The Conscience of a Liberal

Paul Krugman, the economist and New York Times columnist, has just launched a new blog called “The Conscience of a Liberal,” which is also the name of Krugman’s forthcoming book, and was the title of Paul Wellstone’s last book.

Krugman decided to launch with this graphic…

It shows changes in the share of total U.S. income received by the richest 10 percent. In his inaugural post, Krugman celebrates the middle period of the graph and credits the New Deal for it.

I will confess that I am instinctively opposed to too much concentration of wealth, income and privilege and that in some way (I gather Krugman is saying the same about himself) this is the essence of my own starting point on many issues.

In the only conversation I ever had with George Will he posited that the essence of the liberal- conservative is the tension between the competing impulses in favor of freedom and equality. You get it, liberals lean toward equality (and are therefore willing to constrain the freedom of the wealthy to be even wealthier in order to subsidize quality) , conservatives toward freedom (and therefore defend the freedom of the poor to remain poor.)

What think about that? Is that the essential divide?