As an abstract value at least, equality is generally seen as a good thing in most liberal democratic societies. Outside certain fringes of the Right, in fact, it’s exceptionally rare to see people defend inequality as an end itself. This is why most arguments for the unequal distribution of wealth or power rhetorically adopt an egalitarian guise or try to make the case that inequality actually benefits the least well-off. Advocates of so-called trickle-down economics, for example, might in practice support economic policies that have greatly exacerbated the gap between rich and poor, but they nonetheless like to insist that there’s some wider populist benefit to those policies (the wealth, after all, is ultimately supposed to “trickle down”). READ MORE