Governments should value economic equality before prosperity

In this round I shall answer his contentions and defend my own. Ruling eliteAssuming that the government does not print money (which makes everybody poor and is thus not very conductive to prosperity), one person having more money means that another person has less. That's the problem with my opponent on one hand saying that the accumulation of wealth is important, and that on the other hand poverty eradication is also important - one person accumulating wealth is the source of another person's poverty. If you want to eradicate poverty, you have to deal with one person or group controlling too many scarce resources, which is the inevitable result if money is concentrated into the hands of only a few "haves" instead of a majority of "have nots". The prosperous society he describes is one governed by a ruling elite - both because control of money means control of resources, allowing certain individuals to regulate who gets what, and because with wealth comes the power to lobby governments to certain ends. The excuse my opponent gave you for why poverty is OK is essentially that poor people don't invest. Companies get their money primarily through two channels: investment and consumer spending. Poor people are bad at the former, but brilliant at the latter. What you'd find if there was more equality in the world is that companies who provide food, clothing and other necessities would have a lot more wealth to help more poor people, while companies who provide luxuries like private jets are likely to have a lot less to help rich people. The point is that companies are still getting income for things like large capital projects - only from a different source, and by different means - if governments choose equality over prosperity. My opponent claims that the redistribution of wealth must be by a ruling class, using North Korea as an example. He then goes on to defeat his own example by showing that North Korea is actually a very unequal society. The existance of a ruling class is proof that a government cares for prosperity over equality, despite what that government's rhetoric may be. It is perfectly possible to institute a fair and objective system for redistributing wealth, and yet these governments refuse. An example would be progressive income tax, where earning more means you pay a higher tax rate. That's not redistributing according to elitist values, that's redistributing according to an objective measure. If the government "redistributers" started to become wealthy, then they would be taxed at the higher rate too. In this way they don't control the resources either. Why aim for equality? I will agree that income has diminishing returns on happiness. What this means is that my opponent's evidence shows that prosperity beyond some basic level becomes increasingly futile. By comparison, the impact that the same marginal amount of income has on a poor family is much greater. My opponent's evidence is entirely consistant with my observation that equality leads to happiness - indeed, it supports it, because it shows that happiness would not have been increased as much through more prosperity than with more equality. But happiness is only half of the picture. My other contention was that equality leads to prosperity. I gave two paragraphs of analysis on "The Great Prosperity Experiment", and my opponent didn't see fit to answer any of it. All he tells us is that investment and entrepreneurship (which relies on investment) leads to prosperity because the Legatum Institute said so. That's no surprise, because the "Legatum Institute" is actually a division of The Legatum Group (. http://www.legatum.com...), a capital investment group. So basically a capital investment group is saying that their services will bring prosperity. This is spin that just shouldn't be believed. Equality does not diminish wealthI agree correlation does not prove causation. What proves causation is my paragraph of unresponded-to economic analysis on why the figures show such a strong correlation between equality and prosperity, which stated that equality provides incentives for investment and for achievement. Free markets provide no incentives for either. Con asserts rich people have reason to invest in a free market, and yet his own data shows they have relatively little happiness to gain as a result, and a lot of happiness to lose, meaning that in a free market the incentive is not to invest. In an equal market, there is consumer expenditure substituting investment (as the poor spend relatively more of their income) and incentive for international expansion, as I showed last round. To distract from this analysis, my opponent provides three counter-examples. On the United States, he explains more inequality was often correlated with less poverty. This is because he has defined poverty in terms of outputs, such as food and housing. The Stanford Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality shows that while output in GDP per worker has increased massively in the US, the median income hasn't increased a bit since 1970 (. http://www.stanford.edu...). That's bad because there has been significant inflation since that time, so in terms of purchasing power, US poverty has increased massively. Poverty has not decreased, or remained the same. It has increased at more or less the rate of inflation, while inequality has certainly increased. On China and India, my opponent says that they have recently become more prosperous and open. To some extent, the size of a market determines the potential for returns in relatively equal societies (like China and India used to be), meaning that when these countries opened up to foreign investment (NOT free markets or deregulation like my opponent always asserts - in fact China has particularly non-free markets, such as their currency market), there was a lot of investment. It will take some time before issues of poverty in China mean investment slows, and we're already seeing the first signs of that. For instance, Apple's scandel when workers at the Foxconn factory at Zhengzhou suicided will inevitably mean investors will be more cautious about moving into China, and even the US government has expressed some concern (. http://www.bbc.com...). In addition, what incentive do these workers have for entrepreneurship, or to increase their productivity? None. Their lack of equality has diminished their real wealth, just as it did when communists caused the famines there under a five-year plan to improve prosperity. Now let's turn to my awesome examples, which didn't include anyone in Scandinavia so I'll ignore that bit. I gave the example of the Netherlands, my opponent did not respond. I gave the example of Luxembourg, and my opponent blamed that on the attractiveness of their industries. Their efforts to redistribute wealth are in their highest-in-the-world minimum wage, which I cited and my opponent ignored. Their industries are attractive because of the significant foreign investment there. Why? Well, as your source says, it's mostly because of the positive labour relations. And why's that? One word - equality. Of course people will be happy workers if they're equal, that's what I've been proving time and time again. The great prosperity experiment is a failure. Equality should be the future.