Nutting could be finer

Rex Nutting:

... the income of the top 0.01% of earners (the top 1 in 10,000) has increased at a 6% annual rate since 1979 (compared with a 1% increase for the bottom 90%.)

The top 0.01% of earners are overwhelmingly corporate managers, top executives in finance, corporate lawyers and investors. This group makes an average of about $16 million a year, or about $300,000 per week.

This imbalance between the ultra-rich and everyone else would be fine if it were fair, if winners were really rewarded for excellence, and losers really lost, but that’s not the way business works. CEO pay isn’t based on excellence, but on rent-seeking behavior that increases their pay far above what is economically justified.

No.

More specifically:

This imbalance between the ultra-rich and everyone else would be fine if it were fair, if winners were really rewarded for excellence, and losers really lost...

No.

The economy is a game of wealth accumulation. One of the forms of wealth that we accumulate is money. Money is a unique form of wealth because it is the one used in exchange for other forms of wealth -- when you receive your paycheck, for example, and when you spend it. Money is the one form of wealth that facilitates the accumulation of all forms of wealth. So, when money's been all accumulated, the economy can no longer function.

Even if wealth accumulation was "fair", the economy couldn't function. Even if things were perfectly equal, if we all had accumulated equal amounts of everything and had equal wants remaining (ridiculous as the notion is) the economy could not function. Money needs to circulate, to facilitate transaction. When too much of the transaction medium has been accumulated, saved, and withdrawn from circulation, the economy cannot function. In that ridiculously equal world, we would all be sitting on our wealth at zero percent, bemoaning the economic decline.

The kind of wealth and income imbalance Rex Nutting is talking about is not "fine". It puts the economy in failure mode. It makes things go bad. It makes capitalism evolve to some other, more authoritarian form. It's not "fine" at all.