Just because you think something "should be" doesn't mean it "can be", no matter how smart or powerful you are.
The Atlantic has an article this month with the title "Americans Want to Live in a Much More Equal Country (They Just Don't Realize It)." I am always curious when intellectuals announce that the people (who in the American constitutional system serve as the sovereign power) don't know what's good for them (What's the Matter with Kansas?) or don't even know what they want.Implicit in all of these revelations, of course, is the firmest, if never directly expressed, belief of the Left: That the average person is too stupid to run his own life, let alone make public policy decisions. Those few, those happy few, that band of liberal intellectuals, must do that for them. ...
The idea that something as fundamental as the distribution of wealth can be radically altered in a democracy without disastrous side effects is an intellectual fantasy. Prohibition, a far simpler social engineering project than fundamentally redistributing wealth, didn't get rid of demon rum, it gave us Al Capone. And the people who wanted to drink kept right on doing so.
This is a variation on the common trope: the perfect is the enemy of the good. More precisely, the attempt at perfection can ruin the good you've already got.
