The Virtue of Riches

How wealth makes us more moral.

Megan McArdle from the July 2006 issue

(Page 2 of 16)

/p> p class="CRlargetext-1stpgrph"> For many span class= "c1">Americans, riches are so disreputable that taking them away is a goal in itself. The left used to offer the misery of the poor as a reason for redistribution, but these days an increase in inequality is just as likely to be the rallying cry for higher taxation. In a savage New York Times column this past March, the economist Paul Krugman turned rising inequality—a trend that has persisted for decades under both Republican and Democratic presidents—into a frontal assault on the hated Bush tax cuts. More generally, the chief plaint of Democrats about those cuts has been not that they are economically inefficient, or even that they are leaving wonderful programs starved for funds, but that they primarily went to “the rich.” o:p> /o:p> /span> /p> p class="CRlargetext c3"> span class="c1"> o:p>