There’s also what’s known as “equality of opportunity”.
Wealth indisputably gives more opportunity than poverty.
Wellnow…you have a right to live in a mansion (and own a yacht, Mr. Fudd). You have the right to live in any house you want, provided you have the permission of the owner.
Semantics, possibly, but important.
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It’s much easier to measure. Happiness and fulfillment are completely subjective, and are likely tied to income anyway.
In terms of freedom, I’d say opportunity is the more valid item to measure, but it’s very hard to measure. 20 people apply for a job, 1 gets chosen, did they all have equal opportunity? It’s very hard to say.
Income suffers as a metric not because it isn’t important, but because it’s also dependent on personal actions. It benefits because it’s dead easy to measure, and is completely objective.
Is this serious?
Let’s get our heads out of fantasyland and recognize that there is a huge difference between being theoretically allowed to exercise a certain right and being practically enabled to exercise a certain right.
If someone making $10 a hour is fired from a job unjustly, that person will have a significant problem in the practicalities of getting someone (whether it is a judge or an administrative panel) to enforce some type of remedy to the way he has been wronged. Whether it is finding a lawyer who will take his case, or finding the right government office to look into what happened, that person of low income will typically be challenged to obtain the legal remedy to which he is entitled.
Contrast that to the co-founder of Sun Microsystems, who found it within his means to engage in court fights on a ridiculous claim to exclude public access to a beach he bought. He did not have the right, but he sure as hell had the means to attempt for a couple years to obtain a legal remedy to which he ultimately wasn’t entitled.
If you think Mr. Khosla and his gardener not simply entitled, but actually receive, equal treatment under our laws, you just don’t live on this planet. And to butcher the legal aphorism that every right has a corresponding legal remedy, to the extent that a poor person has limited ability to obtain a legal remedy, how much of a right does that poor person really hold?
Eh, the courts are one of the very few places where the little guy regularly beats the big guy. You think Joe Sixpack could have recovered compensation from GM for its faulty rollover protection systems if he had to go through a legislative body?
Regularly? I wouldn’t be too confident about that. And I would suggest that class action suits are the way most people would get compensation for cases like this – to allow plaintiff attorneys to pool resources to take on deep pockets defendants.
Large corporations are regularly sued, sometimes for frivolous reasons, and regularly settle for millions as a result.
Remember that juries are comprised of regular people who typically don’t share a hyperactive love of the corporate overlords.
+1.
I’d add that for most people, the kind of house you live in is going to have a much bigger impact on your quality of life than whether or not you have an equal right to, say, vote.
Others have nicely addressed the increased income = increased happiness part, but I just wanted to note that after the VRA and CRA, MLK did very squarely address income equality as the next step in the civil rights movement. At the time of his death he was planning a march on Washington for the poor and economic justice.
You can see the text of one of those speeches here: The M.L. King Speech
So I would saw that, at least by 1968, MLK very much saw equality in those terms.