To the editor:

George Gurley explained in his Sunday op-ed why it would be a bad thing for government to mandate that everyone have the same income and wealth. Obviously true. He also claimed this is what Bernie Sanders advocates. Quite false. The parallel mischaracterization would be for me to claim that Mr. Gurley advocates one person earn and own everything. Of course he doesn’t advocate that.  No one does.  

A problem that is driving the popularity of Sanders (and Trump) is that over the last 30 years we have moved quite a bit away from absolute equality and toward winner-take-all. We’ve never been at either extreme and wouldn’t want to be, but we have been moving toward winner-take-all. This is partly due to globalization, partly due to automation, and also partly due to government policy that magnifies the winner-take-all effects of globalization and automation.

What drives a lot of Sanders supporters is the idea that government policy should mitigate, rather than magnify, the winner-take-all effects of globalization and automation. This is a lot different from advocating that government coerce absolute equality of outcome. The concept is that there is middle ground which is better than being too close to either extreme, and we need to move back toward the middle ground.