I don’t believe that income inequality is the problem. Income inadequacy is the problem. Yes, the ratio of senior executive pay to rank-and-file pay is out of whack, but CEO pay cannot be redistributed to any great effect. And the owner’s wealth isn’t income at all; it’s the present value of future income.

Enhancing the purchasing power of workers creates wealth for the owners of businesses that sell to them, but the rich needn’t be taxed on that wealth. As any good twenty-first century progressive should know, Modern Monetary Theory teaches that the government can create purchasing power without confiscating it from someone else. If the rich aren’t spending, then the rich aren’t causing inflation, so there’s no point in taxing them. Taxing the rich merely raises the cost of capital. It’s not clear why we would want to do that.

I support estate taxes to break up dynastic fortunes and anti-trust actions to prevent a concentration of power. But unless giving people more money causes inflation, there is no need to raise taxes generally. As for giving people more money, I am torn between raising the minimum wage and instituting a UBI, but I lean toward the latter and allowing the market to set wages. (Maybe a lower minimum wage — $10/hr., say — combined with a $12k annual UBI would work.)

In any event, taxing should never be a policy goal. Good spending should be a policy goal, and taxing should be done to control the resulting inflation, if any. The zero-sum “redistribution” approach, based on income inequality rather than demand shortfall, is, IMHO, more about settling scores than boosting wages.