The value of equality in all aspects of life has become an axiom. There are different types of equality, i.e. equality before the law or social equality, but there are concepts such as equality in terms of the outcomes of the process of social interaction, these concepts are seen by many as a term that violates the human condition and the individual principles of each human being. The language we use is, without a doubt, powerful. On one hand, the term Equality is used as a synonymous of uniformity and homogeneity, on the other hand, inequality is a synonymous of diversity and plurality, however, in practice this term is not used with such connotations.

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If a society is unequal, where people are different and have their own particularities should not be seen as negative. A heterogeneous, plural and diverse society, where each human being has a different life project, and where each person follows different paths, is not something that we should worry about at all. However, many politicians and activists use inequality as a synonym for a social problem. In his 2014 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama said, "After four years of economic growth, entrepreneurs and shareholders have never been in a better position, but average wages have not changed. Inequality has deepened. Pope Francis tweeted that same year "Inequality is the root of social evil". Oxfam did the same, noting that the latest report showed that the world's 85 richest people possessed the same amount of wealth as the Earth's 3.5 billion people. The IMF stated that "inequality can undermine progress in health and education, reduce political and economic instability of investment and undermine the necessary social consensus in the face of shocks, which tends to slow down the pace and sustainability of growth".

These assertions justify inequality as a social problem, especially in a world where the World Bank estimates that in 2013, 767 million people lived on less than $1.90 a day. On the other hand, some human beings argue that we are unequal in nature. Those with natural talents and skills valuable to the socio-economic growth of a nation will inevitably have to outstrip those without special talents. Yet could individuals who did nothing to deserve their natural talents be considered merit? Critics of inequality claim that it is arbitrary for natural talents to dictate the distribution of wealth in a society when natural selection has nothing to do with merit. One of Piketty's arguments in Capital in the 21st Century is that the richest individuals on the planet are increasingly those who inherited their fortunes: the Koch brothers, the Walton family, etc. However, do natural talents really dictate merit in our society? The fact is not that people are born with talent, the fact is that it is the way they use it to achieve success and amass a great deal of wealth, there are millions of skills that all human beings can exploit and that they can certainly never understand or use due to a number of different social, economic, psychological, among other factors.

It is indisputable that inequality has become such a sensitive and problematic topic. Inequality, many say, is the momentous issue of our time. It is indisputably true that modern free-market capitalism creates enormous inequalities. But it is also indisputably true that it enriches us all in an uneven way. According to a study by the University of Wisconsin, most Americans were poor at the beginning of the 20th century. According to most indicators, most Americans were poor at the beginning of the last century. In fact, if we use a definition corresponding to current poverty measures, between 60 and 80 percent of the U.S. population was poor in 1900. Today, only 23 percent of Americans are poor, and they even enjoy a standard of living that would be envied by the rich a century ago.

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According to Nobel prize-winning economist Angus Deaton, worrying about inequality creates substantial problems in our society, including slower economic growth and democracies with problems from the ground up due to polarization. Deaton claims:

Inequality is not so much a cause of economic, political and social processes as a consequence.

It also concludes:

Inequality can sometimes reflect some of the social problems. But it can be a reflection of social progress as well, and some supposed cures for inequality are far worse than the disease.

From the above, it can be concluded that inequality has an ambiguous concept in any expression used, given that it can be used to identify any alteration harmful to the country and can also be synonymous with the progress of some socio-economic reality. Inequality in income is not determined, much less pre-established by the State. The free market is characterized by millions of interactions, exchanges, decisions, and policies, all of which reflect inequality. The Gini coefficient, or any statistics on the income or wealth of that 1% of people who accumulate more capital than the other 99%, does not tell us how that wealth really came about, it is simply aggregate information.

The inequality that has been created in South African countries is indisputable, this inequality can be considered as a historical injustice. This inequality derives from prejudices and oppression that were inherited from the past and continue in the present. It has a lot to do with family break-ups, unemployment, and poor education. This inequality can also be attributed to corruption and the capture of the state by authoritarian and self-interested groups. All these factors could have influenced the creation of social immobility in these countries, given that they all led to the concentration of capital in the hands of very few, who through corruption and favoritism remain at the top of the ranks of the population.

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Low levels of inequality can result in other negative trends. In Walter Scheidel's book The Great Leveller, he shows that the abrupt reduction of economic inequality has only resulted in pandemics, mass mobilization due to war, violent revolutions or failed states. The Black Plague in Europe eliminated a quarter of the population, led to a shortage of jobs in relation to agriculture and a narrowing of the per capita income gap between workers and landowners.

Between 1938 and 1945, in Japan, the per capita income of 1% of the population fell from 9.2% to 1.9%, and along with this fall, the nation's wealth fell by 90%. It is evident then that the price of these searches for equality ends up creating greater social problems such as death, destruction or severe restrictions on citizens' social freedoms.

There are causes of inequality that are totally malicious, such as the lottery, but there are others that benefit positively, such as technological advances, innovations, and entrepreneurship. From Henry Ford to Marck Zuckerberg, they created profound inequalities with their innovations in society, but at the same time, they were able to provide services that improved the living conditions of human beings, as well as allowed development in other commercial and scientific areas, among others.

A clear example of positive inequality is China, where the Gini coefficient has increased from 0.16 in 1980 to 0.55 in 2014. The interesting thing about the case of China is that as the Gini index has increased, poverty has fallen as a result of market liberalization and new economic policies of capitalism.

The purpose is not to make it clear that inequality is "positive", but rather to make it clear that the generalization that less equality means more development is wrong. This is something we should bear in mind when governments or states talk about reducing inequality'. Something that people should take into account when generalizing about inequality is the principle of Pareto that teaches us that the distribution of natural goods and world wealth is distributed heterogeneously and not homogeneously. Therefore, the attempt to alter the inevitable distribution of wealth results in altering the natural order of human action, as Von Mises put it. We could, without a doubt, distribute wealth in an authoritarian way in order to reduce inequality by taking everything from those who have the most to those who have the least. But would this really solve anything, though?

Tyler Cowen, George Mason's economist, pointed out empirically that:

It is economic growth that lifts most people out of poverty, not forced income distribution.

Beyond its capacity to reduce poverty, economic growth also brings with it all kinds of secondary benefits, including longer life expectancy, a better-educated society and the extension of civil and political rights.

Looking at it from a more minimalist point of view: something wrong with the way the economy works today is that it is seen as a big cake, where someone else's success hurts mine, and I'm worse off because the top people get a bigger tax cut than mine. Actually, the size of the cake is infinite, and when it grows we are all better off, even if some people get bigger slices than others.