Diversity of Outcomes

An 11-year-old girl was rescued after three days of being stranded at sea when a shipwreck off Italy's Lampedusa island is believed to have killed the remaining passengers on the vessel.
There were an estimated 45 passengers onboard the ship before it sank.
She survived without any drinking water or food and despite suffering from hypothermia, she was "responsive and oriented," according to the release.

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President Joe Biden is commuting the sentences of roughly 1,500 people who were released from prison and placed on home confinement during the coronavirus pandemic and is pardoning 39 Americans convicted of nonviolent crimes. It’s the largest single-day act of clemency in modern history.

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“Violence is never the answer. But people can only be pushed so far.”--Elizabeth Warren on murdering a CEO
So violence sometimes is the answer?

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Diversity of Outcomes

Inequality is all the rage. It is essentially "differences" in the culture. Its production. Its efforts. Its qualities. In the West, these differences, combined with liberty, have allowed for an astounding, diffuse economic advance across all groups, some more than others. But all have benefitted beyond all historical norms or expectations. Yet, despite this extraordinary achievement, some emphasize the unequal allocation of success.

Segments of a book review by James Hartley:

"Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth by Ingrid Robeyns is a very bad book. Writing a review of it thus presents a challenge. Who wants to read a review that is the equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel of dead fish? Yet, while reading Robeyns’ tendentious screed, I was faced with the absolute certainty that quite a few of my colleagues and students would love this book.

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As I said at the outset, writing an entire review just documenting how bad this book is would be an incredibly easy task. Pick a page at random, and you’ll find multiple examples of an argument neither cohesive nor persuasive. The question is: how is it possible that the book is this bad? The answer is found in the Introduction. On the third page, Robeyns notes, “For a long time, I felt that there was something wrong with an individual amassing so much money, but I couldn’t properly articulate why.” So, she “decided to deploy my training in philosophy and economics to answer the question: Can a person be too rich?” The arguments in this book did not lead Robeyns to her conclusion; she started with the conclusion. When you start your investigation already knowing the answer to the question, then you may not notice that the reasons you offer for your conclusion are not persuasive to someone who is skeptical about the conclusion. If it seems like the arguments are non sequiturs attacking straw men, that isn’t important to Robeyns. The conclusion is right even if the arguments fail. The result of this approach is a religious book written for the already converted.

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To pretend that you can have all the riches of the modern world and eliminate the ability for anyone to become wealthy is a sure sign of someone who has no understanding of how all this wealth was generated in the first place. Robeyns’ book, however, provides insight into why people advocating income limitation plans often seem so unaware of how economic growth occurs. If getting rid of rich people is akin to a religious mandate to rid the world of evil, then of course it is safe to impute bad motives to anyone arguing that there are possibly benefits to the world from allowing people to do things that will make them wealthy. Despite appearances, Robeyns book is not really an attempt to persuade anyone of her beliefs; instead, it is an insight into the minds of zealots."