Here is the essay prompt: “when the student checks his Facebook page on his Apple iPhone, he sees that the meeting to protest income inequality and white power is to be held at Starbucks.”

When I gave this topic to a mature college student, he wrote about several economic factors, such as the inadequate level of minimum wages. He did not comment on the point I was making in the prompt, which was, to my way of thinking, terribly obvious.

Specifically, each of the companies in the prompt is led by a member of what you would have to call the white power structure, while every customer/usage/patronage of their businesses exacerbates the extent of income inequality. Whether Democrat or Republican, whether deliberate or implicitly muffled, Messrs. Zuckerberg, Cook, and Schultz have to be smiling on their way to the bank, even while voicing their conceptual support for the socially aware protestors.

Imagine that Sanders acolyte protestors (which include the above referenced student) are advocating a redistribution of the wealth the very same people are helping to create with their purchases — although I somehow doubt they have thought through the impact on their own lives if they followed the dictates of their protest signs. Imagine that our form of government was a version of statism, whether Marxist or socialist or fascist or even the Western Europe hybrid welfare state model. The thrust of such approaches is fundamentally how to redistribute the economic pie, inherently pitting one sector’s view of equity with that of another, inevitably accompanied by either conflict (to put it mildly) or a hardening of the economic arteries caused by a stifling bureaucracy.

The multiple versions of creativity that underlie Facebook, Apple, and Starbucks are unlikely to be the product of politically correct committees in a statist government environment The latter would be more concerned with protecting existing jobs, e.g. those of Borders, the 40,000 employee book retailer that disappeared without a whimper as Amazon, Costco, and iDevices collectively usurped its function. Ironically, keeping a Borders alive could have meant less income inequality, but it seems unlikely that people of any political persuasion would line up to drop their Facebook accounts or discard their iPhones or skip their lattes to make this vision a reality.

The Sanders acolytes have a dilemma: do they stay with broad brush slogans that cannot help but be hypocritical, or do they drill down, in a practical way, on specific individual issues. The latter is harder work for sure. They should realize that the redistribution alternative, in the extreme, risks a damaging of the entrepreneurial drive which helps set this country apart and which enables the USA, even with its well-recognized faults, to grow and attract people (and currencies) from around the world.

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