Combine that with your view of inequality as a symptom of a problem rather than as a problem, and the immense wealth and luxury of the rich is good evidence that redistribution towards the poor and/or the middle class would be an improvement in aggregate utility.

I suspect my view is the dominant intuition behind egalitarians, and your final sentence is simply inapplicable to us.

Also, dismissing political equality as instrumental without evidence seems kind of bizarre given how much emphasis we put in democracies on “one person, one vote”. There are more zero-sum games in politics than economics, and your loss of influence is almost always someone else’s gain in influence.

Interesting post. I would say that I am roughly concerned with income distribution, but not necessarily with what we might call income equality. It seems to me that you can get behind the idea that it is problematic if a large swath of the public, let’s just call them “middle class America” without being too precise for now, is not getting what they are worth, and that this does not really need a comprehensive moral doctrine to advocate. This could be for lots of reasons, but lets just imagine that the middle class is being underpaid for performance due to a lot of bad institutional arrangements in both the business and political world. Now, I am sympathetic to what I suspect is your chief worry: the state is not someone we want to get too involved in deciding who is “overpaid” and who is “underpaid.” I happen to think that we ought to proceed with the presumption that such a fear is a very credible one. However, I also think that at some point, our entire political arrangement gets threatened if there becomes too much long term transfer of proportional wealth from the middle class to elsewhere because the Commercial Republic works pretty well at being unoffensive to almost every citizen in almost every situation because the interests of the vast American middle class mirror “the public good” generally pretty decently. Once we disempower the middle class too much, we threaten the equality that really matters: political equality. This is, for me, why the alarm bells go off when I examine recent economic data.