On Being a Capitalist Unitarian-Universalist

That's right... I'm an out-of-the-closet conservative in an overwhelmingly liberal church. Our church has approximately 400 members and I know of only one other Republican and he's only the spouse of a member - he's smarter than me. Why should I be in a congregation that is so liberal when I'm a conservative? It's a long story that I'll get into sometime, but for now, you'll just have to trust me.

This past Sunday, our minister (whom I really like) went on an anti-capitalist, our-country-is-on-the-verge-of-collapse, why-can't-we-just-be-socialists rant. This, unfortunately, is not a rare occurrence in UU-land. It got me thinking: what's so bad about income disparity in and of itself.

Our county has the richest of the rich and a not-insignificant number of folks who rely on government assistance and/or minimum wage jobs. The Gini coefficient has become the de facto measurement of "income disparity" in a given country. I think this measurement is bogus - it's too impacted on the highest income echelon. It allows a country devoid of entrepreneurs appear to be a more 'fair' economy, when, in fact, that economy is simply not producing wealth for anyone.

Here's what I want to see: I would like to see each country's average income (in normalized US $) by decile divided by the US income by decile. We really shouldn't care if our rich are richer that French rich (I'm sure they are), we should look at the bottom five quintiles and really see how the 'poor' in each county compare.

I don't have the data to calculate this. I'm going to forward this post to EconoPundit & Skeptical Optimist... hopefully these smart guy could get the analysis going.

I'll report back on the results.