We hear so much about how northern European social democratic states redistribute their wealth more equally, but this is confusing income and the overall money one has. Income is just the money we take home every month. The difference between wealth and income is like the difference between the interest rate of a loan and it's principal. You can be rich without high income and you can have high income without being rich. So while countries with strong income redistribution have more equal income than more "free market" countries, do they actually have more equal wealth too? It would not surprise me if their wealth is actually more concentrated.
The first question you must answer is why it matters whether or not wealth is more equally distributed.
Older people have to save more money for medical expenses, so any country with old people will have "concentration of wealth" among people over 60.
Wealth is psychological. A masochist feels good about his standard of living if he is being beat by his old lady and has a fresh pair of lederhosen to wear each day.
Governments, and government thinkers are shallow, and so they reduce the concept of wealth to the most shallow and arbitrary measures. GDP growth != wealth creation.
Given that wealth is subjective, this is difficult to answer.
You're all so hung up on the term 'wealth'. I just happened to pick that term, that's not what my question was about. I actually meant objective wealth, like money. Don't be so esoteric about the specific meaning of "wealth". The question was whether income equality also leads to overall money equality. I thought someone had some numbers on that. I want to know so I can counter people who say that socialism leads to equal wealth. I suspect that redistributionism may equalize income, but actually concentrates overall wealth in society.
Why don't we just consider monetary wealth.
Most metrics for inequality are biased towards smaller populations.
In a very heterogeneous economy, you're going to have a lot of different industries with lots of people doing different jobs. So there's going to be a lot of inequality because doctors are lumped in with assembly line workers. Conversely, in smaller economies where everyone's a banker (luxembourg) or in oil (norway), the uniformity of industry intrinsically yields less inequality. So the obvious conclusion is that we should not be looking at things on a country-country basis. Ideally we should look for similar institutions in different countries and then compare them. Even if you don't buy that, consider that they're basically bragging about the high price of labor. Would they be bragging about the high price of commodities? No... If labor costs are changed artificially by law then the labor market loses communication with capital structures. Firms choose economically inferior production strategies and everyone is harmed.
Rothbard's example is that higher wage laws leads to over mechanization - premature investment in machinery and capital goods that could have been used for some other more economic purpose.
Good luck getting a lefty to see any of that though.
It's an important distinction. Not everyone desires money, most trade money for other things. Money equality = what? Purchasing power?
You need to be precise, and no, as there are no quick and dirty arguments to explain basic economics to people who are fundamentally ignorant.
Their ignorance is based on flawed premises and require several levels of logic to correct.