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… is from page 143 of Deirdre McCloskey’s brilliant 2019 book, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All [2]:
Yet we all are required nowadays to have opinions about inequality, which people regularly mix up with injustice and poverty, even though the alleged inequality of “capitalism” is a small matter beside the equalizing power of the Great Enrichment.
DBx: Oh so true.
Monetary-inequality-raising fortunes are built by those who publicly draw attention to, and denounce, differences in monetary incomes and wealth. Yet professors, pundits, and politicians who pave their own paths to greater monetary wealth – and (far worse) to greater political power – by vilifying those who are unusually successful at pleasing people in markets remain curiously silent about the ever-greater equalization of consumption opportunities made possible by the very same economic forces that create large differences in monetary incomes and wealth.