Excuse me but are you joking? Communism was further than Capitalism to an equal society. Communism is a sad excuse for Dictatorship and social engineering of the population. I don't think you are equal or free, when you are allowed only what the state (some people who hold the power) give you.
There's more to it than that. For context, I'm a little-l libertarian and personally not overwhelmed by a great need for equality, but suppose we take it as a given that this is a Good Thing and should be aimed for. There are a lot of questions: When? At what cost? Who? And perhaps most importantly, how?
Communism in practice boiled down to a three-fold plan: Take the money from the rich and give it to the poor, let the government take over managing the money now that there's no rich people to do it, and give the goverment managers perks that turn them back into rich people in practice, if not on paper. This is what you might call the simple approach, "naive" in the sense that a simple algorithm is "naive".
It turns out to work absolutely terribly, of course, because it fails to take into account higher order effects. Of course with a first-order analysis, if you take all the money in the world and spread it out equally to all people, all people have the same amount of money! The problem is that the analysis can't just end there, for reasons well explored elsewhere.
Perhaps there are smarter ways to do this. It's hard to know. But I am fairly certain that whatever the smarter way is, it doesn't involve just taking money from one person and giving it to another. That has been shown to be all kinds of corrosive to society. (Somewhat ironic, as it is promoted as a cure.)
There are other approaches. We could take a long view of equality, listen to the Singulatarians (even, or perhaps especially, the "weak" Sigulatarians), realize that we're still in a transitional period of wealth generation and that breaking our economies now to spread wealth now may be a terrible idea, as opposed to letting the economies run with a bit of inequality now but attacking the problems (either of inequality or the secondary/related problems in the essay) with orders of magnitude more resources later. Perhaps later we can or should trade economic efficiency for wealth equality, but we can't afford that yet. The wealthiest country on the planet can't even afford that choice for its own citizens, let alone share with the rest of humanity. Maybe the "how" can only be answered in 30, 40, 50 years, and trying to do it now is as stupid as setting up an interstate highway system in 1870.
Or maybe we recognize that rather than tearing rich people down, we should be looking at how to bring poor people up without tearing anybody down. This is possible, but only if you have the correct view of the economy as a non-zero-sum game, which is unfortunately still "uncommon sense".
So, even if we do agree that equality is a desirable goal in and of itself, we are not constrained to take the stupid view of it and believe that we must go with Communism. We could try smarter things, and realize that instant success is not possible and any plan that promises it is therefore flawed. Of course, this is predicated on a willingness for large swathes of the population to think about second-order effects so the odds of this happening are pretty low.
Equality of opportunity and social equality are the important factors.
I visited Ireland several years ago. I think it was Sligo where someone pointed out a local millionaire's house. It was just another house on the row, and the guy lived a quiet life and still went to the local pub. He didn't fear his neighbors, and his neighbors weren't stressed out by his wealth, including the chap who pointed all this out to me, who happened to be on the Dole!
I also note a marked difference between wait staff in Houston, Texas and Cincinnati, Ohio. Waitresses and waiters seem to be much more servile in Houston, whereas in Cincinnati, I was often simply asked what I wanted. Houston is markedly more affluent as a whole, however.
I too think that the problem lies in an underclass that feels "captive." If you are somehow inferior and underclass because of your race then how in heck are you going to escape? Also, the US has huge disparities in educational opportunities. There's some kind of feedback with those disparities and subcultures that devalue education. (Which seems to be spreading up the socioeconomic ladder!)
Looking at countries that have very good equality of opportunity in terms of relatively equal access to education, there does seem to be a higher level of social cohesiveness. (One example would be Japan, where the education system is highly standardized.)
I agree with your notion of bringing people up. I think that the best way of doing this is by raising the level of education. But I doubt that very much more than lip service and the opportunity to get more money from the government have resulted from most of those initiatives.
That's an extreme, but it's certainly common economic knowledge that income inequality -- in rich nations -- tends to promote economic growth. Of course, common knowledge is sometimes wrong, but I think it takes more than one article to disprove it.
