There's a substantial and growing body of social science research that indicates that inequality leads to a whole host of social ills--see Wilkinson and Pickett.
There's also an intuited sense that when so very many people (1 in 4 children now!) are underfed, and so very many have no real access to medical care (1 on 6 americans), when education is becoming ever more inaccessible, and when the few institutions that have successfully defended workers from a hardscrabble life of hopeless poverty are virtually destroyed, AND there are a few people who don't really work harder (and certainly NOT billions of times harder!) than the rest of us, but enjoy quirks of market, law, and birth to amass vast wealth, that something might be wrong with the system that allows them to do that.
We're trapped in an economic system that concentrates resources and power, whose foundations we have been so thoroughly indoctrinated to accept that we treat them as immutable laws of nature, rather than inventions to serve us--all of us, not just the ultra-wealthy. Laws of nature, we might be stuck with. Inventions of our own making, we might could improve upon.
Food insecurity != being underfed. Food insecurity is a measure of a person's subjective feelings about food. If an obese person reduces his consumption from 4500 cals/day to 4000 (i.e., from 9 cheeseburgers to 8) due to perceived financial strain, he is "food insecure".
If I cared enough, I'd also dispute your claims about education and health care as well.
It's not hard to check that everyone, rich and poor alike, receive more of each than ever before - more people go to college than ever before, and more people get medical treatments today that didn't even exist 20 years ago.
As for the rest of it, it's just complaints too vague to refute.
Of course, there's also a substantial and growing body of research that indicates that ill-advised attempts to "equalize wealth" also lead to social ills, such as a pile of 100 million or so dead bodies.
Ah, yes, the brutal regimes of modern-day Norway, Sweden, Iceland, and others in Northern Europe!
where people aren't routinely bankrupted by medical debt, and don't enter adult life or the adult workforce straddled by terrible student loan debt, and workers have rights!
Obviously, the sort of inequality we have in the U.S.--now greater than that of imperial Rome--obviously that's the right way to be, and the only way society (or at least a tiny fraction of it) can thrive. Right? That's what you're saying, right?
There's a substantial and growing body of social science research that indicates that inequality leads to a whole host of social ills--see Wilkinson and Pickett.
There's also an intuited sense that when so very many people (1 in 4 children now!) are underfed, and so very many have no real access to medical care (1 on 6 americans), when education is becoming ever more inaccessible, and when the few institutions that have successfully defended workers from a hardscrabble life of hopeless poverty are virtually destroyed, AND there are a few people who don't really work harder (and certainly NOT billions of times harder!) than the rest of us, but enjoy quirks of market, law, and birth to amass vast wealth, that something might be wrong with the system that allows them to do that.
We're trapped in an economic system that concentrates resources and power, whose foundations we have been so thoroughly indoctrinated to accept that we treat them as immutable laws of nature, rather than inventions to serve us--all of us, not just the ultra-wealthy. Laws of nature, we might be stuck with. Inventions of our own making, we might could improve upon.
Yeah, we'd like a more equal country.