000 at the worst point of the global financial crisis in 2010. [NZ Herald]
Consider a model society that consists of ten households. One household lives in squalor: it is dirty, and unkempt. Its occupants are usually sick. No-body works, except one who spends his days begging the other nine households for food. Another household lives in comparative luxury. The earnings and net worth of this household increased by two hundred percent in the last twelve months. The remaining eight households experienced no change over the same period. According to the egalitarians, this society has just got worse (more evil and unjust), because inequality has increased.
Most morally clear-sighted people would think it a good development if at least one household greatly increased their net worth. But the egalitarians regard it as an evil outcome, unless every other household increased commensurately.
There are two philosophical and religious axioms underlying the cult of economic equality.
The first is a bizarre notion that wealth, like matter, can neither be created, nor destroyed. It is a fixed quantum. Consequently if one household significantly increased its net worth, it could only do so by decreasing the net worth of the other nine households. The economic (or wealth) pie is fixed in size. If someone takes a bigger piece, everyone else gets less.
This underlying axiom is bizarre because it necessarily implies that economic growth never occurs: there is only the transfer from some to others. Over the past two hundred years, on this reckoning, there has been zero net economic growth in the world. While living standards and household net worth have increased in New Zealand, to be sure, they have only done so at the expense of other human beings somewhere else on the planet, whose living standards have consequently declined. We in New Zealand have taken more of their "stuff".
If this materialist axiom were truthful, the drive for equality, for economic egalitarianism might have some meaning and merit. But it is so bizarre, so counter-intuitive, and so demonstrably false that the egalitarians amongst us (which constitute a large proportion of the population) never bother to argue for the axiom, lest they end up being exposed as foolish.
A second religious axiom underlying the cult of equality is that it is morally and ethically better to have everyone in squalor than one person wealthy and the rest of us poor. In other words, economic egalitarianism is built upon a moral foundation of envy. When envy reigns in a community, the successful and prosperous are always the despised. Now, to be sure, Victorian manners usually restrain the bile that envy always nurtures, so these days it takes a more sophisticated, disguised form. Anger is directed at the government, for allowing a situation where some prosper (at the expense of others). But disguised envy is even more pernicious than blatant, Occupy-style envy, because it cloaks itself, Klingon-style, as a moral good. Is it not the government's duty to administer justice? Is not justice a high and holy thing?
Whilst modern secular societies are thus racked with envy, most folk are extremely self-righteous about clutching this particular evil to their bosoms. Most think they are not racked with envy at all. Rather they are committed to the high cause of justice--which requires egalitarianism.
Modern egalitarians never argue for economic egalitarianism as a moral principle. They assume it. High moral dudgeon then marches in the front door, whilst intellectual rigour and honesty slink out the back.
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