The Upside of Inequality: How Good Intentions Undermine the Middle Class

The scourge of America's economy isn't the success of the 1 percent—quite the opposite. The bigger problem is the government's well-meaning but misguided attempt to reduce the payoffs for success.
Four years ago, Edward Conard wrote a controversial bestseller, Unintended Consequences, which set the record straight on the financial crisis of 2008 and explained why U.S. growth was accelerating relative to other high-wage economies. He warned that loose monetary policy would produce neither growth nor inflation, that expansionary fiscal policy would have no lasting benefit on growth in the aftermath of the crisis, and that ill-advised attempts to rein in banking based on misplaced blame would slow an already weak recovery. Unfortunately, he was right.
Now he's back with another provocative argument: that our current obsession with income inequality is misguided and will only slow growth further.
Using fact-based logic, Conard tracks the...