- Inequality is on the rise, which is bad for society for a host of reasons
- Inequality in the extremes is totally unnecessary and not at all advantageous
Inequality has existed in every economic system, including communism, since the beginning of economies. Inequality is the normal state of nature. Why anyone thinks that equality would just come about naturally without human greed interfering is beyond my comprehension.
Ultimately, inequality isn't as salient a concern as the
net wealth of a society.
If you look at free market versus centrally-planned economies, inequality exists in both types, but free markets always have greater net wealth. The result is that even the least wealthy people in a free market tend to have more wealth in their own possession than do the average participants of a centrally-planned economy.
It's better to have a smaller piece of a massive pie, than to have an equal-sized crumb as everyone else.
- Neither is enforcing that everyone lives on the same income despite differences in effort, skill, social value, contribution or merit (and I'd argue equally that people like teachers deserve more and CEOs deserve less based on that, but alas)
You are correct, it is unfair to try and decide contributions legislatively, especially when some individuals make greater contributions to a nation's wealth than others. We must be careful about making qualitative judgments about who is "deserving" of what, especially when doing so interferes with our ability to make efficient judgments about the market.
So how are we to decide who gets what?
As it turns out, prices (and wages, which are the price of labour) do just that.
Money is a measure of how much people care about something. The more money you get for what you do, the more people care about you doing it. Prices, when they are not interfered with, allow us to get a real sense of how much a society cares about this service or that, this product or that.
So
one person who doesn't care about football might say that a football player shouldn't receive 13 millions dollars for throwing a ball and running fast. But his salary speaks otherwise about the opinions of people who do care about football, and their opinions must not be ignored for personal reasons.
The trouble arrives when we try to interfere with prices under the pretenses of fairness. This is what UBI is - an interference with prices - and it will have the same problems as other kinds of price interference such as rent control, minimum wage, government subsidies of goods/services, etc.
When we interfere with prices, we are interfering with the one means we have for determining what people value from moment to moment.