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Economic Inequality Is Only Bad When Your Face Gets Rubbed In It

AP
July 24, 2013

I am about as far from an egalitarian as you'll find. Equality of opportunity, not outcome, etc. But this post by Megan McArdle on amusement park "fast passes" (i.e., passes that allow you to pay a premium to skip queues) reminds me that even I have my line. And that line is line-jumping.

You should read McArdle's whole piece; here's a taste:

But it felt bad to see everyone else patiently standing in line while we stepped onto the roller coaster with no wait. And a lot of the theme park attendants clearly didn’t approve of us.

On our last day, at Water Country USA, I understood why. We were heading to Big Daddy Falls, a tube ride. There was no way to walk directly into the Quick Queue lane because a line of a hundred or so people completely filled the entrance. A 15-minute line was hardly a hardship after the ease with which we’d breezed onto the other rides, so we waited patiently with everyone else.

Pretty soon, a woman with three small children came pushing up behind us. "Excuse me … excuse me … we’re just going to the Quick Queue lane." Why should she wait in line? After all, she’d paid $20 apiece for her passes. Clearly, everyone else should stand aside so that she could get onto the ride slightly more quickly.

McArdle concludes that the woman has a sense of entitlement—people with fast passes "start feeling that they should never have to mingle with the people who don’t have the passes"—and that is certainly part of the problem. A larger problem, however, is the resentment such behavior engenders in the rest of us.

It used to be that the line was the great equalizer. Rich or poor, no one was better than the line. Line-jumpers were reviled, the lowest of the low. You stood in line at the airport and waited for everyone to work their way through security. You stood in line for hours to get on a two-minute roller coaster. You stood in line to get a burger at Shake Shack. It wasn't exactly communal—I think we can all agree that interacting with strangers is terrible—but it was equalizing.

Allowing the wealthy to pay for the privilege to jump the line shatters that semblance of equality. I'm convinced that the average person doesn't particularly care about economic inequality per se. They don't pine after the wealthy's homes or their yachts or their caviar. But that's because they rarely see the difference in lifestyle: ignorance is bliss. When you're forced to confront the difference in a visceral, taboo-shattering way, resentment spikes.

"First class, that's what's wrong," Renée Zellweger told her son in Jerry Maguire. "It used to be a better meal, now it's a better life." Economic inequality isn't a threat to the republic because robber barons are buying $10 million penthouses in New York City. But the equation shifts when the lawyer making mid-six-figures pushes past blue collar families for whom a day at King's Dominion is a real economic sacrifice.