Bryan Caplan says: 'If people envy people richer than themselves, I say we should fight envy, not inequality.'
My instinctive response to this was that many leftists - me especially - don't envy the rich their income, because this often comes at a high price. Instead, we envy the fact that, in their youth, they had more opportunities than others.
But then I thought again: mightn't it be a bad thing to have lots of opportunities?
I mean this in two senses.
First, a lack of alternative opportunities can force us to concentrate on developing skills. The kid who spends countless hours practicing football or music becomes much more proficient - and possibly rich - than one who, faced with many opportunities, flits between them and becomes a mere dilettante. A big reason why I got into Oxford - and from there a decent income was a small step - was that, in the days before computer games, I had nothing else to do.
There's an analogy here with the arts. As Jon Elster points out in Sour Grapes, great art often arises because of constraints. 78 records which limited recordings to three minutes produced lots of great music whereas free jazz and atonality is often unlistenable. Old black and white films with no special effects are often superior to multi-million pound CGI ones. And so on. Excellence often arises from limited choice, and mediocrity from freedom.
Secondly - and maybe relatedly - when we are faced with unlimited opportunities, our bounded rationality often leads us to make poor choices or to become less satisfied than we would be with fewer options; Sheena Iyengar (eg this pdf) has argued for just this view. Although her research has focused upon low-level choices, such as jams in supermarkets, I suspect it applies to major decisions; women such as J-Lo, Cheryl or Kerry who could have any man they want often marry no-marks.
Again, this is true for me. When I was looking for work after university in the 80s, pretty much my only option was to go into the City: there were no jobs in academia and journalism never occurred to me. The upshot was that I ended up making a bit of money simply for want of alternative. Had I had a freer choice of occupation, I'd probably have wasted my 20s doing self-indulgent lower-paid work and I'd be worse off now.
Now, all of this looks as if it's an extension of David Henderson's writing on how we can overcome envy. It is - but only insofar as it challenges their fundamental belief in the great value of freedom. Which is a paradox.
Another thing: I suspect that (some) inequality would be a bad thing even if there were no envy. But this is another story.