Saturday, February 8, 2014

The cause of income inequality

I have added a new thesis to the others I have nailed to the door:

Income inequality does not result from greed or mean-spiritedness or a lack of fairness or any of the other canards proffered by the Left. Rather, it results from the fact that low-skill workers are becoming less and less valuable in society today and knowledge workers are becoming more and more valuable.

My favorite example is: tolltakers and RFID engineers. In the not too recent past, armies of low-skill tolltakers manned tollbooths on all our bridges. These jobs were government, union jobs, so the tolltakers made a decent living. Then, along came a bunch of engineers and invented RFID technology and Fastrak. No one can dispute that Fastrak is a better system than manual tolltakers. It is cheaper and it doesn't result in automobiles lining up for miles wasting enormous amounts of fossil fuels as their drivers idle along, waiting to hand over their tolls. So, the tolltakers are out of a job and the engineers who created FastTrak are millionaires. Voila: an increase in income inequality. This is not injustice, but rather progress.

(BTW, the next place this will happen is with BART workers. Google has already developed self-driving cars. Self-driving trains are not far behind. And when they take over, many of the BART drivers will lose their jobs.)

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