David McWilliams: Ireland has French Revolution-style levels of income inequality

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David McWilliams: Ireland has French Revolution-style levels of income inequality
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Yet, when it comes to social uplift, the past few decades in Ireland have been truly remarkable. Simon Harris’ dad was a barman - that’s Irish upward mobility in action

Kamala Harris’s father, Donald Harris, an eminent economics professor at prestigious Stanford University in California, was described by the Stanford Daily in 1976 asDr Harris was critical of mainstream economic thinking, which for decades had argued that free markets would solve everything. Instead, he focused on the importance of income and wealth distribution, long before inequality became a hot topic.

Inheritance is not just a family affair – it’s also a critical societal issue. Should we tax inheritance to make society more equal, levelling the playing field, or is inheritance tax a malevolent posthumous penalty for an individual’s effort? After all, everyone wants to leave something behind. For many, this is the main reason for their striving, saving, planning, working constantly when they could be dossing. Many people are doing it all for their children.

The main thing to appreciate, and this sometime confuses the dogmatic, is that societies are complicated ecosystems in which three or four apparently conflicting things can be true at the same time. In fact, a dynamic economy requires there to be a number of stories playing out at once. So, a society can have a marked degree of wealth inequality but also a significant degree of upward mobility.

You might think this conundrum applies to very few people. But due to the upswing in houses prices, it has become a real issue for the present – albeit, very middle class – Government.

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