[boffinism]

When people talk about wealth inequality as a bad thing they're normally talking about self-perpetuating wealth inequality, or wealth inequality that is caused by things that are seen as inherently unfair, like the family you are born into.

A lot of people who have comparative wealth and have worked hard for it feel they have earned their wealth, disregarding the fact that a lot of other people work equally hard and do not have the same amount of wealth. This sort of thing muddies the issue.

Also muddying the issue is the fact that some people think that if X amount of money could lift Y poor people out of poverty, vs making rich person Z marginally richer, it is self-evidently the case that it is better and therefore right for X to be spent on the Y rather than person Z. I.e. as long as some people are below a minimum acceptable level of wealth, all wealth inequality is, in this view, bad.

[sudoke]

People who think wealth inequality is a problem are being short sighted.

>wealth inequality that is caused by things that are seen as inherently unfair, like the family you are born into.

I, like my father before me, am making sacrifices to benefit my future generations. It's not unfair, it's called being responsible and thinking about the future.

edit: changed delusional to short sighted.

[SaintGhurka]

So rather than downmods, I'd be really interested to hear why people disagree with this - apart from the argumentative "delusional" comment.

Is it wrong to work hard to improve your children's future prospects?

[Can_Not]

> Is it wrong to work hard to improve your children's future prospects?

Nothing is wrong it.

> I'd be really interested to hear why people disagree with this

It's a blatant strawman.

If you provide for your child 1000x what they need (during childhood and/or via inheritance) that is not bad (in the scope of this discussion, no other details implied). What is bad is if you have 1000000x what your children need and you built this on the backs of people who will squaler in poverty until the day they die and the only thing you use the wealth for is to acquire more wealth. That is bad. The strawman makes it sound like you are defending an average middle class engineer saving up for their children's college as if they were in the wrong, as if they were on the winning side of increasing income inequality.

Nobody here is arguing against a middle class person saving up for their kids college. They're against people who actually have ridiculous amounts of wealth and the rapid growth of that inequality.