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Large-scale firms contributed to rising productivity but created potentially dangerous concentrations of economic and political power. Evolution of banking and financial institutions both aided growth and added a source of potential instability to the economic system.

Can wealth redistribution take place in the US? The least disruptive approach would be changing the tax code to be more progressive. This could be modifications to the income tax, the restructuring (not elimination) of the estate tax, and imposition of either wealth taxes or consumption taxes. The wealthy can be expected to object to all of these changes. In addition they have the political and economic clout to promote their self interests. A concerted effort by the people can succeed. Recent examples in countries like the Phillipines and Poland show the power the people can have when they join peacefully for a change in the organization of society.

Only the rich can create economic growth In the US this is contradicted by the history of our country. All the great industries of the 19th and 20th Centuries were created by individuals with no prior wealth. Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, Bill Gates, etc. started with essentially nothing and built huge enterprises. On the other hand the children of these entrepreneurs have not been especially noted for doing anything notable. Andrew Carnegie felt so strongly that each generation should make its own way that he left the bulk of his estate to charity. His children had to make their own way. The secret of a successful entrepreneur is his ability to raise capital to expand his enterprise. This is obtained from banks and selling stock and not generally from personal wealth. One doesn't need rich people to build a business. The capital of a bank can be $1000 from one hundred people or $100,000 from one person. The amount available to lend is the same. Wealth does not have to be concentrated to be available for investment. In the developed world much of the available capital comes from pension funds and is thus not provided by the wealthy.

The only areas which continue the patronage model and are still the domain of the wealthy are opera, classical music and big fine art museum

The fairness argument: As all people come into the world equally helpless they should ultimately reach at least approximate equality of condition when they mature. People have an innate sense of what is fair as many psychological experiments have demonstrated. The intrinsic sense of fairness requires basic economic equality.

If you look at a situation and decide that it is unfair because one person has too much and another has too little, you probably are making a judgment that compares goals. The judgment says that the person with too much is satisfying goals that are less worthy than those of the person with too little. We commonly make this sort of normative judgment; our decision to give money to one charity rather than another indicates that we find some goals more deserving than others. Our decision to give at all suggests that we decide that the goals of someone else are more worthy than our own "selfish" goals.

Economic analysis suggests that people earn different amounts of income both because they have different goals and different abilities (or resource endowments, to use a more comprehensive but also more abstract term). From this starting point, we can examine a few common judgments on fairness

With the coming of the New Deal in the early 1930s, however, it became impossible to maintain the sacrosanct character of private property. A series of decisions by the Supreme Court validating New Deal legislation removed the constitutional barrier to governmental action in the economic field.

e series of economic measures of the New Deal, including control of agricultural prices, production, and marketing; the sanctioning and support of collective bargaining; social security legislation; the increase in the progressivity of income taxes; regulation of the security exchanges; increased governmental control over money and banking; the conscious use of deficit financing; the great increase in the proportion of national income flowing through the governmental budget; and the great increase in the proportion of the labor force in governmental employment, meant a significant change in the capitalistic system. The later legislative acceptance, which came about after World War ii, of the responsibility of the federal government to attempt to maintain full employment represented another step in the same direction. All these changes served to differentiate modified capitalism from old-style capitalism. [SeeWelfare state.]

"Capitalism." International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. 1968. Encyclopedia.com. 11 Jan. 2013 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>.

A Gini of 50 could mean that half the people share all of the income while the other half get nothing. In other words, a country that literally consisted of haves and have-nots in a 50-50 split would have a Gini coefficient of 50.

According to the Census Bureau, the official Gini coefficient for the United States was 46.9 in 2010, the most recent year with data available. This is way up from the all-time low of 38.6 set in 1968.

A major gap in the measurement of income inequality is the exclusion of capital gains, profits made on increases in the value of investments. Capital gains are excluded for purely practical reasons. The Census doesn’t ask about them, so they can’t be included in inequality statistics.