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There is an inequality rating, where .1 is the optimal and 1 is the worst. I have read that this has been worsening over tge past decade in Canda, US and UK. Comments please?

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Yes, it's the Gini coefficient. It doesn't do a great job of explaining the problem, but it has been getting worse since about 1978.

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You wrote: "It is very clearly a kind of moral judgment about who deserves the money..." But... nah! It is an immoral judgement, for precisely the reasons you go on to outline, about where the real value derives from etc. Maybe I'm all alone here, but in my lexicon "moral judgement" means judgement about what is good (and so also about what is "less good" in relative terms when presented with choices), not what derives from an ideology that could easily be false. While no one person can lay claims on what is morally correct, it is not too hard to agree on what is morally false. So at a minimum I'd write that sentence, "It is very clearly a kind of false moral judgment about who deserves the money..."

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Reagan-blaming comes hard if you're Canadian (Mulroney) or British (Thatcher). What really got me was that my mother thought Reagan's stand against unions was merited. Thing was, she grew up a coal miner's daughter who lost him at age 12, mining accident, uncompensated. Her Dad had been a UMWA organizer and staunch unionist. But by 1980, Mom thought that Unions Had Gone Too Far.

People like my Mom, all over the industrial world, voted in a right-wing shift.

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