Coddington on closing the gaps

Deborah Coddington writes in the HoS:

It’s election year and this year’s panacea is to close the gap between rich and poor. Expect more of this zeitgeist because some Kiwi journalists have just caught up with a silly book published in Britain two years ago called The Spirit Level.

Actually I have no problem with closing the gaps. I think that’s an admirable objective, but I suspect my aspirations are vastly different from those of some of my colleagues.

Because when most people talk about closing gaps between rich and poor, they want to drag the successful down to the level of the lowest, whereas I’d lift everyone up to the top, if I could.

Indeed. Any excuse to whack the rich pricks, which is why they have latched onto The Spirit Level (whose findings are shown in The Spirit Level Delusion to be cherrypicked to get the results they wanted).

If the gaps are really to be closed, spirit-levellers would have to go further and place handicaps on successful people to ensure they don’t find ways to break the mould.

Clever brains like Sam Morgan’s, for instance, which enabled him to come up with Trade Me, would have to be dulled with drugs.

Fashion designers like Denise L’Estrange Corbet, who sees beauty where I see bolts of cloth, would have to be blinded. Cut out Kiri Te Kanawa’s voice box – I think you get my drift.

I’m not a fan of the saying, “celebrate our differences”, but in this context it seems appropriate to trot it out. And why can’t we aspire to something higher than the middle common denominator?

It’s about time someone started championing the rich and successful in this country – they’re a persecuted minority.

I can only imagine the hate mail Deborah will get in the next edition of the HoS.

But she has a point. As a society we celebrate someone winning $1m in Lotto using blind luck, but condemn someone who after 30 years of 70 hour weeks, earns $500,000 a year as a chief executive.