Income Inequality Over Time

Via Daily Kos

There are a large number of people, among whom I number, who believe that extreme income inequalities are not good for society. A large part of that, for me is the power disparity - after a certain amount of wealth money begins to transition from stuff to status and then to power over others.

The idea has been advanced that disparities of wealth stimulate the economy by providing incentive, but I wonder to what degree this scales with increasing wealth - must everyone have a 15-20% larger carrot dangled in front of them for motivation?. While I dislike redistributionism in its purest forms, the richest of the rich can only obtain their extreme wealth by skimming off the top of large numbers of people - either through the monopsonistic powers of their company as employer, or their monopolistic powers as sellers.

PS
I don't wholeheartedly feel that is the governments job to do this. It is my strong suspicion that CEOs don't really have the effect on their companies that Boards of Directors seem to feel that they have, and think that they should be the ones to address that first. Color me crazy - but they seem like an insulated group that mostly trust the opinions of others like them - so you have the strong possibility of intellectual incest. Also, consider three factors - that success in business is often deeply affected by unknown (both known and unknown), that Boards are comprised of people used to having power, and that people in general (except when avoiding blame) don't like to admit to having little power. I think what they are paying for is the external and internal illusion of control.

It remains my contention that many of the problems to which government solutions are sought can be addressed by people doing their jobs more conscienciously. Barring that, I really don't mind the idea of 70% marginal income tax for the highest tax brackets.