¶ … painted an interesting picture with regards to wage equality. The first article by Rachel Childers was an infantile work written by someone with a clear bias and zero understanding of economics. The other articles, thankfully, were more intelligent and thought-provoking. The fatal misunderstanding of market critics is that they fail to grasp that the market is a concept based on reality, it is not absolute reality. The articles that discuss the role of government policy illustrate this clearly. Government constantly interferes in natural market behavior. The examples cited - tax policy and minimum wages - are examples of the government's role in income distribution. On the most basic level, the market creates and distributes income. How this happens is a direct result of government policy. The market has power, but the government can to some extent guide the market.
The point that these articles attempt to illustrate is that this policy is failing. At the low end, it is not market failure. Workers with no skills cannot reasonably expect to be high-value employees. Paul Krugman's piece, however, hits on the most important point. The income disparity we see today is not a reflection of workers' economic worth. It is not that the top 1% or 0.1% of Americans are significantly more valuable to society, it is that they found themselves in a position to exploit the system for tremendous personal gain. This disparity in "power relations" represents a market failure. Market failures can often be attributed to government policy. In light of these articles - particularly Krugman's statement that "it may take some time before we muster the political will" - it is interesting to consider the ramifications of this income disparity on the last federal election. If the growing income disparity was inevitably going to result in social unrest, perhaps we have seen the first signs. I wonder if, in light of recent economic and political events, the authors can now take this particular line of discourse to the next stage, where potential solutions and their implementation is the focus of discussion.
