Who defines "much"?
Which is exactly why many view regulation as a bad thing. It is written by the powerful to protect the powerful. It may seem to be there to protect the common man, but often times regulation is just a mean to create high barriers to market entry to protect the encamped.
Animal farm is a allegory for communism. No one is making the claim that we are all equal in creating value.
That is absolute bull. Let's take the most powerful position in the country. Bill Clinton came from a poorer family, and Barrack Obama's mother was on food stamps.
The superwealthy-- Gates parents were well off, Ellison's mother was a broke unwed 19 year old, and Buffet's family was middle class.
We live today in the closest thing ever to a meritocracy. Certainly the wealthy have more opportunities at breaks but never before in history have the poor been able to rise up like they can today.
The free market is the best thing we've have to date. The freer the society and market, the more likely chances it has alleviated poverty. The evidence is all around us-- North Korea versus South Korea. Hong Kong and Taiwan versus China...........
Are there problems? Absolutely but if you have any better ideas with evidence to the contrary by all means share.
I think Thomas Sowell's argument in "A Conflict of Visions" nicely sums up this debate -- there are competing definitions of what justice is, and in some way, it is important to understand that 'welfare statists' believe they are fighting for their vision of 'justice.'
That is not to say, it is necessary to agree with that view of justice, or acknowledge its validity, but only that the motivations of 'welfare statists', internally, as far as they are concerned, are based on their pursuit of their view of 'justice.'
Sowell neatly categorized the two camps as 'process based justice' vs. 'outcome based justice,' and the two views are infinitely non-reconcilable. Process based justice, simply stated, is belief in a consistent set of rules, applicable to all, such that any outcomes, no matter what they are, are arrived at justly. Outcome based justice is a belief in rigging the rules to guarantee equal outcomes for all, no matter what. As in Vonnegut's lead weighted ballerinas.
Under process based justice, there is no coerced limit aimed at the top half and bottom half. Both the self directed heights of the top half, as well as the self directed depths of the bottom half, are primarily limited by self practice under the common set of process based rules. Although, subscribers to this ideal, such as Hayek, also embrace the concept of a 'safety net' below which citizens would be encouraged not to fall, limited welfare. The real villain in this world, according to its opponents, isn't the rising level of that safety-net, but the unlimited heights of the top half. In order to sell this as villainy, they have to paint a child-like image of our economies as Poker Games, with a fixed amount of chips, or a mythical One Pie World, where every slice of pie in someone hands is by necessity taken from some other. Nonsense, that is not the way money works in healthy economies, only in cartoon concepts like 'The' Economy.
As well, such freedom, based on value-for-value, is demagogued as 'dog eat dog.'
There is also a clear political instability in this freedom; the bottom 51% is always woo-able by promises to eat the top 49% on their behalf, and that is the exposed path to power that freedom under process based justice exposes.
Under outcome based view of justice, the rules of process are infinitely and arbitrarily riggable on a person by person basis, whatever is necessary, to try to achieve equal outcomes for all, usually based on arguments of ability/need and endless claims of right to subsidy. The inevitable outcome of this is two miserable souls in rags, fighting in a hovel, showing each other their runny sores, arguing over who has the 'right' to the last not so maggoty piece of rotted meat on that basis.
In a universe where nothing is uniform and equal, including capabilities, work ethic, and propensity to shoot oneself in the foot, the only way to achieve 'equal' outcomes is to jerryrig process, and apply unequal and thus unfair process to individuals. Ideally, this enables the weak, but in practice, it also rewards the criminally inept and lazy, as well.
But in that same universe, the only way to permit 'equal' process is to live with the resulting massive inequalities of outcome, and the inevitable hopelessness and crime that results from same.
Should either camp ever drop the rope and excusively have its way, life would be awful, and our world would be terribly out of balance. So, the livable solution is an interminable tug of war between two competing camps view of justice, and the net result is some ever changing imperfect compromise between two irreconcileable views of justice.
We have to remeber when we are tugging at each other that both sides are doing their job to make life bearable.
Plus, and this is my other firm belief, we atavistically thrive on the tugging, and would just plain make up something to be in conflict over if we otherwise had nothing much of substance to angst over. (See parents in stands of any Little League game...)
The world is a compromise. We don't put lead weights on the really good ballerinas, yet, but we do put extra weight on thoroughbred horses with light jockeys. We do more than toy with "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need," but at least give lip service to weeding out overt criminal abuse, if not laziness.
Did I happen to mention that gradients drive everything? Even, gradients of views of justice...
