Why harp on income inequality? Jealous?

Really.  Why harp on income inequality, unless you're just a bitter, jealous malcontent, not willing to get off your ass and work hard to become part of the 1 percent?

That's the line you hear if you listen to the spokesmodels at Fox News, folks who are themselves paid fantastic salaries for looking pretty and reading teleprompters and memorizing lines.  It doesn't occur to them that had any of them been born before the age of television they would have been eeking out  subsistence livings as radio pitchmen or vaudeville comedians. 

But really, why harp on income inequality.  Isn't that just a fact of human existence from time immemorial?

Yes, it is.

The problem is, that governments from time immemorial were mostly forms of Imperialism that  were only meant to benefit the very upper echelon of society.  Malcontents were jailed or shot.

We live in a democratized world, where imperialistic economies tend to implode over relatively short periods of time.  This experiment with modern democracy is only a couple of hundred years old so generalizations tend to be difficult to defend.

Yet nothing could be more intuitively obvious than the idea that trends that destroy the object of Democracy will be deleterious to the maintaining of a democratic system.

The fact of extreme income inequality is one such trend.  Not simply because of the result of income inequality but because the method through which this is achieved is the printing of fresh money that is only available to the financial elites closest to the printing process.  The result is the the rest of the money owned by the lower echelons of society is debauched in value.

This basic ineluctable trend destroys the objects of democracy.

What are the objects of Demcoracy?

1) One man one vote.  Income inequality destroys the efficacy of an individual vote in many obvious ways.  Elections can be bought and paid for.

2) The Level Playing Field.  The idea that anyone can succeed with hard work and education.  This is only true for those going into professions closest to the Banking cartel and the corporations that service it.  Everyone else suffers.  The best middle school teacher in America makes one millionth the salary of the worst trader at Goldman Sachs.  And the teacher's the one going to get your kids into High School.  The trader is the one front running all your trades.

3) Equality Under the Law.  How can this exist when lawmakers are owned by the Banks and the Corporations that service the Banks?  Nobody has yet been prosecuted for  the financial implosion of 2008.  Or anything since.

4) Freedom of expression.  How can this exist, when the instruments of mass media are owned by the banks and the corporations that service the banks?

Obviously all these objects suffer by varying degrees.  The question is: where is the tipping point?  At what point do the objects of Democracy suffer to the extreme that results in mass lawlessness?

At what point does the average citizen stop paying taxes, and start stealing, cheating and disrespecting rules and laws of society as a matter of course?  Everyone else is doing it, they think, why shouldn't I?

At what point does routine lawlessness devolve into armed conflict?

It seems to many like we're miles away from this.

And it seems to many like we're teetering on the brink

It probably depends on how close your are (and how close you think you can get) to the financial printing press.