I have not posted in a long time, which may be appreciated by some of you but I just wanted to share some recent thoughts.  I have been reading the Washington Post's series on inequality, which I highly recommend.  The stresses of inequality are huge and I believe constitute a huge problem.  Most of the solutions that have been offered focus on service specific transfers of wealth, such as Medicaid. However, there are huge distortions which come along with these types of transfers and the two markets which the government has manipulated the most in the last decades, namely education and healthcare, have seen explosive rises in cost.  I think that we need to re-evaluate our methods of wealth transfer and really see how we can increase equality without causing the huge problems we currently see.  
I don't have a lot of answers but some things that I would like to see are:

1. Transfers which encourage opportunities-not dependence.  This will ultimately be much more rewarding for both recipient, taxpayers, and the economy.
   
2. Transfer which can be used to cultivate and benefit from competition.  Currently much of government education spending goes directly to the institutions, why not give education dollars straight to each and every high school grad below a certain income level-to be used for any training/degree he/she sees fit and thus create a more competitive education market?
   
3. Transfers which are not burdensome to a specific industry/company.  Allowing trade unions, for example, are essentially a transfer of income from producers and buyers to the workers which puts a heavy burden on the specific industries which are locked into these agreements-thus giving them an unfair disadvantage.
   
4. Transfers which encourage individuals to evaluate the cost/benefit analysis of important decisions.  Universal healthcare, for example, places the responsibility of cost/benefit analysis of all healthcare decisions on legislatures.  Someone must ultimately make these decisions, if individuals had to make them I think we would see much more efficient use of resources.
   

Anyway, these are just a few thoughts.  I bring this subject up, one, because I think it is important, and two, to emphasize that we can and ought to approach this with more ideas besides the typical food stamps, government regulation, Social Security, universal healthcare, unionization, minimum wage, and other liberal policy which has been attempted.  I hate the idea of living in the country where we have sacrificed opportunities for economic and personal achievement in order to achieve better equality, (such as France with it's dismal unemployment).  I just hope there is a better way.