What disparity is tolerable in an individual income to another individual?

Answer 1

It is so hard to compare incomes from one person to another. We all have different work backgrounds, different educational backgrounds, different attitudes toward work, etc.

It is a well established fact, for example, that women make less money than men, on average. Is this discrimination. Probably. But, after correcting for time in job, for education and work backgrounds, and for job choices (teaching versus engineering, for example), research shows that women make almost as much as men.

So, we need to be very careful about such comparisons.

Answer 2

Whatever a free market produces, since it is the indirect but definite result of the decisions of the consumers.

Why do you refer to differences as "disparities" - they're just differences. The top fraction of some percent might make 500 times as much as the worker-bees but there are only a handful of such people - even if you could, without eliminating what those people produce to earn that money, divide it up among the rest of us, congrats, you just bought everyone a Pepsi. The differences among the top 20% and the bottom 20% are largely a matter of experience / age and they are growing as we move toward a knowledge-based economy where your earnings peak much later. College educated workers make more than non-college educated workers in a given year but they don't start working until 4 to 7 years later. Cyclical workers like contractors make six figure incomes in good years and live on their savings while they fix up their own homes during the lean years - unless they didn't save, which is nobody else's fault.

And let's not forget, if your inflation-adjusted income goes up by 15% and your rich neighbor's goes up by 100%, they both went up - you're still better off than before. And it's the same free market forces that produce both the difference and the near-universal increases. In more socialist-leaning European countries they create equality only by holding people down, by preventing people from becoming affluent, through higher tax rates. Those same controls produce double our rate of unemployment - more poor people. We still have a lot of poor people but only because we keep importing them.

And if you're in favor of a welfare state for those at the bottom, the only way to maintain that is to enlarge the class of people that is financially independent of government - and that's exactly what we've been doing in the US for 25 years.

Answer 3

I don't care about one else's income. I care about my own. If I am gaining purchasing power then why would I have a problem if someone else is getting even more

Answer 4

These are all wrong, no disparity is tolerable

Answer 5

I remember hearing " that no one should be so poor that he would willingly sell his children and no one so rich that he could buy them."