Andrew Sullivan has done it again. In a post about rampant income inequality -- which, to be fair, he sees as a problem -- Sullivan equates "wealth" with "success." I'll let E.D. Kain explain what's wrong with this equivalence:
But what really irks me about Andrew's post is his use of the phrase ‘penalizing people for their success does not help the less successful'. This is not about penalizing anyone, first of all. Second, anyone who is still under the illusion that wealth is a good measure of success needs to reexamine the American economy. Often as not wealth is tied so closely to privilege and connections and luck that it's almost impossible to weed out where those factors leave off and real merit begins. And why is a teacher earning fifty grand a year less successful than a Wall Street banker making twenty or fifty times that? Last I checked the very ‘successful' in this country had to be bailed out to the tune of many hundreds of billions of dollars.
To quote myself on the subject, "[W]ealth simply doesn't enjoy a 1:1 relationship with success. Some people work hard for their wealth, but some are lucky, some have it handed to them, and others are ultimately capitalizing on advantages they gained at birth. Money is money, not moral worth, and Sullivan is smart enough to know the difference."
This has nothing to do with resentment or a desire to see rich people suffer, and everything to do with a simple fact about our universe: a large part of what we have is completely outside of our control. That's not to say that merit shouldn't be rewarded, but that the reward should be tempered by a recognition that wealth has as much to do with luck and chance as it does hard work and effort. That Sullivan continually refuses to recognize this is disappointing.
