There is now a consensus—not a belief, not an hypothesis, nor a policy position—but a consensus among informed observers that excessive social and economic inequality is a danger to society. There is a further consensus that, while a certain degree of inequality is desirable to encourage enterprise, wide inequality is not an inevitable outcome of economic processes, but the result of conscious choice in economic policy.
If both are right, it follows that the threat to society posed by excessive inequality can be averted by public policies designed to reduce it. So the answer to the question “Can we render inequality less iniquitous?” is, as someone once put it, “Yes we can.” It is a matter of political will.