> One side believes equity should be distributed equally regardless of achievement
I'm not sure this is true. I think a lot of people including economics professors like to consider themselves fairly humanistic. And I think the idea of a mass of people permanently living near or below poverty bothers them.
And I think they take it somewhat for granted that their favorite economic theory has in our recent past effectively provided a middle class standard of living for many people. But when we start talking about dismantling the mechanisms which have created the large middle class and how it could decrease quality of life and increase poverty, they don't offer an honest assessment based on the fundamentals of their theory. That would be to say, "well yes such changes may induce pverty here."
Instead there is kind of a shrug. We'll become a service economy, nevermind making a comparison of the quality of the new service jobs against those being transplanted.
Or we'll become a knowledge economy, the great brain of global capital. Again never really contending with the question of whether that is even possible.
This allows them in my opinion to advocate politicies which harm people whilst shrugging off any guilt because instinctively they know to willfully empoverish people is wrong. It is this dishonesty that bothers me.
My gripe is not with those advocating against redistribution. Though my personal politics are for a mass ownership of property in some regard. My gripe is with people who have setup what might be a fiction (maybe it could be real too) as the answer to making choices which create suffering. And then for that image to have become a dogma we all expected to accept without questioning its basis in reality.
I'm willing to accept that I could be wrong. But I come from a working class background. I've known a lot of working class people over the years and the idea that most or even many of them are going to pivot into IT or what have you is just nonsense. The vast majority have pivoted into low paid service work without much social insurance of any kind.