Wealth Distribution Matters

What do the proponents of Laissez-faire (" "let them do as they will," or "leave it alone.") economics expect from the system regarding the widening wealth distribution gap?

If they don't see the, now decades old, trend as a political/social problem there is no point in continuing.

On the other hand when one looks at the history of tectonic shifts in nations that have failed to attend to the wealth distribution problem it is replete with violent revolution.

The French, and Russian upheavals are but two samples of what desperate people can be persuaded to do in the face of extreme hardship.

A cause of the French Revolution: The economic crisis was compounded by years of bad harvests and resulted in urban and rural resentment of the wealth and privilege enjoyed by the nobility and clergy. In due course, the crisis led to the convocation of the Estates-General in May 1789 and, subsequently, as the revolution unfolded.

Inequality in Pre-Revolutionary Russia

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/12/27/prerevolutionary_russian_income_inequality_russia_in_1904_was_less_unequal.html

Is the United States primed for Bolshevik revolution? Probably not. But Steven Nafziger and Peter Lindert report that the contemporary United States has a less egalitarian distribution of income than did Russia on the brink of the revolution of 1905.

In the U. S. today

http://www.forbes.com/sites/dalearcher/2013/09/04/could-americas-wealth-gap-lead-to-a-revolt/

The disparity between the nation’s top earners and the bottom 80 percent has grown exponentially over the past three decades, and it’s been exacerbated by the Great Recession.

For all the employment growth and claims by many that our economy is in recovery, most of those new jobs – six out of ten according to the Labor Department – are on the low end of the pay scale, which is already much lower than other first world countries. Meanwhile, the top executives of the fast food companies at the center of this storm are among the highest paid in the nation.

Paul Hunter