There are a lot of people who believe that financial equality is a virtue.  And that the rich should be forced to “share” their wealth with the poor. Some even argue that, for a better world, money should be “taken away” from the rich and be “distributed” among the poor. I think, it requires willful blindness to think that once wealth is distributed equally among everybody, inequalities will disappear. It is easy to see that within a short time of this “redistribution”, there would be different classes in society in the same way as now.

Equality is obviously unsustainable except by force. But let’s examine the proposal to solve problems by equal distribution of wealth. The currency notes and coins anybody holds are just pieces of paper and metal. They have no intrinsic value. They are given their value by the work done by a society. In the absence of concentrated wealth, there cannot be any output from a society unless people volunteer/are forced to work. Simply, society would stop functioning because employers have no incentives to offer employees.

In addition, when talking about rich industrialists, some say that these guys exploited/looted others to become rich. On the contrary, the utility of these few rich industrialists far outweighs any fictional harm they may have done. The wealth of an industrialist is not all in his bank balance. They do have a huge bank balance; but when people call them multi-millionaires, it doesn’t mean they have all those multi-million dollars in cash. A significant amount of any industrialist’s wealth is the valuation of his industry, which provides employment and goods to thousands of people. It is no coincidence that prosperity and industries go hand in hand in modern societies. Besides, wealth is not static; it has to be created first before looting/distributing.

We all want to eradicate poverty and we all want to be rich. The combination of these two feelings contributes to justifying the idea of looting away a man’s wealth to others. In actual fact, this is just thievery. Someone’s need cannot be a justification to forcefully take what is rightfully owned by another man. Our target is not making the rich guys poor, but basic amenities for the poor. Equality is not a virtue if everybody suffers equally.

Inequality is a necessary precondition for accomplishing any task both in time and space. In time, any individual must pass through a learning phase and an intermediate phase to become an expert. It is not fair to say that an individual is worth the same after he puts in years of hard work to become an expert. Similarly, to produce any good, we need specialists for all intermediate steps; some tough, some easy. There are many individuals who would gladly accept a lot less money for doing a work more comfortable/interesting to them. Thus, to be fair, a differential pay is inevitable in both time and space.

Inequality is an inviolable feature of the universe embedded into it to aid its functioning. Mankind can choose to exercise this inequality, for its survival, either by force/calling for volunteers (communalism/socialism) or choice (capitalism). I think force is wrong, and calling for volunteers may not get anything done. The choice is obvious.

Financial equality isn’t workable; we should work for basic amenities and opportunities for all.

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