re: #489 iossarian

Which is more fair: a country in which 99 people subsist on a dollar a day and one person makes $101 every day, or a country in which everyone makes $2 a day?

Note, the total revenue is the same in both cases.

This sort of disparity between concentration of wealth and the public good reached its extreme during the Highland Clearances of the early 1800’s, during which landlords were able to generate more revenue from raising sheep on their lands than by renting it out to tenant farmers.

Whole stretches of the Highlands were emptied of population. Later, when the British Empire was looking for soldiers to defend it, a Highlander’s response was quoted as “Since they prefer sheep to people, let them get sheep to defend them!”